The monument to Charles Stewart Parnell is an odd thing on close inspection: a triangular granite shaft rising behind the statesman's figure, its base decorated with swags and bucrania, the classical ornamental motif of ox skulls, borrowed in a somewhat incongruous nod to the nearby Rotunda Hospital. Bronze plaques naming all thirty-two counties and four provinces wrap around the base, a remnant of an earlier design for a four-sided pyramid that was eventually abandoned. The inscription Redmond selected is deliberately uncompromising: 'No man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation.'

The monument's long, fraught journey to completion is part of what makes it worth pausing over. The project was instigated by John Redmond, who had succeeded Parnell as leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, partly to honour the so-called 'uncrowned king of Ireland' and partly to consolidate his own political standing. A voluntary body, the Parnell Committee, was founded in 1898 and chaired by Lord Mayor Daniel Tallon; its membership included Count Plunkett, Thomas Baker of the Irish Independent, and the MP Edward Blake. When the foundation stone was laid on 8 October 1899, most of the Irish Parliamentary Party stayed away, still raw from the split over Parnell's affair with Katharine O'Shea, and hecklers disrupted Redmond's appeal for unity. Fundraising in Ireland proved so difficult that Redmond was forced to tour America to secure backing. The commission went to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, born in Dublin in 1848 but taken to the United States as an infant, and by then regarded as the foremost sculptor of public monuments in America. He was simultaneously at work on the equestrian statue of General Sherman in New York. Saint-Gaudens built a scale model of the Dublin streetscape near his studio and constructed a full-size wooden mock-up of the monument in a nearby field. In 1904, a fire destroyed his studio, and of the Parnell work only the head survived. He was quoted in the New York Daily News lamenting the loss specifically 'as an Irishman.' The revised design, developed with architect Henry Bacon, replaced the original thirty-foot pyramid with a triangular shaft of undecorated ashlar granite, described in The Irish Architect and Craftsman in September 1911 as Shantalla granite from Galway, with an inlaid trefoil of Barna granite at the base. The monument was finally unveiled on 1 October 1911, more than twelve years after that troubled foundation stone ceremony.

The monument stands at the top of O'Connell Street, near the Rotunda Hospital, and the siting was not accidental; the City Council had rejected an earlier proposal to place it on the Thomas Moore statue's plot and directed it here instead, so that it answers Daniel O'Connell's monument at the street's southern end. The figure of Parnell is notably lower and more approachable than the elevated O'Connell, a difference in scale that reflects a conscious choice about how each man was to be presented to the public. The Irish-language inscription at the base reads: 'Go roimhigid Dia Éire da Clainn.' The bucrania at Parnell's feet are easy to miss, but worth finding.