A plinth outside City Hall lies empty again. What, if anything, is next up?

On Saturday afternoon, a handful of tourists descended the steps to City Hall, looking down towards the vista of car-free Parliament Street, and beyond that, the river.

On the steps, they passed an empty plinth to the left of the entrance, into which the surname of the 19th-century nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell’s surname was engraved.

But the statue, created by sculptor John Hogan, hadn’t been on that plinth since the 1860s, according to Sculpture Dublin, a council initiative for promoting and commissioning sculptures. 

It had been taken down and moved into City Hall, the Sculpture Dublin document says. “Due to concerns about the 12-foot high statue’s Italian marble weathering in the damp Irish climate.”

So, for more than 150 years, the “O’Connell Plinth” remained empty, save for two years between 2021 and 2023 when a sculpture by artist Alan Phelan occupied it. 

Phelan’s sculpture was a giant candle holder, which attracted a lot of attention with its playful nods to various aspects of 19th-century Irish politics, he said on Friday. “I was in every single flippin’ newspaper in Ireland and every news report.”

“Then, of course, they forget about you the next day,” he says.

While the council, following the removal of Phelan’s sculpture in May 2023, had plans to commission more temporary installations for the plinth, that effort lost momentum after Ruairí Ó Cuív, then the city’s public arts officer, retired, Phelan says.

On Saturday, the plinth was empty, and it seemed odd, like it was commemorating an invisible man. But nobody paid it any mind as they continued past it into City Hall’s rotunda, taking snaps of its columns and mosaics.

The council currently has no plans to commission another sculpture for the plinth, a council spokesperson on Tuesday said.

But with the appointment of a new public arts officer recently, that should probably return to the council’s agenda soon, says Social Democrats Councillor Cat O’Driscoll, who is on the council’s arts committee. “I’m looking to reignite that conversation.”

Maybe the council could pay an artist to create a new work, specifically for the plinth, but that can be quite costly, O’Driscoll says. 

“Are there things that should be on display that aren’t on display, that are in storage? This could be a way of bringing them back out,” she says.

Ghost plinths and accidental scarecrows

Originally, the plinth stood in the centre of the entrance steps up into what is now City Hall, supporting the towering statue of Daniel O’Connell, a photo in the Sculpture Dublin report shows.

O’Connell made his first public speech in 1800 outside the building – when it was the Royal Exchange, according to the report.

He was elected Dublin’s Lord Mayor in 1841, and in 1843 Hogan was commissioned by the Repeal Association to create the statue of him, “in anticipation of the repeal of the Acts of Union”, it says.

The statue cost £1,600 and was completed by Hogan in 1845, the report says. It was all rather premature, though, it turned out – as the union of Ireland and the United Kingdom remained in place until the revolution forced the issue in the early 20th century.

In any case, in the 1850s, the Royal Exchange was purchased by the council, then the “city corporation”, according to the report. They moved in, and set up a new council room in what had previously been the “coffee room” there.

The following decade, the statue of O’Connell was moved inside. “The removal of the statue in the 1860s dispossessed the plinth of its intended purpose, transforming it from a conventional mechanism of display into a vacant anomaly,” the report says.

The plinth was later moved to the left hand side of the entrance.

In 2020, the council acted to address the empty plinth – at least temporarily.

The council funded, through a special budget allocation, Sculpture Dublin, a two-year initiative to raise awareness of sculpture, and commission new works for the city, a council spokesperson said on Tuesday.

As part of the initiative, the council commissioned five permanent works – in Smithfield, Finglas, Bushy Park, Ballyfermot and St. Anne’s Park – alongside a special temporary piece for the plinth on Dame Street, according to the Sculpture Dublin report.

The council put out a call for artists to send on proposals, getting 36 ideas back, 17 of which were deemed ineligible as they failed to include details like a budget breakdown.

In July 2021, the council’s Protocol Committee was informed that the artist Alan Phelan had won the competition with his sculpture “RGB Sconce, Hold Up Your Nose”.

It was a five-metre-tall piece made of paper-covered, 3D-printed thermoplastic polyester forms and steel, the report said.

