DUBLIN would have no landmark Spire and O’Connell Street would instead be dominated by St Patrick’s Pillar if a 1960 plan by Sean Lemass, the taoiseach, had been approved, writes Andrew Bushe.

Lemass proposed toppling Horatio Nelson, the British naval hero, from his perch on the top of the pillar and replacing him with Ireland’s patron saint. The statue of Nelson was to be “disposed of in a manner to be determined” and St Patrick was to take his place to “mark the occasion of the Patrician Year, 1961”, according to a government file released yesterday.

Six years later the IRA blew Nelson off the pillar on the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising. The monument was finally replaced two years ago by Ian Ritchie’s Spire, a €4.8m steel pin which stands nearly 400ft high and which was shortlisted for the Stirling architectural prize last year.

Lemass asked his attorney-general for legal advice “as a matter of urgency” on how to get Nelson off the city skyline, which he had dominated since 1808. The taoiseach’s plan was for the state to buy the pillar from its trustees, paying them a sum equivalent to the revenue generated by admission fees — about IR£1,200 a year.

The attorney-general said there were no legal difficulties with Lemass’s plan, saying that the state buying the pillar was no different to the ESB compulsorily purchasing land. But Lemass’s idea was subsequently shelved.

The files reveal that having the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar dominating Dublin’s main thoroughfare had irked Irish officialdom for decades.

In 1948 the city engineer estimated the cost of the pillar’s removal at between £12,000 and £15,000. “The salvage value would not appreciably reduce this figure,” he reckoned. The monument contained 22,090 cubic feet of black stones and 7,310 cubic feet of cut granite and had cost £6,856.19.6d to erect.

In April 1954 the IRA called on Dublin corporation to seek legislation to remove the pillar, but the city fathers decided to take no action. Six months later the Arts Council recommended the corporation declare that “whatever the political considerations regarding the statue”, the pillar “has claims to be one of the finest Doric pillars in existence”.

In 1955 the pillar’s trustees turned down a request from Dublin corporation to remove the statue and “place it in the National Museum or in some other place”. The trustees said they were “debarred” from removing Nelson as their duty was to “embellish and uphold the monument in perpetuation of the object for which it was subscribed”.

In 1956 the corporation asked John A Costello, the then taoiseach, to introduce legislation to enable it to take possession of the pillar and if necessary demolish it. The government decided that legislation to get rid of Nelson was unlikely to succeed unless it was preceded by a general demand to remove or partially demolish the pillar. “There would also have to be general agreement as to what, if anything, should replace it,” one minister said.

Times Recommends

• Mandela’s tribe threatens President Zuma
• The French empire strikes back
• Wife of cheating governor exacts a political revenge