Maud Gonne Society welcomes announcement of Dublin statue for revolutionary women

Councillor Donna Cooney, Dublin City Council 

The Maud Gonne Society welcomes the news that Dublin City Council, in response to pleas from us and so many others, is to commission a new public monument honouring the women of Ireland’s revolutionary period ( 1914-1923).

It will stand near the GPO, on the street where so much of that history was made and unmade—our first choice of location for a statue of Maud Gonne—and it will commemorate a group of women who acted during the revolutionary years and those whose work carried on after.

A baseline €1 million allocation has been allocated to ensure that the international design competition for the monument can attract top-tier artists capable of delivering a high-impact, permanent tribute.

Maud Gonne is precisely the kind of woman this monument sets out to honour: present at every turning point after the Easter Rising in 1916, when her ex-husband was executed for his role in the rebellion; and a woman whose public work did not stop in 1923 but continued for decades.

In announcing the project Councillor Donna Cooney, who newly chairs the Council’s commemoration committee, and has a real understanding of the issues, alluded to the stark context that ignited this campaign.

“There are hardly any ...statues of real women [in Dublin] at all,” and a 2023 count found just 27 of the 936 streets in the city centre were named after women, she said.

This initiative, a collaborative endeavour across a variety of cultural organisations, will be part of broader effort to address historical underrepresentation of women in public spaces in Ireland.

• The first phase will be a gender audit of all existing public art, street names, plaques and buildings—counting what’s there (which won’t take long), and what is conspicuously not.

• Then comes a phase of public lectures and community projects to surface and recover women’s histories missing from the public realm.

• Only then the commissioning: permanent sculptures, murals, street naming, with a stated focus on supporting Irish women artists at every career stage, and educational resources for schools.

Nothing is specifically confirmed about Maud Gonne as yet--we must await the unfolding of the process.

While there is a difference it’s progress in the direction we hoped for and we very much support this initiative.

Our intention is to understand the scope, artistic brief and timetable of the Council’s monument, to explore where the Maud Gonne Society might contribute historical knowledge and perspective, and to consider how the two initiatives can strengthen the wider movement to restore women to Ireland’s commemorative landscape.

We will be delighted to work with the council at the formative stage, to explore how the Society might contribute its knowledge and perspective to any consultation surrounding the historical and artistic brief.

The purpose of the campaign remains clear: to secure a prominent and permanent public statue of Maud Gonne in Dublin, honouring her as a woman in her own right and restoring her extraordinary contribution to the streets and history of the city and country she helped to shape.

We look forward to sharing further developments as the project progresses.

Find out more about the Dublin announcement at The Irish Times.

And such statues are having a moment, as Co Kerry has become the first county to honour women of revolutionary period with a statue in Tralee.