John D’Arcy was killed by a fall from a horse in 1823. It was yet another unremarkable private tragedy, but its consequences were long felt and are with us to this day. D’Arcy was a Catholic and the owner of a substantial brewery in Dublin. His remains were brought to the cemetery of St Kevin for burial.
St Kevin’s was a Protestant cemetery in the western suburbs of the city, near Lower Kevin Street, itself named for the eponymous parish. There was no specifically Catholic cemetery in the city because of the penal laws but the practice was long established whereby Catholics and Dissenters could be buried in Anglican cemeteries. In the relatively relaxed atmosphere that obtained by the second half of the eighteenth century, confessional tensions were not intense as in earlier times or as they would become again following 1798.
When D’Arcy’s remains were brought to St Kevin’s for burial, the parish sexton, under orders from the archbishop of Dublin, Dr William Magee, refused permission to say Catholic prayers in the cemetery itself. The mourners were obliged to conduct the funerary rites outside the gates, in the street. This departure from customary practice was an interesting straw in the wind. Sectarian tensions were hardening. Accepted accommodations could no longer be taken for granted. The fact that a number of distinguished Catholics, including at least one Jesuit, had previously been buried in the cemetery with full Catholic graveside ritual was disregarded.
Magee was man of considerable reputation and ability. He grew up and was schooled in Co. Fermanagh. An intellectual of some contemporary reputation, he was successively professor of mathematics and Greek at Trinity and had held two previous sees prior to his appointment to Dublin in 1822. He was even seriously considered for an English bishopric, most unusually for an Irishman. However, like another formidable archbishop of Dublin from a south Ulster background — the Catholic John Charles McQuaid in the mid-twentieth century — he brought some of the sectarian animosities of his native province south. He was an obsessive anti-Catholic and he both engaged in and encouraged religious polemics. He was a strong supporter of the so-called ‘Second Reformation’, an attempt by Protestant evangelicals to effect a mass conversion of Irish Catholics in the 1820s.
In all this, a number of tributaries were flowing together. The heightened confessional tensions following 1798; the rise of evangelical Protestantism, with its missionary enthusiasms, in the early decades of the nineteenth century; and the contemporary development of Catholic nationalism under the leadership of Daniel O’Connell — all conspired to polarise Irish public life around confessional differences. Thus it was that when the remains of poor John D’Arcy were brought to the gates of St Kevin’s cemetery in 1823, the stakes were raised in a manner that was deeply offensive to the mourners — and by extension, to the entire Catholic community.
This offence, gratuitously offered at the urging of Dr Magee, was the prompt for the establishment of a cemetery which was Catholic-owned and -controlled. As with any Catholic project in the 1820s, Daniel O’Connell was central to its purpose. During that decade, he agitated for and eventually secured the passage of Catholic Emancipation (1829), which removed almost all the residual penal disabilities. In the course of this agitation, O’Connell developed the world’s first organised mass mobilisation in a political cause and more or less invented modern Irish nationalism. The key moment was a by-election in Co. Clare in 1828 in which O’Connell himself stood and was elected, despite Catholics being then ineligible to sit in parliament. In effect, it was this victory that resulted in the change to the law.
The Clare by-election was drenched in the most uncompromising sectarian rhetoric: O’Connell knew his market. Although his rival,Vesey Fitzgerald, was a supporter of the Catholic cause and the son of a popular landlord who had himself been an opponent of the Act of Union, O’Connell played the two cards that were to sustain popular Irish nationalism for more than a century to come: faith and fatherland. He represented himself to the electors of Clare as one whose ‘forefathers were for centuries the chieftains of the land and the friends of her people’. Describing Fitzgerald as ‘the sworn libeller of the Catholic faith’ — this because he had taken the oath of allegiance, anti-Catholic bits included, as all MPs were obliged to do — he drew the contrast with himself:‘one who has devoted his early life to your cause, who has consumed his manhood in a struggle for your liberties’. In effect, as one of O’Connell’s biographers notes, his ‘energies were directed to prising the peasant vote from the proprietors by the lever of religion’.
It was under O’Connell’s leadership that a cemetery committee was established. It eventually purchased a 9-acre site in the townland of Prospect, to the north-west of the city close to the village of Glasnevin. This pleasant village, lying astride the River Tolka, had been a popular summer retreat for the well-to-do, of whom the most celebrated were Dr Patrick Delany and his wife Mary, whose house on the hill above the village, Delville, played host to Jonathan Swift on many occasions; the site is now occupied by the Bon Secours hospital. Glasnevin was and still is also the site of the National Botanic Gardens, then under the aegis of the Royal Dublin Society.
Prospect cemetery opened on 21 February 1832. The first burial was that of a four-year-old boy. The original name is still the official one but it is universally known as Glasnevin. Everyone in Dublin knows it by that name, whereas many would struggle to identify Prospect cemetery. It has grown to be the city’s great necropolis, now expanded to cover more than 120 acres. O’Connell himself is buried there, in the most ostentatious vault in Ireland, over which stands a round tower memorial that is the visual focus of the cemetery and a vertical landmark visible from afar. Nearby is Parnell’s grave, as chaste as O’Connell’s is exuberant, topped by a boulder of Wicklow granite. Although formally non-sectarian, Glasnevin became de facto the Catholic burial ground and grew to be one of the city’s greatest Victorian legacies. Most Catholic archbishops of Dublin are buried here, some in dramatic monuments just inside the main gates, of which G. C. Ashlin’s memorial for Cardinal McCabe (1885) is the most elaborate. The Hades episode in Joyce’s Ulysses concludes here, as Paddy Dignam is laid to rest. The republican plot holds the graves of many leaders and victims of the independence struggle. The cemetery contains the remains of the great and the ordinary, as well as of the indigent poor: in addition to Famine victims from the 1840s, there were over 11,000 victims of the 1849 cholera epidemic buried here in that year alone. In all, more than 1. 5 million dead lie here.
Glasnevin cemetery marks the rise of Catholic power. If, in the eighteenth century, one spoke of the Irish Nation, one meant and was understood to mean the nation of the Protestant ascendancy with its parliament in College Green and its control of all the country’s levers of power. By the 1830s, when Glasnevin opened its gates, the Irish Nation meant the organised movement of Catholics to loosen or break the connection to Great Britain, a project that waxed and waned through the century before achieving most of its aims in 1922. Lord John George de la Poer Beresford (1773–1862), Church of Ireland archbishop of Armagh, summed it up in simple language:‘When I was a boy “the Irish people” meant the Protestants; now it means the Roman Catholics. ’
