The Irish Times

The Minister for the Environment has given the millennium Spire the go-ahead. Sculptor Vivienne Roche argues that it could become the 'signature' of Dublin for the rest of the world "It is not a beautiful object," said W.B. Yeats of Nelson's Pillar. He also said: "The life and work of the people who erected it are part of our tradition". The almost 75 years since these remarks were made have seen the work of those people subsumed into a dynamic new tradition, and the destruction of that particular monumental symbol. The dynamism, however, has all too often been fractured and without vision. Fortunately, this has not been the case with the thinking behind the reformation of O'Connell Street, the neglected central street of the capital of Ireland.