Dublin's historic Glasnevin cemetery is getting a massive makeover which it is hoped will be self-financing. It's also good preparation for the centenary of the 1916 Rising
A GREY SQUIRREL sprints across the grass, dashing between ornate headstones. It's a misty morning on the north side of Dublin city, and Glasnevin cemetery is a rural oasis, a leafy retreat, with evidence of wildlife behind every vault and monument.
Pockets of newly restored areas within the grounds, where herbicide is no longer in use, have a fresher, greener hue. According to George McCullough, the cemetery's chief executive officer and a former botanist, two families of foxes have just moved in, a family of Peregrine falcons hatched during the summer and a couple of pheasants have also taken up residence in the cemetery, which is currently undergoing a serious face-lift.
Near the cemetery's main entrance the most innovative part of a 10-year restoration and building programme, expected to cost €2.5 million a year, got under way a couple of weeks ago. This will involve the building of a new two-storey landmark heritage centre. The spirit of renewal in this most sombre and beautiful of settings, comprising 160 acres, is impressive.
The crumbling foundations of dangerously tilting headstones are being replaced and important sculptures of Carrera marble are being cleaned and re-erected. Walking along the path towards the oldest part of the cemetery we pass three men using a mantis crawler crane as they lift an old monument out of its narrow crumbling base so they can build a more solid foundation and reset the stone into the same place.
Avenues look more spruce and tidier as dead trees are cut down. Many pathways are cleared and re-paved with the traditional Hoggin covering of sand and clay, neglected areas have been redesigned and a great number of the trees have been pruned and treated.
Other new features, already well in advance, include the restoration and cleaning of the site's seven dilapidated but ornate oratories, which were erected privately by wealthy merchants of the city in the 19th century; the replacement and resetting of the many missing and damaged Victorian railings that surround family vaults and monuments; the laying of paved ceremonial areas, such as that around the grave of Arthur Griffith TD, the first president of Ireland, who died in 1922; and the redesign and rebuilding of the resting place of Parnell and his mother, which is now easily identified by the large stone from Avondale that now rests in the centre of a flat grassy mound.
Other work is ongoing, such as on a plan to turn a plot where 100,000 victims of smallpox and cholera who died during the Famine are buried, into a memorial garden. A new entrance, not far from the existing main gateway, is also planned.
The 10-year programme began in January, 2007, which marked the cemetery's 175th anniversary. A key target is to have the grounds ready for the 1916 centenary celebrations in 2016. Annual funding of €2.5 million will be provided by the National Development Plan for the duration of the project.
The new heritage centre will be built right inside, running along the cemetery's Finglas Road boundary wall. It will stand on the former site of office buildings, sheds and storage units which have already been knocked down in order to create the 2,000 sq m space. The protected gate lodge, chapel and 168.5 ft-high O'Connell Tower, not far from the main gates, as well as the 12ft-high cemetery walls and the seven distinctive watch towers (which were built in the 1830s to keep out graverobbers) are all being restored and preserved.
The new heritage centre, which will include an underground museum, has been designed by AD Wejchert architects. Its curvilinear roof of 1,000 sq m is set to become a landmark feature on the city's northside. The museum, where the cemetery's 300 ledgers, detailed maps, documents and correspondence, going back as far as pre-Famine days and still in pristine condition, will be on display, is being designed by Martello Media, the firm also responsible for the Cliffs of Moher Museum and the Kilmainham Museum.
The documents "are a social history of Ireland. We will be making these available and you will be able to check all of our records electronically," says McCullough. Without this project of restoration and the building of the new heritage centre, he believes important monuments, buildings and sculptures "would have to be demolished".
He hopes city-dwellers will return to use the cemetery as a popular area for walks, as was the case in the late 19th century.
Future plans for the cemetery include connecting up with the Botanic Gardens, so that pedestrians can walk straight from one to the other, when it forms part of the Tolka Valley Linear Park along its northern boundary, while it is also planned to connect the southern boundary with the Royal Canal Linear Park.
McCullough says the expected increase in the number of visitors to the cemetery is likely to be "in the millions".
Currently about 0.5 million people come in on business during the year, with about 12,000 coming on tours during the summer. "We would expect that number to increase by multiples of four, five or six," he says.
Within the museum, visitors will be able to view and search 175 years of archival records, which total 1.5 million burials, including records of Daniel O'Connell who is the founder of the cemetery's governing body, the Dublin Cemeteries Committee (DCC).
Other important figures include Eamon de Valera, Brendan Behan, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Michael Collins, whose grave is the most visited in the cemetery by far, says McCullough. There are records from the Famine, including the cholera and smallpox epidemics of those years, and records of the children interred in the Angels' Plots. "It's a huge genealogical database," says McCullough. "It's totally untapped at this stage."
PART OF THIS BUILDING WILL BE underground in the original culvert or drainage system, which predates the cemetery of 1832. There will be a glass floor with a view of these old ceramic drains in the museum. "We found culverts that nobody knew existed," says McCullough.
Visitors will be able to get a printout certificate of the extract from the records with name, address, age, date of birth, grave number, status, occupation, cause of death and other relatives in the graves. Other plans include the GPS marking of graves with handsets for people to guide themselves around the cemetery.
The new heritage centre will also have a 180-seat restaurant and exhibition areas, a lecture hall, reception area and a family room. As well as a restaurant, the first floor will also have a family room, public facilities, a florist's shop and the cemetery's monument sculpture business. The second floor will comprise conference rooms, exhibition areas, a lecture hall, the DCC boardroom and staff facilities.
"The new visitor centre is designed to compliment the heritage-restoration programme," says McCullough. Currently the cemetery costs €1 million a year to keep open. The heritage centre and its subterranean museum "have been designed to bring us an income to run and maintain the cemetery", he explains.
McCullough introduced 3,000 new graves on the northern section of the cemetery two years ago. These will be gone in three to five years' time, he says. There is no more land.
The doors to the 48 vaults which circle the O'Connell Monument will be opened to the public, allowing visitors to see the small altars and the stained-glass windows inside.
The cemetery "is a microcosm of Irish history for 200 years", McCullough says, as we walk back towards the main entrance. Republicans lie beside colonialists, he muses, as we pass the graves of the 1916 republicans close to the resting place of Maj Theobald Butler who served with the Duke of Wellington and died in 1851.
Reading the vainglorious inscription about his entry to the British army at a young age and his key role in many battles, it says the major devoted himself to love of family in the later years of his life.
"He was a rascal, a rogue and a reprobate," quips McCullough, as he makes his way up through the tombstones and cedar and oak trees. Soon, there will be more than just the reposing souls able to enjoy his wry humour.
THE FAITHFUL DEPARTED
The Great Liberator, Daniel O'Connell; Arthur Griffith, Charles Stuart Parnell, Michael Collins and Countess Markievicz, are among the famous reposing in Glasnevin. They're in good company, with the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who died in 1889 and is buried in the Jesuit plot; the actor Barry Sullivan, who died in 1908; the Archbishop of Tuam, John McHale; Sir John Gray, Lord Ardilaun and Cardinal Cullen, all of whose monuments were sculpted by Sir Thomas Farrell; Denis Guiney, of the well-known retail dynasty, who died in 1967; John Philpot Curran, father of Robert Emmet's Sara, who died in 1817 and whose remains were returned from England to Glasnevin in 1837; Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, the Fenian leader who died in 1915, and Roger Casement, who was executed in 1916.