‘A never-ending throng of mourners’: Arthur Beesley on the funeral of Michael Collins

When an Irish bullet killed Michael Collins on this day a century ago, the main report on his funeral in this paper appeared under the byline Nichevo. That was the pseudonym of Bertie Smyllie, who went on to take command of the paper in 1934 and ran it for 20 illustrious years.

In his heyday, the larger-than-life Smyllie was known around Dublin as “the Editor”. But it was Smyllie the perspicacious reporter who followed Collins’s sombre cortege to Glasnevin six days after his death. It was one of the largest processions its kind, the city at standstill, the “never-ending throng of mourners” taking hours to pass silently through the streets.

“It was a proud sight, but it was a sad sight. Dublin never saw its like before and the burial of Michael Collins will live long in the memories of those who watched it,” wrote Nichevo.

“The service in the Pro-Cathedral was marked by that majestic simplicity which gives so much dignity to the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. The building was full to overflowing and the weird mournfulness of the plain chant was restfully impressive. Down the steps came the great oak coffin, with its purple handles, bearing the tricolour flag and a single white lily, the last gift of the dead General’s betrothed.”

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Nichevo described tears coursing down the sunburnt cheeks of the young men who carried the coffin to the gun carriage that conveyed it to Glasnevin. “How many people lined the city’s streets it is impossible to say. But there was not a vacant inch along the roadways, not an empty window from end to end.”

It was shortly after three o’clock when the cortege reached the cemetery, met by a guard of honour. “The service was very short, the responses being sung by a choir of sweet-voiced priests. The coffin was lowered reverently into the grave, a sharp word of command was followed by three deafening volleys which tore the still air of the summer afternoon, and then the harrowing pathos of the ‘Last Post’ told us that a soldier was at rest.”

In Glasnevin, the ghosts of history are everywhere. Although the Civil War chasm endured for generations, I am struck always by the close proximity of the pro-treatyite graves to those of the republicans who rejected the pact. In a way, though, that serves only to emphasise the burning intimacy of the split, close comrades and even siblings torn asunder in violent reproach. Collins’s grave seems but a stone’s throw from that in the republican plot of his strident opponent Cathal Brugha, mortally wounded in the Battle of Dublin six weeks before Béal na Bláth. Another Irish bullet.

The cemetery was established in 1832 by Daniel O’Connell, three years after Catholic emancipation lifted many of the swingeing restrictions imposed by the penal laws. The Liberator himself is interred in a crypt under the round tower that bears his name, rising 183-feet tall. The summit is reached after 198 winding steps, Howth Head brooding in the distance, the Poolbeg lighthouse and, in the city centre, the Spire glistening by the GPO.

More than a million dead lie below, lives of all kind in distant time. Among them is the lawyer John Philpot Curran, who was born in 1750 and died in 1817, his remains transferred in 1837 to an eight-foot sarcophagus in Glasnevin from Paddington, London. He was the defender of the United Irishmen of 1798 and father of Sarah Curran, Robert Emmet’s beloved.

By the bleak summer of 1922 then, this was already a place imbued with an especial sense of the past.

In his piece on Collins, Nichevo noted the presence of “grey-headed veterans who had followed Parnell to Glasnevin” in 1891. That was another huge funeral, tens of thousands lining the streets in October rain as the city procession took three hours to reach the cemetery. Parnell’s resting place, among the victims of a cholera outbreak in 1849, is marked by a boulder of Wicklow granite from his Avondale estate. Nearby are the parents of James Joyce – John Stanislaus and Mary Jane – their son’s work evoking a twilight era in which the premature loss of the Chief was still keenly felt by his supporters.

Collins too died young, Nichevo noting how the unknown revolutionary became a “whisper in hill-side cottages”, the hunted outlaw a statesman. “Now we have buried him in Glasnevin, where Parnell was buried thirty years ago and Arthur Griffith only the other day. Michael Collins has died … but his grave, which is today smothered in a glory of flowers, will be a place of pilgrimage for the living.”