St Stephen's Green Park

The name St Stephen's Green appeared many centuries before the present park. In the thirteenth century, there was a church nearby belonging to a leper hospital, dedicated to Saint Stephen, an early Christian martyr. “Green” meant a common pasture: a marshy outskirts where townspeople grazed livestock. The church and leper hospital have long gone, but their name remained with the former pasture.

This area was not always open to everyone. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the owners of the surrounding houses controlled the park; only those who rented keys could pass through the railings. Arthur Guinness, heir to a brewing fortune and a politician, grew up in Iveagh House opposite these gates. In eighteen seventy-seven, he proposed buying out the rights of the keyholders, paid off the park's debts, and secured an act placing it under state management. Guinness then spent about twenty thousand pounds on the lake, bridge, paths, waterfall, and plantings. On July twenty-seventh, eighteen eighty, the gates opened without a formal ceremony. The seated figure of Guinness on the west side of the park stands here precisely because of that decision.

Thirty-six years later, those same railings became the boundary of a military position. On April twenty-fourth, nineteen sixteen, the Easter Rising began in Dublin: supporters of an independent Irish Republic occupied several points in the city and rose against British rule. St Stephen's Green was to block the southern approaches to the center.

The detachment here was commanded by Michael Mallin, chief of staff of the Irish Citizen Army. Before training volunteers for military action, he earned his living weaving silk; at home, his wife Agnes, four children, and an unborn child were waiting for him. Mallin brought men and women into the park, ordered the people strolling there out through the gates, ordered the neighboring streets blocked with carts, and had trenches dug along the railings. A dressing station was set up in the greenhouse.

The park's rectangular shape seemed a convenient fortification as long as the enemy remained at street level. But tall houses stood all around. Mallin did not have enough people to occupy The Shelbourne on the east side. British soldiers entered it at night, and in the morning opened fire from the upper floors, downward into the trenches. The trees and bushes provided scattered cover, but holding the whole park became impossible.

Mallin ordered a retreat to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland on the west side. His people barricaded themselves inside the stone building and remained there until Sunday, when the general order to surrender arrived. Mallin surrendered the garrison, faced a court-martial, and was shot on May eighth. His youngest daughter was born four months after his execution.

No trenches remain among today's lawns. The site of the greenhouse where the wounded were treated is now occupied by a memorial to W. B. Yeats. Bullet marks remain on the stone of the arch at the northwestern entrance, on the very line of railings behind which Mallin's position held out for less than a day.