Ireland

Campaigners vow to save United Irishmen burial site

The memorial park
The memorial park The memorial park

Campaigners have vowed to prevent Dublin City Council from tampering with the gravesite of hundreds of United Irishmen executed after the 1798 Rebellion.

The National Graves Association, which restores and maintains graves and monuments of historic significance across Ireland, has expressed fears that a park known as Croppies or Croppy Acre in central Dublin could be affected by plans for a Liffey cycle route.

One of four options being considered by the local authority for the new route would involve relocating the Croppies Acre memorial park between Wolfe Tone Quay and the National Museum down to the riverside to allow traffic to be diverted around it on a new road.

The NGA is calling for the public's help in ensuring that the park remains undisturbed.

Inspired by the French revolution, the United Irishmen were founded in Belfast in 1791, with historians suggesting that its membership swelled to up to 300,000. Led by Theobald Wolfe Tone, its members are said to have earned the nickname croppy or croppie because of their tightly-cut hair.

After the 1798 uprising was quashed by British forces, hundreds of rebels were executed, including Wolfe Tone's brother, Matthew Tone, and buried in a mass grave at the site that became known as Croppies Acre.

In his poem Requiem for the Croppies, Seamus Heaney wrote how the rebels were buried "without shroud or coffin" after "shaking scythes at cannon".

NGA spokesman Matt Doyle, whose group led a successful 1998 campaign to stop the area being turned into a bus park, said: "It is a disgrace that as we approach the centenary of the Easter Rising that Dublin City Council would consider such a proposal.

"It is the greatest insult to our patriot dead that their final resting place is to be interfered with/desecrated. In Arbour Hill only a short distance away 14 of the 1916 leaders are buried, every year commemorations are held to honour these brave men."

Mr Doyle, whose group has lodged an objection to the proposal, called on members of the public on both sides of the border to contact the local authority, lodge objections, and lobby city councillors on the issue.

The site underwent a €35,000 renovation in 2011 by the Republic's Office of Public Works, but the park was padlocked in 2013 after becoming a haven for heroin users who littered the ground with dirty syringes and other drug paraphernalia.

Over the past two years, group of volunteers have staged a number of clean-ups in the park.

Meanwhile, the casket used to carry the remains of Fenian leader Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa back to Ireland from New York prior to his burial in Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery is set to go on display in the West Cork village of Reenascreena tomorrow.