Bodenstown, the other national cemetery

It took over six months of living in Ireland before I realised how close Bodenstown was to where I live, and you'll soon see how ironic that is. I've had a fascination for Irish history and culture for almost as far as I can remember, and the very first time I looked into it more closely and wrote about it was for the thesis I wrote in the first year of my Masters degree in "Anglophone Studies", back in 2008-2009 (ow, that hurt). For my very first personal research, I had decided to focus on the creation of the Nation newspaper in 1842, how it was used as a tool of political propaganda for the defence of cultural nationalism, and how its readers and contributors gradually made the Young Ireland movement evolve from supporters of Daniel O'Connell to defenders of a more radical change in Irish society, some of them overtly advocating for insurrectionary politics as the only way to respond to English colonialism. This choice allowed me to mix my interests for Ireland, art and culture (I was also studying Art History), and identity issues.

Whether or not the founders of the newspaper themselves were insurrectionists and republicans is still debated today and probably does not have a single, clear-cut answer, but the ambiguity was definitely there in the texts they publicised through their newspaper. They largely contributed to commemorating all the revolts and risings of the Irish past, and definitely included the 1798 republican rising in that list of heroic national acts of resistance. Thomas Davis, co-founder and main poet of the Nation, apparently uncovered the location of Wolfe Tone's grave in 1843, and then wrote about Bodenstown and its importance for national memory. At the time, Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin had only been in existence for ten years, and had not yet gained the status of national necropolis it would soon boast. Bodenstown might then have been seen as potentially the main national cemetery (if not necropolis), and it has remained an on-and-off centre of republican commemorations ever since.

---

If you are not familiar with the history of 1798 and haven't read last week's post, you might be wondering where all this is going and what Bodenstown has to do with that date, so I'll provide some crudely short and incomplete context (if you know all about Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen, you can skip the next 2 paragraphs). In the late 18th century, two factions of Irish nationalism were in conflict. One, usually remembered by the name of its leader Henry Grattan, had obtained more autonomy for the Irish Parliament in the early 1780s and proceeded to seek Catholic Emancipation so that the more "respectable" class of Ireland's Catholic majority might be represented. The other, led by Theobald Wolfe Tone, thought that Grattan's demands were too meek. In 1791 they formed the Society of the United Irishmen, initially to advocate for a strong union between the various religious groups of Ireland to form a properly Irish identity and fight for a truly Irish parliament. The United Irishmen quickly evolved into an organisation for the defence of all "men of no property" (you needed to own property to be elligible to vote).

By 1794, the organisation was seeking the overthrow of the United-Kingdom, and in 1796 Wolfe Tone secured the support of the French Directoire. The French were first supposed to come to Ireland in the winter 1796-1797, but they were caught in a terrible storm and the ships either got destroyed or turned back towards Brest, in Brittany. Widespread repression ensued. The second attempt, in 1798, was more "successful" in terms of turning into an actual rebellion. Yet it suffered form the imprisonment of many leaders and the efficiency of British informers, as well as the government's skillfull use of sectarian divisions to paint the United Irishmen as a Catholic group which the Protestants of Ireland should resist (even though Wolfe Tone was actually a Protestant and sought to unite all faiths). Launched in May 1798, most of the local risings turned into bloody guerilla between republicans on the one side, and British troops and loyalists on the other. By late June, most of the rebellion had been repressed. The first French fleet, led by Général Humbert, finally arrived in late August in Mayo; it was initially successful, but they were too few (1,000 French troops and a few thousand Irishmen) to resist the British army, and hundreds of the defeated United Irishmen were executed. In mid-October, the second French fleet arrived, with Wolfe Tone on board, but they were intercepted and surrendered without even landing. Wolfe Tone chose not to return to France, was condemned by the British state as a traitor, and used his trial to keep advocating for armed resistance. His request to be executed by a firing squad (rather than be hanged, drawn and quartered) was rejected, and legend has it he slit his throat (but it might also have been torture) and died a week later, on 19 November 1798.

---

And he was buried at Bodenstown cemetery, near Sallins, which is the area his father was from. So Bodenstown is a highly important place in Irish republican memory, and I had been reading about it since writing my first thesis in 2009 (and let's not mention my work on Fenianism since), but I did not know where it was in Ireland, or that I was living so close. It is only when we were cycling back to Celbridge after visiting Oughterard, where Arthur Guinness is buried (see previous post), that I noticed a sign mentioning Bodenstown and looked into it. But enough words and context, let's get inside the cemetery! The presence of such a famous grave in a relatively small local graveyard makes for an interesting mix of styles.

