Nine hectares of Victorian park at the top of Grafton Street, paid for by a Guinness, and briefly a battlefield in 1916 when both sides stopped shooting so the groundsman could feed the ducks.
The park
Common grazing land until 1664, when the corporation enclosed it and sold the surrounding plots for building, which is how the square got its Georgian frontages. It was railed off for the use of residents only until 1877, when Arthur Guinness, Lord Ardilaun paid to have it landscaped and reopened to the public. His statue faces the College of Surgeons, and by tradition it faces that way because he is looking at the Guinness brewery — which it does not, but the story survives.
Nine hectares: a lake with ducks and a waterfall, a bandstand, formal flower beds, a garden for the blind with scented plants and Braille labels, and a great many benches.
1916
The Irish Citizen Army under Michael Mallin and Constance Markievicz occupied the Green during the Easter Rising and dug trenches in it — which was a poor tactical choice, because the British occupied the Shelbourne Hotel overlooking it and fired down into the park. The rebels withdrew to the College of Surgeons on the west side, where the bullet marks are still in the stonework.
During the fighting, both sides observed an informal daily ceasefire so the park’s groundsman could cross and feed the ducks. That is the detail everybody remembers, and it is true.
The memorials
The Green is dense with them, and they are a decent short course in what the state has chosen to commemorate:
The Fusiliers’ Arch at the Grafton Street corner, to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who died in the Boer War — locally nicknamed Traitors’ Gate for a long time.
The Famine memorial by Edward Delaney.
Wolfe Tone, in front of a granite screen Dubliners call Tonehenge.
W. B. Yeats, by Henry Moore. James Joyce, opposite Newman House where he studied. Markievicz. Robert Emmet.
The Three Fates, a fountain given by West Germany in thanks for Irish aid to children after the war.
Around the Green
The Shelbourne Hotel on the north side, where the Irish constitution was drafted in 1922.
Newman House on the south side, two Georgian townhouses with extraordinary plasterwork, once the Catholic University where Joyce studied and Gerard Manley Hopkins taught. Now the MoLI museum of Irish literature, which is good.
Iveagh Gardens, five minutes behind the Green through a lane, is a walled Victorian garden with a waterfall, a maze and almost nobody in it. It is the better park and most visitors never find it.
