At the north end of O'Connell
Street, the funeral procession in Hades passes
by the site of an intended monument to Ireland's other great
19th century leader, which was to complement the monument to O'Connell at the southern end.
In 1904 the monument had not yet been erected, so Bloom sees
nothing more than the foundation stone: "Foundation stone for
Parnell. Breakdown. Heart."
The base for the monument to the great man was constructed in
1899, but not until 1911 did it receive the statue made by
notable American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the
triangular granite column designed by architects Henry Bacon
and George P. Sheridan. Unlike O'Connell at the south end of
the boulevard, Parnell stands at the bottom of the obelisk,
and he looks down the street. Some Irish wits (Dubliners are
notoriously irreverent toward their public works of art) have
observed that Parnell's raised hand seems to be pointing
toward the Rotunda,
suggesting that when he says, "No man has a right to fix the
boundary to the march of a nation," he is urging his
countrymen to outbreed the competition.
If other monuments to great men along the route of the
funeral carriages suggest ghosts living on in the present, Parnell's unfinished stone
evokes (in Bloom) simply loss. The "Breakdown" happened after
Parnell lost control of his party in the wake of the Katharine
O'Shea scandal. Struggling desperately to return to the
public's good graces, he undertook a grueling schedule of
speeches around the nation, and, Gifford notes, "in so doing
he seriously undermined his already precarious health. He
finally broke down after being soaked in the rain during a
speaking engagement and died of a complex of causes
(rheumatism, pneumonia, etc.) simplistically diagnosed as
'heart attack.'"
