This photograph dates from November 2016 and I have not photographed it recently.
22nd June 2022: Dublin City Council would like to announce that it has today added the name of another victim of the Dublin Bombings, Baby Martha O’Neill, to the memorial in Talbot Street.
I was waiting for my father at the top of Talbot Street to give me a lift home minutes before the first bomb exploded in Dublin. To the best of my memory we had crossed to the South of the River Liffey at 17:30. I must admit that I remember little else about the event.
Edward John O’Neill was one of those killed in the bombing in Parnell Street on 17th May 1974, in which two of his sons were badly injured.
Edward O’Neill’s wife, Mrs Martha O’Neill, was six-months pregnant at the time. Three months later, and as a result of the trauma, Mrs O’Neill’s baby, Martha, was stillborn at full-term. Baby Martha O’Neill was formally recognised as one of the victims of the bombing, being listed in the report of the Government’s Commission of Investigation into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 1974.
Although Edward O’Neill’s name was on the memorial in Talbot Street (at the junction with Amiens Street), Baby Martha O’Neil’s name has only now been added.
The Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 17 May 1974 were a series of co-ordinated bombings in counties Dublin and Monaghan, Ireland. Three bombs exploded in Dublin during the evening rush hour and a fourth exploded in Monaghan almost ninety minutes later. They killed 33 civilians and injured almost 300. The bombings were the deadliest attack of the conflict known as the Troubles, and the deadliest attack in the Republic’s history. Most of the victims were young women, although the ages of the dead ranged from 19 up to 80 years.
The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a loyalist paramilitary group from Northern Ireland, claimed responsibility for the bombings in 1993. It had launched a number of attacks in the Republic since 1969. The month before the bombings, the British government had lifted the UVF’s status as a proscribed organisation.
The bombings happened during the Ulster Workers’ Council strike. This was a general strike called by hardline loyalists and unionists in Northern Ireland who opposed the Sunningdale Agreement. Specifically, they opposed the sharing of political power with Irish nationalists, and the proposed role for the Republic in the governance of Northern Ireland. The Republic’s government had helped bring about the Agreement. The strike brought down the Agreement and the Northern Ireland Assembly on 28 May.
No one has ever been charged with the bombings. A campaign by the victims’ families led to an Irish government inquiry under Mr. Justice Henry Barron. His 2003 report criticised the Garda Síochána’s investigation and said the investigators stopped their work prematurely. It also criticised the Fine Gael/Labour government of the time for its inaction and lack of interest in the bombings. The report said it was likely that British security force personnel or MI5 intelligence was involved but had insufficient evidence of higher-level involvement. However, the inquiry was hindered by the British government’s refusal to release key documents.
The victims’ families and others are continuing to campaign to this day for the British government to release these documents.
VICTIMS SCULPTURE BY ANDREW O’CONNOR [IN MERRION SQUARE PARK]
I have published other photographs of this sculpture but this time I used a very old Canon !Ds MarkIII with a recently purchase Voigtlander manual 40mm lens but due to lack of experience in using manual lenses the images were not as good as I had hoped.
This figurative sculpture, The Victims originated as a part of an unexecuted project for a war memorial for Washington, DC. The artist, Andrew O’Connor, conceived the idea of a huge war memorial in about 1918 and worked on the project until at least 1931.
However, no such monument was ever commissioned from him. The memorial consisted of three sections. The first of which was a group of three figures; a dead soldier strapped to a bier, mourned by his wife and his mother.
The figure of the dead soldier is The Victim, inscribed with the words; ‘Naked you came into the world’, the kneeling figure of The Wife with her hands clasped in prayer is variously called The Virgin or Mother of Sorrows. She is inscribed; ‘As cranes chanting their dolorous notes traverse the sky’ which is taken from a translation of Dante’s Inferno.
The standing female figure of The Mother of the Hero leans mournfully on her left elbow. The Victim was presented by the family of the sculptor to the Dublin Municipal Gallery (now Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane) in 1947 while the other two figures were presented to the gallery by the sculptor in 1938.
As is often the case with O’Connor’s work he produced other versions of some of these figures. A plaster version of The Victim is in the O’Connor family collection and a version of The Wife is at the Tate Gallery, London. The group would have been assembled with The Victim on a raised plinth, his wife kneeling at his head, his mother standing at his feet. The Victims was installed in 1976 following an exhibition to mark the centenary of the sculptor’s birth at Trinity College Dublin in 1974.
