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Nelson Pillar (referred to as Nelson's Pillar and sometimes Nelson's Column) was a large granite pillar with a statue of Lord Nelson on top, located in the centre of O'Connell Street in Dublin. Erected in honour of

Admiral Horatio Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar in 1808, it offered Dubliners the city's best public viewing platform. It was designed by Francis Johnson, the architect who built the General Post Office (to the left of the picture opposite). Johnson and later architects laid out Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street) so that the buildings, the GPO and the Pillar were in scale to the size and length of the street and to each other.

At 2am on March 8, 1966, a bomb planted by an Irish republican destroyed the upper half of the pillar, throwing the statue of Nelson into the street and causing large chunks of stone to be flung around the vicinity. Two days later, Irish Army Engineers blew up the rest of the pillar after judging it too structurally unsafe to restore. The rubble from the monument was taken to the East Wall dump, and the lettering from the plinth moved to the gardens of Butler House, Kilkenny. The area was then simply paved over. The Nelson Pillar Act was passed in 1967, transferring responsibility for the site of the monument from the Nelson Pillar Trustees to Dublin Corporation..

A new monument, known as the Spire of Dublin, was erected on the long vacant site in January 2003.