GPO

GPO

The General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin is the headquarters of An Post, the Irish Post Office, and Dublin’s principal post office. Sited in the centre of O’Connell Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, it is one of Ireland’s most famous buildings. Our illustration captures the iconic Dublin building against a range of background colours.

GPO and the Easter Rising

During the Easter Rising of 1916, the GPO served as the headquarters of the uprising’s leaders. The building was destroyed by fire in the course of the rebellion and not repaired until the Irish Free State government took up the task some years later. The facade is all that remains of the original building. An original copy of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic was on display in the An Post Museum at the GPO, where an exhibition, Letters, Lives & Liberty, highlighted the history of the Post Office and the GPO. The museum closed at the end of May 2015 being replaced by a new visitor centre to commemorate the 1916 Rising, ‘GPO Witness History’, in March 2016. The building has remained a symbol of Irish nationalism.

In commemoration of the Rising, a statue depicting the death of the mythical hero Cúchulainn sculpted by Oliver Sheppard in 1911 was sited at the command post in the centre of the GPO main hall and is now housed in the front of the building. The statue was featured on the Irish ten shilling coin of 1966, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising. Despite its fame as an iconic place of Irish freedom, ground rent for the GPO continued to be paid to English and American landlords until the 1980s.