Initially I decided not to include a sound track but that idea did not really work but I must admit that it is close to impossible to find appropriate background music for a visit to a graveyard. Anyway, I selected the music because it is what my Grand Aunt liked.
Then Mount Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world. Ulysses, Chapter 6, Hades episode, James Joyce.
I was in the Harold’s Cross area today so I took the opportunity to visit Mount Jerome Cemetery where two of my Grandparents and a Grand Aunt are buried. I had not realised that it was the 8th of December.
Historically, for Irish Catholics, the festive period began on 8 December, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, with many putting up their decorations and Christmas trees on that day, and runs through until 6 January, or Little Christmas. Today, in modern Ireland it is the big Christmas shopping day.
Mount Jerome Cemetery & Crematorium is situated in Harold’s Cross on the south side of Dublin, Ireland. Since its foundation in 1836, it has witnessed over 300,000 burials. Originally an exclusively Protestant cemetery, Roman Catholics have also been buried there since the 1920s.
The name of the cemetery comes from an estate established there by the Reverend Stephen Jerome, who in 1639 was vicar of St. Kevin’s Parish. At that time, Harold’s Cross was part of St. Kevin’s Parish. In the latter half of the 17th century, the land passed into the ownership of the Earl of Meath, who in turn leased plots to prominent Dublin families. A house, Mount Jerome House, was constructed in one of these plots, and leased to John Keogh. In 1834, after an aborted attempt to set up a cemetery in the Phoenix Park, the General Cemetery Company of Dublin bought the Mount Jerome property, “for establishing a general cemetery in the neighbourhood of the city of Dublin”.
The Funerary Chapel in the cemetery was the first Puginian Gothic church in Dublin. It was designed by William Atkins.
The first official burial happened on the 19th of September 1836. The buried deceased were the infant twins of Matthew Pollock.
The cemetery initially started with a landmass of 26 acres and grew to a size of 48 acres in 1874.
In 1984, burial numbers were falling, thus the Cemetery was losing revenue and began to deteriorate. A crematorium was needed to regain revenue and deal with plant overgrowth on the estate. In 2000, Mount Jerome Cemetery established its own crematorium on the site.
Widely considered one of Europe’s elite institutions, Trinity is Ireland’s most prestigious university, in part due to its long and distinguished history.
Academically, it is divided into three faculties comprising 23 schools, offering degree and diploma courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The admission procedure is based exclusively on academic merit, with the college being particularly acclaimed in law, literature and humanities.
It also carries out extensive research in nanotechnology, information technology, immunology, mathematics, engineering, psychology, politics and English.
Trinity College was originally established outside Dublin’s city walls in the buildings of the outlawed Catholic Augustinian Priory of All Hallows. It was set up in part to consolidate the rule of the Tudor monarchy in Ireland, and as a result was the university of the Protestant Ascendancy for much of its history.
While Catholics were admitted from the college’s foundation, for a period graduation required the taking of an oath that was objectionable to them. In 1793 this requirement was removed, but certain restrictions on membership of the college remained, as professorships, fellowships and scholarships were reserved for Protestants.
An 1873 Act of Parliament lifted these remaining restrictions. While Catholics were not formally banned from attending Trinity from that time, Ireland’s Catholic hierarchy discouraged it. Women were first admitted to the college as full members in 1904.
The Library of Trinity College is a legal deposit library for Ireland and Great Britain, containing around 7 million printed volumes and significant quantities of manuscripts, including the Book of Kells, which arrived at the college in 1661 for safekeeping after the Cromwellian raids on religious institutions. The collection housed in the Long Room includes a rare copy of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic and a 15th-century wooden harp, which is the model for the current emblem of Ireland. The library receives more than 500,000 visitors per year, making it the most important in Ireland.
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