Saint Stephen's Green

The name comes from a medieval leper hospital dedicated to Saint Stephen on nearby Stephen Street, now Mercer's Hospital. Until 1663 the ground itself was a marshy common of roughly 60 acres on the edge of Dublin, used for grazing, and one of three ancient commons in the city. In that year Dublin Corporation, seeing an opportunity to raise much-needed revenue, decided to enclose the centre of the common and to sell the land around its perimeter for building. Robert Newcomen surveyed the ground, which was divided into 96 plots around a green of 27 acres at the centre. The park was enclosed with a wall in 1664.

The first landscaping followed in 1670, when two rows of lime trees were planted around the perimeter to act as the first enclosure, and the marshy ground was drained by a ditch cut at the edge. What those trees enclosed was not a public park in any modern sense: access belonged to the wealthy residents who owned the plots around it.

Early tenants built simple two-storey houses, and much of the square was still undeveloped when it was mapped in 1728. By the time of John Roque's map of 1756 the pace of building had accelerated rapidly, and the first houses around the Green were quickly replaced by new buildings in the Georgian style. By the end of the eighteenth century the Green was a place of resort for the better-off of the city, and most of the present-day square is made up of townhouses of the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of the earliest houses still survive on the south and north sides, their lower height and narrow fronts showing how the original plots were subdivided; on the east side the scale changed dramatically, with much larger and grander houses, many of them by Gustavus Hume.

By 1758 the tree-lined walks around the park had been named: Beaux Walk to the north, Leeson's Walk to the south, Monck's Walk to the east and French Walk to the west. In the same year an equestrian statue of King George II by John van Nost was erected in the park. The Saint Stephen's Green (Dublin) Improvement Act 1814 passed control of the square to commissioners acting for the local householders, who redesigned its layout and replaced the walls with railings. In 1815 the Dublin city surveyor Arthur Neville redesigned the park again, adding winding pathways and iron fences. It was still closed to the public.

After the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria suggested that St Stephen's Green be renamed Albert Green and carry a statue of Albert at its centre, a suggestion rejected with indignation by Dublin Corporation and the people of the city, to the Queen's chagrin. Through the 1860s the campaign to make the park publicly accessible was under way, and the city engineer George W. Hemans proposed a design intended to make it as walkable and as functionally practical as possible, with four gates, one at each corner, linked by the pathways Neville had laid out. Hemans's plan was eventually abandoned, most likely because he was employed by Dublin Corporation, but much of it, the corner gates and the connecting paths among it, was taken into the final plans submitted by William Sheppard, the principal designer responsible for the landscape as it stands, working with the engineer A. L. Cousins.

Access to the Green was restricted to local residents until 1877, when Parliament passed the Saint Stephen's Green (Dublin) Act to reopen the park to the public, at the initiative of Sir A. E. Guinness of the brewing family, who lived at St Anne's Park in Raheny and at Ashford Castle. He then paid for the laying out of the Green in approximately its current form, which took place in 1880, and gave it to the Corporation as representatives of the people; by way of thanks the city commissioned a statue of him, which faces the College of Surgeons. Sheppard's scheme was sponsored by Lord Ardilaun, who also had a significant hand in the planning and importing of the exotic trees and plants installed in the park, and who officially re-opened St Stephen's Green to the public on Tuesday 27 July 1880. The architectural historian Christine Casey has written that the 19th-century restoration obscures what would have been the square's most impressive feature to an 18th-century visitor, its large size.

The family's mark on the square was not confined to the park. Iveagh House on the south side was created in the 1860s from the joining of two earlier houses, numbers 80 and 81, by Benjamin Guinness. Edward Guinness, brother of Sir A. E. Guinness, lived there, and his descendants gave the house in 1939 to the Department of External Affairs, now the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, whose main offices it still holds.

During the Easter Rising of 1916 a group of rebels, made up mainly of members of the Irish Citizen Army, established a position in St Stephen's Green under the command of Commandant Michael Mallin, with Kit Poole as his second-in-command and Constance Markievicz. They numbered between 200 and 250. They confiscated motor vehicles to establish roadblocks on the streets surrounding the park, and dug defensive positions in the park itself, an approach that differed from the taking up of positions in buildings adopted elsewhere in the city. It proved to have been unwise when elements of the British Army took up positions in the Shelbourne Hotel at the northeastern corner of the Green, overlooking the park, from which they could shoot down into the entrenchments. Finding themselves in a weak position, the rebels withdrew to the Royal College of Surgeons on the west side of the Green.

During the Rising, gunfire was temporarily halted to allow the park's groundsman to feed the local ducks. Mary Sheldreck, a member of the women's paramilitary organisation Cumann na mBan, was with Constance Markievicz in St Stephen's Green and died from injuries sustained during the Rising.

A statue of Archibald Montgomerie, 13th Earl of Eglinton, by Patrick MacDowell, was erected on the north side of the Green in 1866. It was destroyed in an explosion by the IRA in 1958, which injured gardai and civilians, and the remains were dismantled. Van Nost's equestrian George II had gone the same way in 1937, blown up by Irish Republicans the day after the coronation of George VI.

The Fusiliers' Arch at the Grafton Street corner commemorates the men of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who died in the Second Boer War. A memorial bust marks the war poet Thomas Kettle, who was killed in action while serving in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers at the Battle of Ginchy in September 1916; because Irish republicanism traditionally viewed Irishmen who served in the British armed forces during the First World War as traitors, the placement of the bust was beset by controversy until it was finally set in the centre section in 1937, without an official unveiling. Inside the Leeson Street gate is a fountain representing the Three Fates, designed in bronze by Joseph Wackerle in 1956 and given by the German people in thanks for Irish help to refugee children after the Second World War; up to five hundred children found foster homes in Ireland in a project named Operation Shamrock.

A tearoom at Heritage House, 23 St Stephen's Green, hosted the first public Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Ireland on 25 November 1946. During the mid 20th century a number of the Georgian buildings on the Green were demolished in favour of modern office blocks, and most of the east side is now modern reproduction terraces in front of offices. Among the losses was No. 21, the former St Andrew's College, demolished by Irish Life in February 1969 and replaced by Stephen Court, designed by Andrew Devane.

Traffic management changes implemented in 2004 during the Luas works greatly reduced the volume of traffic on the four streets that border the square. A bust of the Bengal Renaissance poet Rabindranath Tagore was erected in the park in 2011. St Stephen's Green is now operated by the Office of Public Works on behalf of the Irish state.