Early on Easter Sunday morning in Glasnevin Cemetery, under an icy blue sky, the British ambassador solemnly steps forward to lay a wreath at Ireland’s Pieta, Dora Sigerson’s poignant sculpture of a mother cradling a lost warrior.
Amid the wreath's soft green and cream foliage, entwined with an orange ribbon, is a hand-written note: "With respect and admiration for Ireland, and thankfulness that a turbulent past has been transformed into a settled friendship as befits good neighbours – Dominick Chilcott, Britain's Ambassador to Ireland".
No parade, no museum, no bullet-riddled building can evoke the reality of Yeats’s “terrible beauty” quite like this cemetery.
Single lilies
To the ambassador’s right lies Roger Casement’s imposing grave. Nearby, a series of single lilies with blue ribbons mark the graves of iconic
1916
figures such as
Cathal Brugha
,
Margaret Skinnider
,
Oscar Traynor
,
Countess Markievicz
,
Harry Boland
, Elizabeth O’Farrell and
Michael Malone
. A monument to hunger strikers of the past 100 years records deaths that occurred as recently as 1981.
Yet these memorials to those who fought for the cause of Ireland across parliamentary and revolutionary traditions, stand side by side with those who fought the cause for King and Empire, as Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Heather Humphreys, noted. Today is a day to honour those who acted "with sincerity" in their quest for independence – "despite the consequences", she says.
In this extraordinary setting, piper CQMS David Ussher plays haunting Irish laments as hundreds of guests and spectators gather among the yews. They are here to honour the rebel dead – represented by the Sigerson monument – as well as Peadar Kearney and Edward Hollywood, the men from whom Ireland received the symbols of her nationhood, the Amhrán na bhFiann and the Tricolour.
Pride
Could Hollywood have dreamt that more than 150 years later Irish citizens would find themselves welling up with pride as they watched the Tricolour being hoisted?
Could Peadar Kearney have anticipated that the words he wrote in 1907 would one day be our national anthem? Or that his three grandsons – Colbert, Conal and Peadar – would watch proudly as his great-grandson, Dualta O Broin, would sing those words by his grave, unaccompanied, the clear notes drifting over the resting places of O'Connell the Liberator, Parnell, Collins, de Valera and James Stephens, whose epitaph reads: "A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty, is worth a whole eternity in bondage."
Nearby, Lee Murtagh (42), a former Irish boxing champion and Leeds-born son of a Belfast family "that was involved in the struggle", looks overwhelmed. "I wanted to come for this and to see my grandfather, who is buried here", says Alison Schweppe McCormick. He was American-born Frederick Schweppe, born of a German father and Irish mother, who became a rebel sniper during Easter Week, and served time in Frongoch internment camp, where he was singled out for beatings. The "safe" room in Schweppe's house at 35 Mountjoy Square features in O'Casey's Shadow of a Gunman.
