Nationalists are up in arms this week about proposals by the state and its agencies to do something vaguely new and different with Dublin’s General Post Office. My colleague Niamh is particularly upset:
“While this government might insist that their plans will afford the GPO the respect it deserves, there are several reasons why it could be felt that they can’t be trusted with such a project.
Firstly, there is the long and persistent echo of the Civil War divide, which still manifests itself in much of the extraordinary, almost inexplicable antagonism from some quarters towards anything that might be considered nationalistic, from the language, to our culture, to the memory of those who fought and died for our freedom”
It is seen in the endless attempts to denigrate Irishness mostly by those who don’t show any real appreciation of our heritage but who are often driven by what seems to be an ingrained desire to tug the forelock to our former colonisers. The right of said colonisers to elevate their own historical figures and culture is never questioned, however.
I confess that I am not entirely sure that plans to open a small commercial plaza – alongside the museum and post office – in a main building on the main street in the country constitutes “forelock tugging to our former colonisers”. I sorely doubt that decisions about the GPO will even make a court circular in London, let alone be taken as an act of homage to The King.
If anything, O’Connell street is entirely, desperately, in need of something or other that might attract people to the place. For all that the GPO is hallowed ground for Irish nationalists of a particular stripe, it should not be ignored that it currently sits amidst a cultural graveyard that used to be the City’s main thoroughfare and attraction until Irish Governments over the past fifty years got their paws on it. We can’t even reliably clean the pigeon excrement from O’Connell’s statue, but we’re worried about some shops in the GPO?
Nor, from Niamh’s piece, did I get any sense of what she would find acceptable in terms of a redevelopment of the GPO. The closest she gets is when she says “Any development of the GPO should be focused on making the area a cultural quarter where our history is remembered and honoured. The other nations of the world are rightly proud of the foundational buildings and events that shaped their identity and meaning. We should be the same.”
But what does that mean? What even is a “cultural quarter”? Surely, at a foundational level, culture and commerce are one and the same thing: Much of Dublin’s surviving Irish culture can be found in pubs that host traditional music evenings: Should there be one of those next door to the GPO? Is there room for restaurants in our culture? Is our history so fragile that it cannot accommodate commerce as part of our national culture? Would Pearse really turn in his grave at the idea of a free Irish person buying an engagement ring from a jewellers in the GPO commercial section?
No, I get the sense instead that what Niamh and others who share her instinctive concerns mean when they say “cultural quarter” is in reality a sort of architectural monument to their particular strand of Irish nationalism. A space designed to inspire and inculcate in a new generation a sense of reverence and awe for those who lost their lives over Easter Week one hundred and nine years ago. Which brings me back to the title of this piece, and the essential nature of foundational myths.
Irishness, clearly, did not commence on Easter Monday 1916. Nor is or should it be in any way bound to the events of that week. There is a reason we have a standing joke in this country about everybody having had an ancestor in the GPO, and it is precisely because so few of us had. My dear friend and podcast co-host Sarah is one of relatively few who can make that boast honestly, since her great-grandfather Dr. James Ryan was, as a young man, the medical officer for the rebels who bound and treated James Connolly’s shattered ankle in the GPO, before going on to serve in the cabinet of every Fianna Fáil Government from 1932 to 1965.
But what Niamh describes in her piece as “inexplicable antagonism to anything that could be considered nationalistic” is also part of our history, and part of our Irishness. In her (and she is not alone by any means) version of Irish history, there sometimes appears to be simply the goodies (the people inside the GPO during Easter Week) and everybody else. In reality, public reaction to the rising was so severe that Kate English, widowed mother of rebel and rising participant Patrick, wrote to her son in Frongach Prison telling him that she and his sisters had had to move house, so intense was the public opposition in Dublin to the rising. Perhaps even more poignant is a letter from English’s brother, Davie, which ended with the immortal lines “You will have to look out for another girl when you get home as I see your girl walking out with a soldier.”
Kate also wrote to Patrick advising him on his case for clemency: “We had a letter from Mickie at the (western, in Belgium -ed) front he has got promotion he was surprised when he heard of the trouble. Tell the officer in charge of you that you have 6 first cousins fighting in France. Michael English, Christy [Fenlon], Annies husband that’s Joe O’Mahony, Bridget Reilly’s husband Sergeant Kelly and the 2 Reilly’s of the high road.”
On July 3rd, English received a letter from his dear friend James Maloney, which noted that “Dublin is now quite [quiet] and I hope it will remain so for it’s after seeing a lot of trouble. Tell Cosgrave I am asking for him and I will write to him in a few days”.
It is true, of course, that sentiment towards the rising changed over time, especially in the aftermath of the brutal executions of some of the ringleaders. But it is also true that Patrick English, for one, was verifiably citizen of a Dublin where women – even after the rising – were content to walk out with The King’s soldiers, where GAA captains were desirous of quiet instead of further trouble, and where a majority of his family was fighting a war not on O’Connell street, but in Flanders. His six cousins fighting in France likely have many more living descendants amongst the populace of modern Ireland than he does, though not one of them is honoured by this state for their service.
The “antagonism” Niamh writes about would not have been shocking to the people actually alive in Dublin in 1916. Nor should it be especially shocking to us today. The idea that there was or is universal approval of the rising on this island is as fanciful in 2025 as it was in 1916, and sits especially at odds with any desire for unity or reconciliation on this island with those who take a different view.
The point here is that Irish nationalism has taken many forms over the centuries – both in terms of armed struggle in 1798 and 1916 and again in 1919, and in terms of political casemaking by people like Parnell, Redmond, and O’Connell. Attempts to centre the GPO as the beating heart of that nationalism a hundred years later seem to this writer, at least, to be much more antagonistic to the history of this country than those who wish to take a more rounded, and holistic view of the nation’s history.
The GPO is neither the cradle nor the centrepiece of Irish nationalism. Attempts to turn it into a sterile museum of the same are, in this writer’s view, entirely misguided. By all means, there should be a monument and a museum to those who lost, or gave, their lives in that building for a cause they believed in. That is in the proposal that the Government is bringing forward.
But the idea that there is no room for anything else in the GPO or its vicinity but “hallowed ground”? That would have been alien to the Dubliners who lived through the conflict of that week. It should be alien to us, as well. O’Connell street should be a functioning commercial and cultural hub, not a graveyard monument to one interpretation of this island’s history.