Reports of development at Bully’s Acre site
THE word development is a great one entirely. It covers a multitude as the older citizens of Dublin city are well aware since the handsome old face of the capital of Ireland has been so disfigured. Now it is creeping into Drogheda.
No one has as yet tried to explain to us what “the development” of Bully’s Acre — the paupers graveyard — actuary means. Are they going to put an office block or a public park there. It seems that the Corporation wants to take it over from the North Eastern Health Board and at least two members, Dr. Gerry Costelloe and Mr. Paddy Fullam, Donore, have objected to any possible desecration of the burial place of countless former inmates of the old workhouse since the terrible famine of 1847.
Nobody seems to be able to explain how the graveyard got the horrible name “Bully’s Acre.”
Was the first person interred there about a century and a half ago a workhouse bully or is the word some sort of anglicised distortion of a Gaelic word having some more kindly interpretation?
The place is not The Potter’s Field — the burial place of strangers— in old Jerusalem, although there are probably many strangers buried there. There was a time, a long enough time, when knights of the road commonly called tramps because they tramped the road from town to town collecting alms as they perigrinaged through the country. These unfortunate men, some of them ex-white collar workers such as teachers, could usually set a night’s rest in a workhouse.
Drogheda’s institution was no exception in this respect. Many of them who had gone beyond the continuous walking stage remained there and died there.
There are many locally bred people buried in the same graveyard; people who had no relatives left to claim them or whose kith and kin could not afford a funeral to one of the parish cemeteries.