Most great cities have memorable cemeteries. Highgate in London contains the remains of notables as diverse as Karl Marx and comedian Max Wall; Le Père Lachaise in Paris is the final resting place of Irish playwright Oscar Wilde and 1960s rock star Jim Morrison among others; and Arlington National Cemetery just outside Washington DC has an eternal flame above the remains of President John F Kennedy and his stirring exhortation to his generation "ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country".
Cemeteries are thus places where great emotions are almost invariably on show: sadness of course, but pride and gratitude as well.
So a wander through a cemetery is a stroll through a community's past. Gravestones telling us about the lives, loves and achievements of those whom they mark, stand like sentinels to the memory of previous generations and are reliable indicators as to the esteem in which a person was held at the time of their death. Glasnevin Cemetery, on a 120-acre site in Dublin's north city suburbs, is Ireland's largest graveyard and is, in effect, our national cemetery. It contains the remains of political and military figures associated with the struggle for independence. But also other notables, including literary and religious figures and at least five recipients of the Victoria Cross.
The Government's decision, announced yesterday by the Taoiseach, to spend €25 million on restoring Glasnevin, as Bertie Ahern put it, "to its former manicured state" is to be welcomed. Mr Ahern's acknowledgement that the proximity of the cemetery to the National Botanic Gardens "provides immense scope to mutually enhance both national institutions" displays a good appreciation of what each site has to offer. The programme of restoration will last until 2016, the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Rising. Part of the restoration centres on a memorial, to be designed by the artist Robert Ballagh, to the 10 IRA men executed in Mountjoy Jail in 1920 and 1921 whose remains were removed from the prison in 2001 and reinterred in Glasnevin.
It would be a pity if, in nine years' time, due commemoration of 1916 and the strain of Irish republicanism it represents, occurred to the exclusion of proper remembrance of other, non-violent, contributors to making this State an independent equal among the nations of the world. Who we choose to remember says much about our values now. So let us also remember with pride patriots like Daniel O'Connell, acknowledged yesterday by the Taoiseach, and others like Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish nationalist from the Protestant ascendancy.