Culture Shock Fintan O'TooleThe plan to refurbish Glasnevin Cemetery in time for the Easter Rising centenary is a belated official recognition of its cultural consequence
'While Ireland holds these graves," Patrick Pearse intoned in his famous oration at the graveside of the Fenian O'Donovan Rossa in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, in 1915, "Ireland unfree shall never be at peace." The idea that graves were political assets to be held by the nation would not have seemed especially strange to Pearse's listeners. Nina Witoszek argued that, while other European cultures centre on the wedding, Ireland's centres on the funeral. The Taoiseach's announcement this week that Glasnevin Cemetery is to be given a €25 million refurbishment in time for the centenary in 2016 of the Easter Rising can be seen as a belated official recognition of the cultural consequence of the place. It is important, though, that the context of the centenary of 1916, significant as it is, doesn't reduce that culture to a single, simple framework. For what Glasnevin displays, perhaps better than any other Irish space, is the contested nature of Irish culture. There has always been more to last rites than the simple act of burying the dead.
Glasnevin cemetery itself is a direct result of a political and cultural phenomenon - the gradual occupation of public space by a rising Catholic Ireland. The acquisition of land for Catholic burials was one of the first issues raised by Daniel O'Connell when he founded the Catholic Association in 1823, and Glasnevin (or, as it was originally called, Prospect) Cemetery was a direct result of this agitation. Yet it also bears O'Connell's stamp in a crucial respect - its formally non-sectarian nature. O'Connell said that he "did not wish to make it exclusively Catholic; for as the Catholics were desirous not to be separated in this life from their brothers of other persuasions neither did they desire to be separated from them in the passage from this to another world". This desire was not entirely fulfilled in practice - Glasnevin's inhabitants are overwhelmingly Catholic - but O'Connell's ecumenism did ensure the cemetery remained relatively open.
Being open implies, of course, an openness to conflict, change and the struggle to control meanings. Glasnevin has long been a kind of theatre in which the passions of the living are at play. Not for nothing did James Joyce give the cemetery a starring role in Ulysses, weaving Paddy Dignam's obsequies into the tapestry of lived, public experience. Political factions have often used the cemetery, not just to memorialise the dead, but to persuade the living.
Adrian Frazier has called the ceremonial spectacle of the burial in 1861 of the dead Fenian Terence Bellew MacManus - his body imported from San Francisco, displayed in what would later become the Abbey Theatre and buried at Glasnevin - "the first and greatest moment in Irish National Theatre". The cemetery has hosted a series of such events, many tinged with as much bitterness as sorrow, and some of them involving vast crowds.
Charles Stewart Parnell's funeral in 1891 was accompanied by a crowd so vast - it was estimated at 200,000 - that the burial could not take place until after dark. No priests attended and one of the wreaths read: "Murdered. Avenge." Thousands of striking workers accompanied the body of James Nolan, killed in a police baton-charge during the 1913 lockout, and listened to a fiery speech from the founder of the British Labour Party, Keir Hardie. Michael Collins's body was accompanied by 300,000 people, but, after Fianna Fáil took power, his grave was left unmarked until 1939, when his brother was grudgingly allowed to erect a simple stone.
Glasnevin, in fact, contains a wide variety of political meanings, from the Republican plot with its Fenian and IRA martyrs to the memorials for members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police and for the dead of the first World War. Those political memorials sometimes also have interesting personal twists. The grave of Elizabeth O'Farrell, who carried Pearse's surrender note at the end of the 1916 Rising, also contains that of her lifelong female companion, and their closeness is quietly but insistently marked on the headstone.
The contests within the cemetery are not just political ones. Gerard Manley Hopkins's tortured encounter with Ireland and Catholicism ends with his barely noticed place in a communal grave for dead Jesuits. Figures as diverse as the footballer Billy Whelan, who died in the Munich air disaster, and the singer Luke Kelly, are buried in the more neglected part of the cemetery across the Finglas Road. The extraordinary nature of ordinary love is written on stone: perhaps the most simply moving headstone commemorates "the best little wife in the world, bar none". The struggle for memory itself is marked in a memorial for the Magdalene women whose graves were literally sold out from under them and whose names and lives were consigned to oblivion. A quiet but intensely moving revolt against the practice of leaving unbaptised and stillborn babies without names and memorials is played out in the spontaneous reshaping of the Holy Angels plot by grieving parents whose wind-chimes, teddy bears and other decorations grew into a new kind of vernacular funerary culture.
Glasnevin Cemetery is, in fact, one of the liveliest spaces in Irish culture, and it continues to resound with the complexities of both public and private life. While recognising it as a national treasure, the refurbishment must not kill off the living arguments that still echo among the gravestones.