Living History Amid Dublin's Dead
There's a lot to learn from the 1.2 million graves in Glasnevin Cemetery.
By Jason Berry
In the cool of a Dublin summer, I come
face to face with a statue of the powerful orator
the Rev. D.W. Cahill. With his right hand raised high,
index finger pointing heavenward, and his left hand
clutching a Bible, he seems to be forever exhorting
his fellow residents of Glasnevin Cemetery. The pedestal
bears a relief of a mournful woman holding a harp
and an elegy to Cahill, a native of Ireland who died
in Boston in 1864. "Bearing in mind the labours
he undertook for faith and fatherland," the inscription
reads, "his countrymen brought home his remains
and placed them in his native soil fulfilling the
wish he expressed when dying and they have in sorrow
erected this memorial of a people's gratitude R.I.P."
Imagine the expense of transporting
Cahill's remains back across the Atlantic, a reverse
route of the 19th-century "coffin ships"
on which many Irish died while sailing from their
impoverished country toward hope a world away. The
cemetery has no official figures on how many others
reversed the diaspora after death, but Cahill was
by no means alone. "Some 70 million people on
the globe are entitled to call themselves Irish,?
writes historian Tim Pat Coogan in Wherever Green
Is Worn, "a remarkable statistic when one
considers that only five million people are on the
island of Ireland itself."
The graves of an astonishing 1.2 million
Irish surround me on Glasnevin's 120 acres, a world
of serene beauty where the past whispers at every
turn of labyrinthine paths.
Read more from our current
issue online, look for the July/August
2003 issue of Preservation on newsstands,
e-mail
us to purchase a copy, or subscribe
to the magazine.
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