I was actually surprised that the first thing we saw when entering was the now usual ruined church. This one dates back to at least the first half of the 14th century, but very conspicuous beside it are the five flagpoles (one flag for each of the Irish provinces, and the republican tricolour, which did not exist in Wolfe Tone's time) and the speaker's platform. My first impulse was to think this is where whoever is giving the speech for his commemoration (the Sunday closest to 20 June, the day Wolfe Tone was born) would stand. But it might also be a representation of the famous "dock" where Irish felon upon Irish felon have given their defiant "Speeches from the Dock" after hearing their sentence, a habit which even turned into a book compiling these speeches. Tone never asked for clemency or tried to defend himself, and he upheld his republican views during his trial, so this platform might also be commemorating that attitude. I have tried to find out more about the various plaques and monuments on the site (the dates they were put up, their meanings...) but haven't found much, so I am left only with personal interpretations.

Going around the church, the mix gets even stranger. The old stone wall bears a commemorative plaque and is fronted by a grey esplanade, with low steps leading up to it. As you go up the steps, three stones of a darker grey stand out. They bear extracts from famous speeches by Irish republicans. One by Wolfe Tone himself in which he defends the respectability of the "men of no

property" and asserts that if "men of property" refused to support the rebellion then they must fall. The second is an extract from the oration given by Patrick Pearse during the 1913 Wolfe Tone commemoration, in which he identified his grave as "the holiest place in Ireland". Pearse himself would die less than three years later after proclaiming the independent Irish Republic (of which he was president) during the 1916 Easter Rising. The third stone bears an extract from Liam Mellows's oration in 1922, in which he paid homage to both Wolfe Tone and Pearse, insisting that they fought battles they knew they would lose, because the ongoing fight was what led future generations to fight as well. Only a week after this speech, the Irish Civil war would break out for good, opposing those who supported the Peace Treaty with the British government (which made a Dominion of Ireland and separated Northern Ireland from the rest of the country) and those who wanted to keep fighting for an independent Republic. Mellows was clearly announcing his side in the oration, and he would be executed by the Irish Free State in December 1922. Himself and two other anti-treaty republicans (Richard Barrett and Joseph McKelvey) are also remembered in Bodenstown, with plaques inserted at the foot of three of the flagpoles.

---

These are the memorials, but the tombestone itself is on the other side of the wall, protected behind a sort of cage (loyalists planted a bomb in the 1970s) and its iconography links Wolfe Tone to yet another branch of Irish republicanism:

In my post about Glasnevin two weeks ago, I shared a picture of John Keegan Casey's grave and commented on its typically Fenian iconography. The Fenians are the group I am working on for my Ph.D. They are very hard to define because most of their work was done underground, but they could be summarised as the more radical, republican, and democratic brand of Irish nationalism in the 19th century. They were working underground, but they did find some form of public expression through a series of massive funerals, and through some of the tombstones they erected for their "glorious dead". These tombstone were mostly erected in the 1880s, at a time when republican activity was at a low ebb, and former Fenians could become more public about their past involvements (which for some were actually ongoing). Wolfe Tone's tombstone, pictured below, was an excellent surprise for me, because it is a perfect example of a late 19th century Fenian grave. It is headed by an Irish harp surrounded by wreaths of shamrock imitating Roman laurels (an important reference, Rome was a republic), framed by two Irish round towers, and at the foot of the slab are a bursting sun (to the left), a ruined church (represented on a stone which was itself placed within the walls of a ruined church), and an Irish hound in the centre, with shamrock creeping on the rocks as well. The hound has no head, and visibly lost it (maybe in the 1971 bombing?).

The inscription says the stone was renovated in 1945, but I have no idea when it was originally carved. The Farrell & Son firm is almost as old as Glasnevin cemetery itself (they opened in 1834), so the stone could have been erected anytime between the 1880s and 1945 (but there is a good chance it was in the early 20th century, or I hope I would have come accross it in my research).

So beyond Wolfe Tone himself, the Bodenstown memorial is a tribute to successive generations of Irish radical republicans. He is remembered chiefly as the first in a long line of insurrectionists who sought not only recognition for the Irish Catholics (remember Tone himself was a Protestant), but a deeper change in which an independent Irish republic was seen as necessary for a social as well as a national revolution. After Tone, the Fenians revived republicanism in the mid-19th century, followed by the generation who rebelled in 1916, and later those who fought in the War of Indepence and on the Anti-Treaty side of the Civil War - a (debatable) continuity which is highlited by the choice of quotations on the steps. When it was erected, the monument was therefore indirectly to the glory of that side of the Civil War, and of the Fianna Fáil Party which emerged from it. The party still exists today, and for the first time it is in a coalition with Fine Gael, which emerged from the Pro-Treaty side (in a not-so-revolutionary liberal coalition with Green Party).

---

Initially, I had intended to write more about the rest of Bodenstown cemetery and some of the incredible graves we saw there (one of them involves the Batman, and I am certain you are not ready for it, I sure wasn't). But this is already the longest post on the blog so far, so I will keep that for later, and I hope you enjoyed learning more about one of the most famous graves in Irish history.