Milltown Cemetery
The Milltown Cemetery ( Irish : Reilig Bhaile an Mhuilinn ) is a large Catholic cemetery in west Belfast , Northern Ireland , m² with an area of 220,000.
Location and history
The cemetery is near Ballymurphy , a suburb of Belfast, between Falls Road and the M1 Motorway . It is a historic cemetery that opened in 1869 and is home to around 200,000 Belfast citizens, most of them Irish Catholics. Over 85,000 people lie in the grave fields, which are referred to as poor ground ( poor graves ). Some of them died in 1918 and 1919 as a result of the Spanish flu .
Funerals of paramilitary activists from the IRA and INLA were often held in the cemetery . The cemetery became known beyond Northern Ireland in 1988 when Michael Stone , a militant Protestant fanatic from Northern Ireland, attacked the cemetery. The target of the attack was the mourners at the funeral of three IRA activists ( Dan McCann , Seán Savage and Mairéad Farrell ) who had been shot by the British special unit SAS in Gibraltar during Operation Flavius . The deaths of the IRA members were later ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights . Stone threw hand grenades at the mourners and shot three people with a pistol and injured about 60 people. The process was recorded on a film camera.
Overgrown grave fields have been exposed in the large cemetery and important tombstones have been restored since 2007.
Grave fields
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The cemetery is divided into grave fields, each of which is about the size of a soccer field. The most important are:
- Harbinson Plot: Memorial erected in 1912 to William Harbinson , a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood , who died in Belfast Prison in 1867. Five IRA members are buried in this grave field. One of them is Joe McKelvey , who in December 1922 during the Irish Civil War by troops of the Irish Free State as a reprisal was shot.
- Official IRA / Workers' Party Plot
- County Antrim Memorial Plot
- Old Republican Plot
- New Republican Plot
- INLA plot
About 100,000 people attended the funeral of IRA member Bobby Sands , who died on a hunger strike in 1981 . Numerous IRA activists are buried in the New Republican Plot and County Antrim Memorial Plot , as well as in family graves. The suffragette , trade unionist and socialist Winifred Carney , the well-known Irish nationalist Joe Devlin , and the victims of the German air strike on Belfast are also buried there.
- Graves
Exposure of areas and tombs
New Republican Plot: grave of the hunger strikers of the H-Blocks 1981
New Republican Plot: Grave of Bobby Sands
County Antrim Memorial Plot
INLA plot
Official IRA / Workers' Party Plot
Workers' Party Plot
New Republican Plot
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Poor Graves at milltowncemetery.com ( Memento of the original from November 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved December 1, 2010
- ^ Judgment on UK Law Online . Retrieved December 1, 2010
- ↑ BBC News of November 14, 2008 . Retrieved December 1, 2010
- ^ Robert Kerr: Republican Belfast. A Political Tourist's Guide . (PDF, 848 kB, English), p. 66 (accessed December 27, 2011).
- ↑ a b Republicanism and Milltown on milltowncemetery.com ( Memento of the original from November 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved December 29, 2011
- ↑ Winifried Carney on milltowncemetery.com ( Memento of the original from November 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved December 1, 2010
- ↑ Victims of the Swastika on milltowncemetery.com ( Memento of the original from August 21, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved December 1, 2010
Web links
Coordinates: 54 ° 34 ′ 58 " N , 5 ° 58 ′ 28.5" W.