Bertie Ahern
© AFP/File Gerard CerlesDUBLIN (AFP) - He described the 175-year-old Glasnevin cemetery on the north side of Dublin as the final resting place of those who have helped shape modern Ireland, as he announced the 10-year, 25-million-euro (33-million-dollar) refurbishment.
"These grounds have borne witness to history in the making. Glasnevin cemetery and its history are truly at the heart of our modern nation. It's story mirrors the story of our nation itself.
"It charts our progress through times of political struggle to the freedom, democracy and opportunity that define our country today. It has become, in effect, our national cemetery," Ahern said.
When it is restored it is hoped the 120-acre (49-hectare) cemetery will be a tourist destination like other famous cemeteries such as Arlington in Washington and Pere Lachaise in Paris.
It contains the graves of leading historical figures like Daniel "The Liberator" O'Connell, the dominant Irish leaders from the 1820s to the 1840s, and Charles Stewart Parnell who led Irish nationalism from the 1870s to the 1890s.
Others include human rights campaigner-turned-revolutionary Sir Roger Casement, who was executed by Britain, and independence struggle hero Michael Collins, assassinated in 1922, as well as writer Brendan Behan and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The cemetery is also the burial ground for victims of the so-called Great Famine of the 1840s when the potato crop failed, various cholera outbreaks and the 329 victims of 1985 Air India crash.
The airliner was blown up off the Irish coast allegedly by Sikh militants in retaliation for an attack the year before by Indian troops on the holiest of Sikh shrines, the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
"Nowhere on this island is our sense of the past, of Irish history, of achievement and national pride more palpable than here," Ahern said.
©AFP