Milltown cemetery, Belfast, a republican sanctuary

I visited West Belfast for the first time back in the summer of 2017 with a fellow-historian who grew up there in the 1960-70s, so you can guess it was a pretty fascinating, personal tour of the area. And of course because I'm working on political funerals, the tour had to include a visit to Milltown cemetery, probably the most important centre of republican commemorations in contemporary Ireland, and a beautiful place. It is actually interesting, because no more than one

or two monuments in Milltown are directly related to my research, but it's probably the first place that comes to people's minds, whether they actually know about it or not. Most people I have met wouldn't know who the "Fenians" are, so when I'm asked about my research I usually say I work on republican funerals and the immediate reaction I get is "Oh, yeah, Northern Ireland, the IRA, hunger strikes..." and then I have to explain that massive republican funerals actually existed long before the IRA itself, that they used to be more of a Dublin thing (though certainly not exclusively), and that's what (and when) I'm working on. By the way, most of these people probably don't know about Milltown either, but when they think of massive, Northern-Ireland IRA funerals, this is where many of them would have taken place. In fact, there are so many different repulican plots and memorials (the Harbinson Plot, the New Republican Plot, the County Antrim Memorial Plot, memorials set up by smaller organisations, and that is not counting the many individual family graves with one or more republican members...) that a short presentation has been set up by the National Graves Association to introduce the main plots.

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The earliest monument in relation with my own work was erected to the memory of William Harbinson, Belfast head centre of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who died in prison in September 1867. I already dicussed both himself and the monument in my post about Potmore graveyard in Ballinderry so I won't go into any details now, but that was the main element that drew me to Milltown in the first place. It was erected in 1912, fourty-five years after his death, and was dedicated to all republican prisoners from County Antrim, including five IRA volunteers who are buried there. Harbinson thus gave his name to one of the main republican plots in the cemetery. In 1966, almost a century after Harbinson's death, the County Antrim Memorial was unveiled to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Volunteers who died in the late 1960s and early 1970s are buried there. But what is even more interesting about this monument is the roll of honour it displays, with the names, organisations, dates and manners of death of Antrim republicans from the United Irishmen in the late 1790s to the present-day volunteers, thus asserting a republican continuity and legitimising the ongoing struggle. In that list, I spotted three members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Two died in prison in 1867 (Daniel Darragh and William Harbinson himself), and one was killed in September 1920, during the War of Independence. After that date, no more names attached to the IRB appear, and the IRA is overwhelmingly the main organisation listed there, which corresponds to the gradual demise of the IRB after the War of Independence.

The "New Republican Plot" is the most recent IRA plot, and probably the best-known place in the cemetery, with some of the most high profile republicans buried there. It was purchased by the Belfast National Graves Association in 1972. Like the Harbinson and County Antrim Plots, the continuity of the republican struggle over time is highlighted, this time with a symbol that I was obviously highly interested in. The most famous extract from Patrick Pearse's graveside oration for Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa's funeral in August 1915 insists on the continuity between the original 1860s Fenians and his own generation, who by then were already preparing for what is now known as the Easter Rising, a continuity still claimed here in Belfast:

Internationally, the best known people buried there are the hunger-strikers of 1981, who starved themselves to death as part of a campaign to obtain the status of political prisoners. Bobby Sands is the main star among them, his funeral was described as the largest such event in Belfast since that of Harbinson in 1867 (did I mention continuity?). But 23 people took part in that protest, of whom 10 died as a result of the strike. They are among the total of 77 people buried in this plot.

The people remembered with these plaques (also in the new republican plot) are lesser-known internationally, but their story is the epitome of how infused with politics a funeral can be. IRA members Mairéad Farrell, Dan McCann and Seán Savage were killed in Gibraltar by undercover British agents, on 6 March 1988. They were suspected of planning a bomb attack, but it turned out they had no explosive material with them and controversy over British secret services ensued. On 16 March, a massive public funeral was held in their honour, which was attacked by a member of the loyalist Ulster Defence Association. He killed three of the mourners, whose names are listed on the above plaque (Thomas McErlean, John Murray and Kevin Brady). Three days later, during Kevin Brady's funeral, two British Army corporals drove into the procession. They were attacked and beaten by people in the procession, and later shot to death by two IRA members. The loyalist who attacked the first funeral as well as the men who killed the British corporals were sentenced to long prison terms, and released in 1998 as part of the Good Friday Agreement.

