The tall building is Liberty Hall.

Today I took a walk around the city to see if I could develop a plan for the next few days but I encountered many restrictions and obstructions especially along O’Connell Street.

This weekend ten years ago I undertook my first photo-shoot using a DSLR. The event was the 90th. anniversary of the Easter Rising. Much to my surprise I managed to take some excellent photographs which I uploaded to Flickr having joined the service a few weeks before. Some of my most viewed photographs were taken at the 2006 parade or on the day of the parade.

This Easter we in Ireland are celebrating the 100th. anniversary of the 1916 rising and the main parade on Sunday will end outside my apartment but unfortunately my windows face the wrong direction. Because of traffic and other restrictions I very much doubt that I will get any useful photographs of this year’s major event.

For those of you who are not Irish here is a short explanation: The Easter Rising, also known as the Easter Rebellion, was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week, 1916. The Rising was launched by Irish republicans to end British rule in Ireland and establish an independent Irish Republic while the United Kingdom was heavily engaged in World War I. It was the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798. Almost 500 people were killed in the Easter Rising. About 54% were civilians, 30% were British military and police, and 16% were Irish rebels. More than 2,600 were wounded. Most of the civilians were killed as a result of the British using artillery and heavy machine guns, or mistaking civilians for rebels. The shelling and the fires it caused left parts of inner city Dublin in ruins.

Standing on Beresford Place and Eden Quay, near the Custom House, the original Liberty Hall was a hotel before it became James Connolly's personal fortress in Dublin. During the 1913 Dublin Lock-out a soup kitchen for workers' families was run there by Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz. Following the outbreak of the First World War a banner reading "We Serve Neither King nor Kaiser, But Ireland" was hung on its front wall, and Connolly's newspaper The Irish Worker was printed inside. The newspaper was shut down by the British government for sedition under the Defence of the Realm Act. It was replaced for a short time by a paper called The Worker until that to was banned. Connolly edited a third paper, The Workers' Republic, from 1915 until the Easter Rising in 1916.

Until the Easter Rising Liberty Hall also served as a munitions factory, where bombs and bayonets were made for the impending rebellion. It was on the street in front of the building that the leaders of the Rising assembled before their march to the General Post Office on Easter Monday. They left the building vacant throughout Easter Week, a fact unknown to the British authorities, who chose the building as the first to be shelled. It was completely levelled by British artillery during the Rising, but it was faithfully restored afterwards.

In the late 1950s Liberty Hall was declared unsafe and promptly demolished.The present building, which has sixteen storeys, was constructed between 1961 and 1965. It was originally fitted with windows of non-reflective glass, but after they were damaged by a UVF car bomb in 1972 they were replaced with windows of reflective glass. The viewing platform, which had only recently been opened, was also closed after the car bomb.