Overgrown state of martyrs’ graveyard raises concern

COUNCIL officials have blamed Government cutbacks for the overgrown state of a burial ground in which some of Ireland’s best-known republican martyrs are buried.

The grass is almost a foot high on the historic site in Cork’s St Finbarr’s Cemetery where Irish republicans, most of whom died in the 1920s, including martyred lord mayors Terence McSwiney and Tomás Mac Curtain, are buried.

The grass verges within the rest of the cemetery — where former Taoiseach Jack Lynch, the antiquarian Richard Rolt Brash, who was among the first to decipher the ancient Ogham writing style, sculptor Seamus Murphy and Cork’s first Lord Mayor Daniel Hegarty are also buried — are also overgrown.