Admiral Nelson and I go back a long way...

EVEN though it was blown up six months before I was born, I – in common with several earlier generations of Dubliners – have been ‘up’ Nelson’s Pillar. By the time I climbed it, though, the pillar was a substantially less impressive lorry loading bay in a transport depot in Inchicore.

The company for whom my father worked had been charged with removing the rubble of the pillar from O’Connell Street. Some of the stone ended up in the East Wall, but enough to build a loading bay ended up back in the depot, and it was there that I sported and played on Saturday mornings throughout my early childhood, while my Dad worked in the office nearby (years later, incidentally, that same company was involved in dismantling the altar in the Phoenix Park after the Papal visit, which is how we came to have some of the red carpet from the altar in our downstairs toilet, but that is a different story).

So Nelson’s Pillar and me, we go back a long way. I suppose it’s because Nelson went up in the same year as I did, so to speak, but I’ve always had an interest in the history and dramatic fate of a statue that for a century and a half, was the capital’s most distinctive landmark.

After 18 months of construction, it was opened in 1809, four years after Admiral Nelson had perished at the battle of Trafalgar, and was generally popular with Dubliners, 400 of whom had fought at Trafalgar and many more of whom relied on the sea for their business. That said, the late 19th century brought several attempts to have the pillar moved – either further up Sackville Street or to a Georgian square – as it was an obstacle for the city’s increasing volume of traffic but no authority was willing to pay for the substantial work involved.

That problem persisted after independence. In 1931 Dublin Corporation voted for its removal, the official record noting that it was ‘a shame that the English hero, and adulterer, held pride of place in the capital city while there was still no statue to Tone, or Brian Boru or Patrick Sarsfield’, but again, funds were unavailable to dismantle the monument. In 1964, ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Rising, a proposal was brought to cabinet to remove Nelson from his perch and replace him with a statue of Padraig Pearse, but Taoiseach Seán Lemass was unconvinced of the merits of the scheme.

In any event, the fate of poor old Nelson was sealed for once and for all in the small hours of the morning of March 8, 1966, when a small group of IRA men took matters into the own hands and sent the Admiral skywards.

Operation Humpty Dumpty brought the top half of the 37-metre column and its able seaman down to earth without breaking a single window in O’Connell Street. Six days later, after it was judged unsafe, the army blew up the remaining half – and took out half the windows in the street in the process.

You might know about the head. In the confusion immediately after the bombing, poor old Nelson’s head was removed from the rubble by a group of students from the National College of Art And Design, who held it to ransom in order to pay off a student union debt. Among those students was Joe Pilkington, who would soon become a household name playing Eamonn in The Riordans. The head was eventually returned to the Corporation and currently looks down on readers in the Gilbert Library in Pearse Street, Dublin.

AS to the identity of the bombers, in 2000 an elderly republican called Liam Sutcliffe of Walkinstown, Dublin, claimed responsibility for the bombing. He agreed to talk to me, a decade ago, about the city’s most infamous act of vandalism/grand gesture. He took enormous pride in the fact that nobody was injured and no damage caused (apart from to the good admiral) in the explosion. He likes the Spire.

Neither Nelson’s bombers or his kidnappers ever faced criminal charges, which is probably as it should be. Sackville Street, later O’Connell Street, spent 157 years under his stern gaze, and next week marks 50 years without it.

My mother still misses the pillar, where thousands of young Dubliners met their sweethearts and where you could climb to the top for ten pence. I’m still not sure about the Spire. And if poor old Nelson were still in situ, I’d most likely be among those calling for him to be toppled. Still, he was very much part of Dublin City in the rare old times – and the story of his demise still makes me smile. Oh, and the subsequent hit, Up Went Nelson by The Go Lucky Four topped the Irish charts for eight consecutive weeks.