O'Connell Street: The History and Life of Dublin's Iconic Street by Nicola Pierce

Author:Nicola Pierce [Pierce, Nicola]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Europe, Ireland, Great Britain, General, Modern, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781788493062
Google: u9MvEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: The O'Brien Press Ltd
Published: 2021-09-13T23:28:19.099358+00:00

If 1916 was not a good year for the General Post Office, it cannot be denied that when the Volunteers chose the building and Sackville Street as core locations for what is arguably the most famous rebellion in Irish and British history, they sealed their importance forevermore.

The blackened façade of the GPO after the 1916 Rising, with extensive damage to the interior.

By the time the blazes of Easter 1916 were put out, all that remained of Francis Johnston’s original building was the charred façade. Demobbed soldiers were given the task of ridding the shell of its shattered ninety-eight-year-old interior.

Thanks to the OPW (Office of Public Works), the post-Easter-Rising-War-of-Independence-Civil-War rebuild finally began in earnest in September 1924, on the Henry Street side. Previous proposals about the city’s main landmarks included making the Custom House the ‘new’ GPO and adding a new central train station and port to it. In turn, the old GPO would become the new city hall, while the old city hall and Dublin Castle would be made courts of justice and government offices. In the end, everything stayed the same.

It was a big day for the city when the GPO re-opened for business on Thursday, 11 July 1929. President WT Cosgrave (1880–1965) gave a speech outside the building on a platform erected by the OPW, in which he complimented the build on its Irishness, that is, the material used – the Donegal sandstone and the marble from Kilkenny, Cork and Connemara – and the craftsmen who brought the building back to life. Cosgrave had been stationed in the GPO in 1916 and perhaps this was an emotional moment for him, a moment surely heightened by the sight of the bullet holes in the columns.

The GPO was also the location for Ireland’s first radio broadcast in 1916, with equipment ‘borrowed’ from the Irish School of Wireless Telegraphy a few doors away (now the Grand Central Bar), to announce the Rising in morse code for any passing ships who might spread the word and, thereby, attract international sympathy and help. Nine years later, President Douglas Hyde launched the radio station 2RN in a tiny studio on Denmark Street, emphasising its Irishness with Irish-themed programmes for Irish listeners. In October 1928, the broadcast company de-camped to specially built studios on the fourth floor of the GPO and there they stayed for the next forty years or so until the move to the purpose-built campus in Donnybrook.

The telegraph staff returned to the GPO in April 1932, while secretaries and administrative staff followed a few months later, in October. Finally, following nine years of work, the GPO rebuild reached its successful conclusion in 1933 with a price tag of £276,000.

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