PREPARATORY WORK for a new heritage centre at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin began yesterday and for 18 months only official funeral traffic will have access to the graveyard.
Hearses, mourning cars and vehicles bearing a disabled sign will be the only traffic allowed to use the cemetery's main entrance.
The new heritage centre is part of a 10-year development plan, begun in 2006, which aims to turn the cemetery, deemed a cradle of Irish history, into one of the State's biggest tourist attractions on a par with Arlington National Cemetery in Washington DC and Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Offices and buildings will be replaced by a heritage centre and museum, as well as new public and staff facilities, a restaurant and parking spaces for 110 cars.
The Government will contribute €2.5 million annually from the National Development Plan up to the expected completion date, the centenary of the 1916 Rising.
Restoration work will be carried out on monuments such as the 150-foot high O'Connell tower where Daniel O'Connell is buried, as well as the most historic graves in the 177-year-old cemetery where some 1.2 million people are buried including Charles Stewart Parnell, Eamon de Valera, Michael Collins, Kitty Kiernan, Maud Gonne, Countess Markiewicz, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and victims of the Great Famine.
