Uninspired: a monument to emptiness

One day in 2007 I was sat in a taxi that stuck in traffic on the Quays in Dublin which pulled-up alongside that amphibious tour bus/boat thing that tourists pay to get soaked in, the driver of which was giving-off about the spire in O’Connell Street.

“Do we like it? No we feckin’ don’t,” he informed his already rain-soaked passengers.

‘Some ambassador’, was my first thought, followed quickly by ‘Why does anyone dislike the spire? There’s nothing to it – at all.’ Immediately I recalled a conversation during which someone defended the spire from its detractors on the simple grounds that it is already there and that those who hate it rarely propose an alternative. Fair enough that seems like a reasonable, if somewhat shallow and limited, argument, I thought.

Indeed, much of the criticism of the spire at the time of its erection was, frankly, of the misinformed I-just-don’t-like-it variety, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate reasons to question the thing.

The main problem with the spire is its meaninglessness – it is literally a monument to nothing.

Conceived as a device for urban regeneration, the spire has all of the hallmarks of officaldom and dreary public art, not artistic genius. It’s hard not to imagine that the anti-graffiti device on its base masquerading as a pattern isn’t actually the grubby fingerprints of the army of bureaucrats that delivered it before gorging themselves on the fiduciary placenta of a government handouts. In days gone by we would have selected some noteworthy individual and built a statue to them. Indeed, O’Connell Street is already littered with the effigies of significant characters from Irish history and the spire, or Monument of Light to give it its correct title, sits on the former location of the Nelson Pillar that was removed by freelance demolition experts in 1966.