The statue of Charles Stewart Parnell on Sackville Street, now known as O’Connell Street, is unveiled in Dublin on October 1, 1911. It is one of the last sculptural initiatives in the city before independence.

On January 3, 1882 a resolution is passed by the Dublin City Council to grant the freedom of the city to Parnell. The plan for the Parnell monument is instigated by John Redmond, who succeeded Parnell as leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, partly as a symbolic gesture to honour the “uncrowned king of Ireland” and to consolidate his aspiration to reunite the constitutionalists under his own leadership. The monument is funded through the efforts of a voluntary body, the Parnell Committee, founded in 1898. It is first proposed to place the monument on the site of the Thomas Moore statue, which would be moved to another location. The City Council refuses to grant this site and directs that the monument be erected on a site near the Rotunda Hospital, where it now stands.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an Irish-born sculptor and the most eminent in the art of public monuments in the United States, accepts the commission. It is however to prove a protracted project as the demand for Saint-Gaudens’ work in America is such that completion of the Parnell project is fraught with delays.

For the Parnell monument, Saint-Gaudens makes a scale replica of the buildings and square in Dublin and also a full scale model of the monument in wood in a field near his studio. In 1904 there is a disastrous fire in his studio and only the head of the statue is saved. The original concept is of an 8-foot high bronze figure placed by a bronze table and set against a 30-foot pyramid. However, as this form is already utilised in the Wellington Monument obelisk in Phoenix Park, Saint-Gaudens and architect Henry Bacon propose a triangular shaft almost double the height of the original.

Saint-Gaudens finally presents Parnell in what he considers a noble and calm manner, depicted in an open frock coat, with one hand resting on a table and the other extended dramatically as if making a point at a parliamentary debate. The shaft of the monument is constructed in undecorated ashlar granite.

On October 1, 1911, the monument is unveiled to a large crowd, many of whom had been absent from the foundation stone ceremony, but there are also strikes and marches indicating the unrest to follow.

In June 1913, John Redmond, as Secretary to the Parnell Monument Committee, writes to the City Council requesting the council to take the
Monument into their charge on behalf of the Citizens of Dublin. The Council agrees to this request and ever since then the Parnell Monument has been in the care of the Dublin Corporation.

The inscription on the monument reads:

To Charles Stewart Parnell

No Man has a right to fix the
Boundary to the march of a nation
No man has a right
To say to his country
Thus far shat thou
Go and no further
We have never
Attempted to fix
The ne-plus-ultra
To the progress of
Ireland’s nationhood
And we never shall

At the base of the statue the Irish inscription reads:

Go roimhigid Dia Éire da Clainn