It would appear that it was not until 1974 that the three figures were displayed together as originally intended creating this uncompromising figurative representation of the victims of war.
Born in Worchester, Massachusetts, USA in 1874, Andrew O’Connor was the son of an Irish-American sculptor of the same name. Having studied under his father, O’Connor Jr. began working regularly on public monuments and funerary commissions in the United States.
In London c.1894-8, he met John Singer Sargent and assisted him on reliefs for his Boston Library decorations.
Andrew O’Connor’s style was formulated by the time he first visited Paris in about 1903 and his earliest work is in the Franco-American style which had become popular in America by 1900. Unlike the majority of other American sculptors he remained in France and worked from a Paris studio up to 1914. From 1906 on he exhibited annually at the Salon in Paris and at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin in 1907.
He then returned to the USA from 1914 to the mid 1920s and received numerous commissions for funerary and public monuments including the monument to Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois and the Theodore Roosevelt memorial at Glenview, Chicago. O’Connor spent his last years in Europe, first in Paris, then from c. 1932 between Ireland and London. He resided in Dublin for the last seven months of his life and passed away at his home at No.77 Merrion Square.
VICTIMS A SCULPTURE BY ANDREW O’CONNOR – LOCATED IN MERRION SQUARE PARK
Unfortunately this is very relevant today.
When I first saw this more than ten years ago I thought that it was religious. I assumed that it depicted the removing of Jesus from the cross but while I was photographing a young girl asked her mother “is that God lying on a table” but since then I discovered that it is a lot more complicated that that.
This figurative sculpture, The Victims originated as a part of an unexecuted project for a war memorial for Washington, DC. The artist, Andrew O’Connor, conceived the idea of a huge war memorial in about 1918 and worked on the project until at least 1931.
However, no such monument was ever commissioned from him. The memorial consisted of three sections. The first of which was a group of three figures; a dead soldier strapped to a bier, mourned by his wife and his mother.
The figure of the dead soldier is The Victim, inscribed with the words; ‘Naked you came into the world’, the kneeling figure of The Wife with her hands clasped in prayer is variously called The Virgin or Mother of Sorrows. She is inscribed; ‘As cranes chanting their dolorous notes traverse the sky’ which is taken from a translation of Dante’s Inferno.
The standing female figure of The Mother of the Hero leans mournfully on her left elbow. The Victim was presented by the family of the sculptor to the Dublin Municipal Gallery (now Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane) in 1947 while the other two figures were presented to the gallery by the sculptor in 1938.
As is often the case with O’Connor’s work he produced other versions of some of these figures. A plaster version of The Victim is in the O’Connor family collection and a version of The Wife is at the Tate Gallery, London. The group would have been assembled with The Victim on a raised plinth, his wife kneeling at his head, his mother standing at his feet. The Victims was installed in 1976 following an exhibition to mark the centenary of the sculptor’s birth at Trinity College Dublin in 1974.
It would appear that it was not until 1974 that the three figures were displayed together as originally intended creating this uncompromising figurative representation of the victims of war.
Born in Worchester, Massachusetts, USA in 1874, Andrew O’Connor was the son of an Irish-American sculptor of the same name. Having studied under his father, O’Connor Jr. began working regularly on public monuments and funerary commissions in the United States.
In London c.1894-8, he met John Singer Sargent and assisted him on reliefs for his Boston Library decorations.
Andrew O’Connor’s style was formulated by the time he first visited Paris in about 1903 and his earliest work is in the Franco-American style which had become popular in America by 1900. Unlike the majority of other American sculptors he remained in France and worked from a Paris studio up to 1914. From 1906 on he exhibited annually at the Salon in Paris and at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin in 1907.
He then returned to the USA from 1914 to the mid 1920s and received numerous commissions for funerary and public monuments including the monument to Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois and the Theodore Roosevelt memorial at Glenview, Chicago. O’Connor spent his last years in Europe, first in Paris, then from c. 1932 between Ireland and London. He resided in Dublin for the last seven months of his life and passed away at his home at No.77 Merrion Square.
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