The work was a towering blue, green and red candle holder, meant to embody the idea of emancipation, while also referencing “Hold Your Nose! A Collection of Sanitary Songs Intended for the Disinfection of Dublin”, an 1884 pamphlet containing satirical poems written following a sex scandal in Dublin Castle, according to Phelan’s website.

Phelan’s work didn’t actually rest on the O’Connell Plinth, because the empty plinth itself was seen as a relic, Phelan said on Friday. “Anything on top would damage it. So I figured out a cool engineering solution to brace it and float it.”

The sculpture remained above the plinth for 20 months, Phelan says. “It was only supposed to be there for, I think, nine months.”

By some miracle, it didn’t get damaged, he says. “I thought it would get covered in bird poop, or get scratched, but actually it turned into a giant scarecrow.”

It’s them pesky gulls and their guano

Alan Phelan’s sculpture remained on the plinth for more than a year after it had been granted an extension by Dublin City Council’s Protocol Committee, the city’s public arts officer Ruairí Ó Cuív said in a report to the committee on 5 April 2023.

Ó Cuív, in that report, informed the committee that he was exploring future options for both the plinth and John Hogan’s statue of O’Connell.

He had met with a stone conservator to talk about the possibility of treating Hogan’s statue with a view to returning it to the plinth, something the conservator advised against, Ó Cuív said in his report.

The conservator’s “basic reasons” were that the statue was in very good condition, Ó Cuív said, “and no matter what protective coating was added, the statue will be subject to weathering, pigeon and seagull guano, ongoing air pollution and in the longer-term growth of algae and even weeds”.

But, if the proposal was agreed to, the conservator recommended that a regime of regular cleaning and care would have to be put in place, Ó Cuív said. The conservator “also stated that to move the statue would be a complex and very expensive manoeuvre and in itself would put the statue at risk”.

Phelan’s sculpture was taken down in May 2023, and relocated to the Technological University Dublin’s Grangegorman campus on a long-term loan, according to Phelan’s website.

To replace Phelan’s sculpture, Ó Cuív investigated whether there were any historic statues available to be displayed on the plinth, Ó Cuív said in his April 2023 report.

The council didn’t have any in storage, nor did the Office of Public Works (OPW) when they were approached by the public arts officer, he said.

A spokesperson for the OPW said it was not aware of any engagements with the council in relation to finding a new statue for the plinth, when asked on Monday if the council had since discussed this idea with them.

But that wasn’t the only option Ó Cuív had in mind when investigating future options for the plinth.

In April 2023, a brief was being drafted for an open competition to invite artists to make a proposal for the display of new temporary artworks on the plinth for a year, Ó Cuív told the Protocol Committee at the time.

Councillors, city officials and external art experts would shortlist and select proposals, he said.

But by the start of 2024, Ó Cuív had retired from his role as the public arts officer, Ray Yeates told a subcommittee of the council’s arts and culture strategic policy committee, on 24 January 2024.

A new hope

The Protocol Committee was in the middle of arranging a future for the plinth when Ó Cuív announced his retirement, O’Driscoll, the Social Democrats councillor, said on Monday. “Then the conversation kinda dropped.”

While Ó Cuív’s idea to hold an open competition is still off the agenda, putting a sculpture on the plinth again is something that councillors are starting to think about again, O’Driscoll said.

In May, a new public arts officer, Maeve Butler, stepped into the role, according to Butler’s Linkedin profile.

O’Driscoll said she had recently raised the subject with Butler. “I was saying, let’s get it on the agenda for the Protocol Committee to start the conversation again. Most people, especially newly elected councillors, wouldn’t have heard anything about it.”

The Protocol Committee is responsible for the plinth, not the Community, Gaeilge, Sport, Arts and Culture Strategic Policy Committee, O’Driscoll said.

The plinth will be included in a council audit of all the city’s public artworks, which the council is currently looking to develop at the moment, she said. “That will include the maintenance costs.”

This will be a bigger picture examination of public artworks in the council’s domain, she said. And through that audit, they could find a new role for the plinth. 

“It could be that there’s a need to move something that is in a place being redeveloped or developed, and that needs to move,” she said.

“The plinth at City Hall could give it a place for public display,” she says. “We’re looking at it as an option. There’s no piece in particular that we’re talking about. But this could be a way of animating the plinth without giving it a permanent piece.”