The monument as a whole stands forty feet high, with a twelve-foot bronze O'Connell draped in his cloak at the top, but it is those damaged allegorical figures, each representing a virtue ascribed to O'Connell, that carry an unexpected layer of history. It is also worth knowing that the street on which it stands was not yet called O'Connell Street when the monument was conceived; it was Sackville Street, and the choice to place a monument to a Catholic nationalist leader there, rather than to a member of the British royal family or the Castle administration, was itself a deliberate political act.

The project had origins stretching back to 1847, when O'Connell died and newspapers began promoting a commemorative fund, with the Catholic Hierarchy authorising church door collections. A public meeting at the Prince of Wales Hotel on Sackville Street established the O'Connell Monument Committee, and by the time the two-ton Dalkey granite foundation stone was laid on 8 August 1864, £8,362 had already been banked. Lord Mayor Peter Paul McSwiney presided over the ceremony, with a procession moving from Merrion Square to Sackville Street. The sculptor eventually chosen was John Henry Foley, an Irish-born but London-resident artist whose appointment generated considerable controversy; the Irish Builder protested vigorously that the work should be executed by Irish hands. Two open competitions, producing sixty designs between them, failed to yield an acceptable result, and Foley proceeded largely on his own terms. He died in 1874 before completing the work, and his assistant Thomas Brock was formally commissioned in June 1878 to finish it. The sculptural programme is elaborate: a central frieze features the figure of the Maid of Erin holding the 1829 Act of Catholic Emancipation, surrounded by nearly thirty figures representing the Church, the professions, the arts, trades, and the peasantry.

The monument was finally unveiled on 15 August 1882, thirty-five years after O'Connell's death, on a day that also marked the centenary of the Volunteer Movement. The Freeman's Journal recorded that the sun broke through drenching rain at the precise moment the covering was removed. It stands at the southern end of what is now O'Connell Street, and the details reward a slow look: the layered composition, the frieze figures, and particularly the two lower winged victories where the bullet damage, once spotted, is difficult to unsee.