Famine graveyard restoration ceremony
A ceremony in memory of the estimated 4,000 people who are buried in the Dundalk Famine Graveyard was held in the newly restored cemetery last weekend.
The graveyard has been carefully restored by a dedicated team of volunteers, most of whom live in the vicinity of the graveyard, just off the Ardee Road.
In recent weeks there has been a steady stream of visitors to the graveyard which, according to official records, is the official resting place for 4,000 people who died during and after the Famine
The cemetery is one of a number of mass graveyards, which local authorities had to prepare in the 1840’s during the famine years.
The Killally Famine graveyard was opened in 1852, and is located within walking distance of what was then called the Dundalk Union Workhouse, later renamed St. Olivers.
Designed by the Poor Law Commissioners’ architect George Wilkinson, the building was based on one of his standard designs to accommodate 800 inmates.
Shortly after the hospital opened the country was devastated by the Great Famine, ‘An Gorta Mor’, a period of mass starvation and disease from 1945 to 1845, caused by a blight on the potato crop.
An estimated one million people died, and while the most severely affected areas were in the south and the west, the north-east didn’t escape. Many of those who died in the workhouse in that period are buried in the graveyard with the last interment taking place in 1900.
For a time the graveyard was well maintained, even though there were no headstones or any symbols depicting the burial plots of the men, women and children, or individual families.
Over the century since the last burial the graveyard fell into neglect, with vegetation destroying the neat stone walls that surrounded the site, and the grass area in the centre became badly overgrown.
Around the year 2000 a group of local people took on the initiative to restore the graveyard, and over the last 20 years they have restored the stone walls round the graveyard, and the grass surface that covers the graves.
As the years progressed, the Killally Graveyard Association was set up and some fundraising took place to bring the restoration to completion.
The project has also included a timeline of the burial ground, through from the land being purchased by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1850, to all the efforts which have been made to restore the cemetery in recent times.
All of the painstaking work on the graveyard has been done on a voluntary basis by dedicated people living in the area, for whom the project has been a labour of love. Their work was acknowledged at the ceremony held on the grounds last week.