The Cemo Glasnevin 

By Breda Nathan 

I grew up living on the right hand side of Glasnevin Cemetery and grew old living on the left hand side.   

Such mixed memories of the good and the terrible times. The Cemo as we knew it as children, is two hundred and ninety years old this year.

Founded by Daniel O’Connell in 1832. It was known then as Prospect Cemetery.

With one and a half million people at rest, including Presidents, Writers, famous people from the music and arts, people who created and shaped our history.

The old Victorian monuments and headstones have stood for so many years and the recent creation of the museum and tours for visitors and schools is so different to my years on the right hand side.  

Although the Cemo was out of bounds for us, it was the perfect place to play hide and seek.

When a neighbour lost their cat or dog, we were allowed in to search and we made sure this happened very often.

The church was just inside the main gate, we thought God lived there. And unaware of any other cemeteries, we assumed he picked the good people for heaven and the bad for hell.

Some unfriendly ghosts were known by some of the wise boys to have escaped, both God and the devil, and ramble around the O’Connell Monument at night.

They convinced us that they had seen them, sitting on the headstones.

They could turn into wisps of smoke sometimes and fly around your head.

My dad said he if you went close enough, you would probably smell Woodbine cigarettes from the wisps, but we made sure to never even look in, after dark  

The back gates were in Prospect Square and during school holidays, we always played close to the railings.

When the grave diggers had lunch, they would pay us threepence to go over to Kavanagh’s pub and collect a ‘bottle of porter’.

Looking back I’m not sure what was in the bottles, but we called it porter.  

Our front garden was always very busy in those long sunny days in my memory. We did show respect when the funerals were passing.

The shouting always stopped and we moved behind the big tree and made the sign of the cross.

Strange times indeed, when the burial was concluded the mourners would come back down the road and many of them went into the Brian Boru pub for a drink.  

The horse drawn carriages would stop at the horse trough in the centre of Prospect Road and refresh, while the men headed to the pub.

It was men only in those times and the women would stand outside waiting patiently.  

Though known as the dead centre of Dublin, Glasnevin was never dead to us.

We played tennis and cricket in our garden, where the wicket was chalked on the front wall of the house. The tennis net was Mrs Mulvihill’s rose trees.  

Some of the boarders from St. Vincent’s School would join us for banana sandwiches.

The boarders would sit in the hall behind the door for the snacks, Mam always pointed out how refined they were, not eating outside, but we knew they were afraid of the Christian Brothers passing up and down between the old and new schools.  

They were not allowed to come in and mix with the rest of us.

We lived in a house of books and comics and sport.

Our social media was Drumcondra Library, where we read Enid Blyton or ‘Just William’. There we swapped stories.

I remember one girl in particular, who ran through the Cemo regularly. One particular day she stole a flower from a grave and pinned it to her school uniform.

We were appalled. We spoke about her in whispers, and one boy told me she used rude words all the time. She was infamous in the area.  

My mother often reflected on the fact that the house they chose to buy, had a cemetery one side, a surgery the other and an orphanage opposite.

Maybe… but we have the most wonderful childhood memories and would never change a day.