I picked this great image up recently, showing the unveiling of the monument to Queen Victoria inside the grounds of Leinster House in February 1908. A huge image, I had to scan it in two parts, as you can see in the centre of the scan.

We’ve looked at this statue in some detail before, and Victoria is quite literally a ‘Moving Statue’.

The statue would survive the revolutionary period intact, but following Irish independence focus turned to it and the potential of removing it. While several statues associated with the British empire were targeted by militant republicans in the first few decades of independence, it was the state which began looking at ways to remove Victoria from her position in front of the parliament. In August 1929 The Irish Times reported that discussions were under way to remove the statue “on the basis that its continued presence there is repugnant to national feeling, and that, from an artistic point of view, it disfigures the architectural beauty of the parliamentary buildings”. In the Dáil however in 1930, the government line was that “The statue in question is not regarded as a valuable or attractive work of art; nevertheless, it is not thought that its effect on popular taste is so debasing as to necessitate the expenditure of public funds on its removal”

Removed from the grounds of the Dáil in July 1948, she spent several years in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, and was ultimately gifted to the people of Australia! In 1986, the statue departed Dublin Port in a container vessel bound for Australia. Following a request from the Lord Mayor of Sydney, a decision was reached to send it on a “permanent loan” basis.

Today, she sits happily in Sydney, with a plaque reading “presented by the Government and people of Ireland in a spirit of goodwill and friendship”