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So far, I have shared the three main memorials, those that are mentioned in the National Graves Association presentation. But despite all their efforts at claiming historical continuity in the republican movement, they were not able to fully make up for the complexities and frequent internal divisions that literally led to republicans killing each-other depending on which branch they belonged to. Among the most interesting monuments are those of the not only republican, but overtly Marxist organisations - the Worker's Party and the Irish Republican Socialist Party, with its Irish National Liberation Army. I would have a pretty hard time trying to explain the subtleties of Workers' Party/Sinn Féin relationships, and to be honest I am not quite certain I understand it all myself. But basically, the Workers' Party split from the main Sinn Féin in the early 1970s over the party's abstentionist policy (the refusal to seat in Westminster, which they consider an imperial and not a national parliament), and it immediately defended a not only nationalist, but also Marxist-Leninist policy. If I'm not mistaken, this new branch was widely associated with the Provisional IRA, while Sinn Féin was the political branch of the official IRA (I

am aware it is certainly much more complicated). In terms of how it looked, this was my favourite of the Milltown memorials, with its highly symbolic illustrations. To the left, a factory reminds the viewer of the party's goal to defend labour and workers, while the central Celtic cross and the Celtic ribbons to the right call attention to the defence of Irish identity. Between the two ribbons on the right-wing pannel is the Starry Plough, the Party's emblem, also represented at the centre of the cross in its simplified version, with only the stars. On the central pannel, I have identified the now-familiar sunburst which was already a feature of Fenian graves in the 19th century, and an Irish legendary hero whom I guess is Cú Chulainn (the mythological hero from the Ulster Cycle of legends), but please correct me if I'm wrong. I have no idea what the two figures under the sunburst represent, I am open to suggestions on this. At the heart of the central pannel are the coats of arms of the 4 Irish provinces - the red hand of Ulster to the top-left, the Leinster harp to the top-right, the three crowns of Munster to the bottom right, and the Eagle and armed hand of Connacht. The presence of all four coats of arms at the centre of this majestic monument is a clear reminder of what remained the party's main objective - the political unity of all four Irish provinces.

The Irish Republican Socialist Party also split with Sinn Féin, this time in 1974, over disagreements regarding the ceasefire that was then being negociated. The IRSP claimed the legacy of James Connolly, the 1916 leader and founder of the socialist Irish Citizen Army, and they immediately created a paramilitary sister organisation, the Irish National Liberation Army. Their symbols were the Irish flag (here on the top-left of their roll of honour), the Starry Plough (like the Workers' Party, here on the top-right), and most recognisably the red star and rifle-holding fist. The feud between the INLA and other republican paramilitary groups was particularly bloody, although they also occasionally collaborated, for example in the 1981 Hunger Strike.

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Of course there is a lot more to Milltown Cemetery than its republican memorials, but that was the main angle of my visit that day, and it is such a rich topic I am far from having shared all of its facets here. I'll finish on a different note though, and very intriguing to me, the recent re-appropriation of previously unmarked graves:

A whole area of the cemetery was devoted to unmarked, unconsecrated graves, overwhelmingly of children who died before they could be baptised. This is an utterly exotic practice to me. In France, most cemeteries are oecumenical, and no-one's grave would go unmarked for lack of baptism (about 50% of us declare no religious affiliation). Recently, people have started to identify their families' unmarked graves and to mark them, leading to this strange vision of scattered crosses on a wide lawn.That practice, as well as children's graves more generally, is something that has me particularly fascinated and I hope to write more about it in the future, after I visit more places and learn more about it.