Erik Stewart, tour guide at the GPO Museum, explores the history of the iconic Dublin building, and its award-winning on-site museum telling the story of the 1916 Easter Rising and modern Irish history.
From its opening in 1818, Dublin's General Post Office (GPO) and its staff have provided a range of essential communications, financial, and social services to the city’s citizens. GPO staff have brought, and continue to bring, the world and its people closer together.
A near-immeasurable number of letters, postcards, presents, and other forms of human exchange have passed through the building’s halls over the last two centuries. The extent of that human connection is impossible to quantify, and the GPO has been at the centre of it all for centuries.
Owing to its podium place on Dublin’s main thoroughfare, the GPO has also been a silent witness to major events across the tapestry of modern Irish history. In 1875, celebrations took place outside the building to acknowledge the centenary of Daniel O’Connell’s birth. Sixteen years later, over 200,000 people gathered to witness the funeral procession of Charles Stewart Parnell. In 1913, the GPO was the backdrop to intense violence between trade-union strikers and police as desires for social change intensified. Quasi-mythological status was then attained following the GPO’s use as, essentially, the headquarters for the rebels of the 1916 Easter Rising.
Owing to its podium place on Dublin's main thoroughfare, the GPO has also been a silent witness to major events across the tapestry of modern Irish history.
The GPO and its staff have evidently borne witness to, and participated in, an incredible volume of historical change and human activity. Inclusion of a museum within the building’s walls thus seems an obvious necessity. However, the absence of a museum in our capital city dedicated to any of the above persisted for decades and the GPO continued to function in the capacity for which it was constructed – not as a place of memory, but as a post office providing services to the public.
Indeed, the GPO maintains a dual identity as a both a public service building and place of memory, and neither element was seen as having been adequately commemorated, despite the opening of a postal service museum in the building in 2010. The Decade of Centenaries heralded renewed interest in acknowledging the place of the building and its staff throughout modern Irish history and posed the question – how does one commemorate both sides of the GPO’s identity?
It is in answering this question that the significance of GPO Museum and its place within the building is demonstrated. From the high politics of the Home Rule Crisis to the personal lives of the Easter Rising’s leaders, between the civilians caught in the crossfire, the postal staff who worked throughout it all, and the experiences of those serving in the British military, and from the reopening of the GPO to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, GPO Museum does not deal solely with any one aspect mentioned above. Rather, it delves into all of them and more, encapsulating the momentous change that was the twentieth century in Ireland.
One may wonder why a post office would have such a museum, but in the case of Dublin’s GPO and its role within such events one should instead ask – how could it not?
Find out more about the GPO Museum here
