The National Monument

Stand at the bottom of the Grand Parade, where the buses turn and the city's main streets meet, and look up. A limestone woman in a long cloak stands in a Gothic canopy above four men. She is Erin, Ireland in mourning, and the four below her are rebels from four different generations, each of whom rose against British rule and lost. Cork put them here in 1906, fourteen years before it rose itself.

Built by subscription

Nobody in government paid for this. The Cork Young Ireland Society went round the city collecting shillings from shopkeepers, dockers and schoolteachers, and the money came in slowly. The Mayor laid the foundation stone in October 1898, on the centenary of the 1798 rising, and then the fundraising dragged on for the best part of eight years. The finished monument was unveiled on St Patrick's Day 1906. Dominick Coakley designed it and John Francis Davis, a Cork sculptor, carved the figures. Every stone was paid for by people who wanted their rebels remembered in the middle of their own town, at a time when saying so out loud could cost you your job.

Who stands there

Walk round it and meet them. Wolfe Tone, the Dublin lawyer who founded the United Irishmen and went to France for an army, 1798. Michael Dwyer, the Wicklow man who held out in the mountains for five years after that rising failed. Thomas Davis, the poet from Mallow who wrote A Nation Once Again and died at thirty, three years before his Young Irelanders rose in 1848. And Peter O'Neill Crowley, the Fenian from Ballymacoda who was shot dead in Kilclooney Wood near Mitchelstown in 1867, the only Corkman of the four and the one the crowd of 1906 would have felt closest to.

The choice is the argument. By putting a man from 1798, one from the mountains after it, one from 1848 and one from 1867 under a single mourning Ireland, the people who built this were saying that a century of separate, failed risings was one fight, and that it was not finished. They turned out to be right. Fourteen years later Cork rose again, and the men and women of 1920 saw themselves as the next names on the list. Tomás Mac Curtain and Terence MacSwiney both walked past this monument on their way to City Hall.

A monument on a buried river

You are standing on water. The Grand Parade, like St Patrick's Street, is a filled-in channel of the Lee. Two hundred and fifty years ago ships tied up where the monument stands, and the merchants' houses along the west side still have the steps and the arched doorways they used to load from. Cork filled the channel in the 1780s, and the wide street it left became the place where the city gathers. It still is. Wreaths go down at the monument every Easter, and whenever Cork has something to celebrate or to mourn, this is where the crowd forms.

On the walk

We stop at the National Monument, read the four risings off the stone, and then carry the thread forward to 1920 and the Cork names you meet later on the walk. We also point out the old merchant steps on the Parade, so you can see the river that used to run under your feet.