Irish Miscellany by Dermot McEvoy

Author:Dermot McEvoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2014-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

James Joyce

Thomas Davis and Suds, College Green

Right by the GPO stands the Millennium Spire. The Spire stands in the exact place where Nelson’s Pillar stood for 158 years before being blown up by the IRA in 1966. This event, it is said, made Lord Horatio Nelson Ireland’s first astronaut. (His lonely, dismembered head can be viewed at the Pearse Street Library, two blocks from Pearse Station at Westland Row.) Lord Nelson’s fate has been met by other icons of the British occupier—statues of both King George II and William of Orange were also blown up. Queen Victoria’s statue met a more ironic fate—like many Irishmen under her reign, she was poetically exiled to Australia where she is currently on display in Sydney.

As one crosses O’Connell Bridge and enters Westmoreland Street, the first statue is that of poet and song writer Thomas Moore, famous for his “The Meetings of the Waters.” Moore’s statue sits atop a former public lavatory, which prompted Leopold Bloom to comment in Joyce’s Ulysses: “They did right to put him up over a urinal: meeting of the waters.”

A few paces away is the front gate of Trinity College, stoically guarded by the statues of alumni Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke. And just up College Green opposite the Bank of Ireland is Edward Delaney’s statue of Thomas Davis, nationalist and author of “A Nation Once Again.” There is a fountain surrounding Davis, and it has become a popular pastime for Trinity students to pour in detergent, creating a bubbly mess and making this the cleanest statue in all of Dublin.

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