WARREN FARRELL
Merrion Press
€19.99
ISBN 9781785375125
REVIEWED BY John Gibney
John Gibney is Assistant Editor with the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy programme and was formerly Education and Outreach Officer at Glasnevin Cemetery Museum.
The subtitle of Warren Farrell’s So once was I: forgotten tales from Glasnevin Cemetery is inevitably eye-catching, given that the essential purpose of a cemetery is to remember rather than to forget. There are, however, hierarchies of remembrance. Glasnevin (originally Prospect) Cemetery, opened in 1832, holds a unique status; if Ireland were indeed to have an official ‘national’ cemetery Glasnevin would surely be it. Its vast size—the title of the 2014 documentary One million Dubliners was no exaggeration—guarantees that it has an enduring emotional resonance for so many whose loved ones are interred there. Alongside this reality, its public profile has largely been shaped by an association with Irish nationalism and republicanism, owing in part to the physical presence of the famous ‘republican plot’, dedicated first and foremost to those active in the struggle for independence in the early twentieth century and nestled in the shadow of the enormous round tower that stands over the crypt housing (most of) the remains of Daniel O’Connell. Nearby is the imposing boulder of Wicklow granite that marks the grave of Charles Stewart Parnell, which might well have become the focal point—a Home Rule version of the republican plot—had history taken a different course (a perusal of some relatively obscure graves nearby will testify to that). Then there are the various other graves and memorials that were brought into sharp relief by the recent ‘decade of centenaries’: the grave of Michael Collins and the ‘Cross of Sacrifice’, marking the dead of the First World War interred in the cemetery. (The now-abandoned ‘necrology wall’, controversially intended to list all the dead of the Irish revolution, would have been of a piece with these.)
Such set-piece memorials, for want of a better term, tend to be clustered near the main entrance to the cemetery on the Finglas Road and are prominently visible to visitors and mourners alike. But Glasnevin Cemetery is a vast site, and what Warren Farrell (himself a guide at the cemetery, among other things) does in his début book is to venture beyond the screen of famous memorials that serve as the public face of the cemetery to deliberately focus on some of the more obscure life stories that reached their final end in Glasnevin. In doing so he offers up an engaging and revealing sequence of vignettes of Irish life over the last two centuries, anchored by the final resting-places of the individual lives in question—an approach that follows, as he acknowledges, in the footsteps of the late Shane Mac Thomáis, whose untimely death in 2014 deprived Glasnevin, and Irish historical discourse more broadly, of a unique voice.
The vast number of those interred in the cemetery since it opened in 1832 ensures that it represents an extraordinary cross-section of Irish history over the past two centuries. This fluent and fascinating book is divided into broad themes, ranging across politics, conflict, the arts, sport and religion, among others.
Farrell’s selection ranges across the physical expanse of the cemetery. The garden section, near the original entrance adjacent to John Kavanagh’s pub (a.k.a. the Gravediggers), is the oldest and most atmospheric section of the cemetery, which has expanded northward towards Finglas over the past two centuries. ‘Curran’s Square’ in the garden section is also the final resting-place of eleven-year-old Michael Carey, regarded as the first interment in the cemetery in 1832. From this physical and temporal point, Farrell outlines a range of remarkable, overlooked and often striking lives, from the internationally renowned soprano Margaret Burke Sheridan to the pioneering plastic surgeon Thomas Addis Emmett (great-nephew of Robert, whose own final resting-place remains unknown), the sculptor James Pearse (father of Patrick and Willie, whose work is a reminder that Glasnevin can also be seen as an open-air sculpture gallery), Francis Edward de Groot (known in Australia for gatecrashing the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932) and the Oscar-winning (for Out of Africa) art director Josephine McAvin. Alongside the individual lives are extended thematic sections on Glasnevin’s multiple connections with events like the Napoleonic Wars and the ‘Spanish ’Flu’ pandemic that followed the First World War.
The guiding principle of the Dublin Cemeteries Committee (now Trust) established by Daniel O’Connell to administer the cemetery at Glasnevin (and its predecessor at Goldenbridge) was to inter those of all religions and none without distinction. It follows, then, that remembrance should also be without distinction. To paraphrase the historian Jay Winter, Glasnevin Cemetery, like any cemetery, is a site of memory as well as mourning, and Warren Farrell’s book is an excellent new introduction to what it can reveal about the city and country in which it is located. So once was I is a well-written, well-researched, generous-spirited and fascinating book, equipped with notes with which to explore the cemetery itself as well as the history it reflects. As such, Farrell’s book acts as a guide to Glasnevin Cemetery and to a great deal of modern Irish history, as revealed by his selection of individuals who lived through it and who now rest within the precincts of this endlessly beguiling city of the dead.