The College Cemetery at Maynooth was established in 1817 to take the remains of Francis Power, a Cloyne* priest born in Co. Waterford near Clonmel, who had served as Vice-President and Bursar from 1796, when he returned to Ireland after spending most of his priestly life in France, where he was a canon of the diocese of Avignon. 

 

He was one of a group of about twenty priests associated with the college in the first years of its existence. Many of them had associations with France, and four were actually French; two were laymen, one an Englishman, a former actor and theatre director named John Walker, who served as Professor of Elocution for two years before returning to England; the other was James B. Clinch, the son of a Dublin working-class father, who taught Classics. Some were attached to the ‘lay college’ which operated for little more than a decade at the turn of the nineteenth century.

 

Many of the others left too to return to previous assignments or their country of origin, and since most of them were elderly, some died in the early stages and were buried in the area.

 

EARLY BURIALS IN OTHER LOCATIONS

 

The first member of the Maynooth College staff to die was Maurice Ahern, a Kerry-born priest. He died in 1801 at the age of sixty-five, having served for six years as Professor of Dogma. He was buried in the parish cemetery, still in use, at Laraghbryan on the Kilcock Road. His grave is marked with a plaque.

 

The second to die, three years later, was Peter Flood, who was Parish Priest of Edgworthstown at the time of his appointment as President in 1798, having escaped from France in the revolutionary period; he also served for six years, but was only fifty-three when he died. He was buried under the north aisle of St. Joseph’s Chapel, the original college chapel, in a location marked only by a simple cross.

 

The next staff member to die – Clotworthy McCormick, priest-sacristan, who died in 1807, aged about eighty – was also buried at Laraghbryan, though the location is unmarked and unknown. 

 

Edward Ferris, a Kerry priest of the Vincentian order, was seventy-one when he died in 1809, having served for eleven years as the college’s first dean and later Professor of Moral Theology. He was buried at Laraghbryan too, but was reinterred in 1875 in the Vincentian cemetery at Castleknock.

 

The last to be buried in Laraghbryan was Charles Lovelock, who was parish priest of Abbard or Monivea, Co. Galway, when he was appointed Professor of Classics and later of Rhetoric; he died in 1813.

 

CEMETERY ESTABLISHED

 

When Francis Power died in 1817 at age eighty, his ‘presidential’ status (he had acted in that position under Thomas Hussey, the first officially-appointed President, who maintained his previous positions as a diplomatic chaplain in London and later as Bishop of Waterford) and relatively long-service as vice-president, bursar and teacher of French worked in favour of his interment in a cemetery appropriate to the now well-established institution.

 

The place selected was a two-acre plot near the present-day theology halls, and over the next decade or so some of the ‘founding fathers’ of the college – the first state-funded college for the education of Catholic priests in the history of England and its fledgling Empire – were interred in its precincts.

 

The first block of available space to be used was in the centre of the area to the left hand side of the present entrance. Here a collection of miscellaneous tombs and headstones of various shapes and sizes were put in place beginning on the right hand side, and moving from right to left in rows of five or six.

 

Some of the inscriptions on these are now indecipherable, but at the time of the college's centenary in 1895 the inscriptions and the records of burials were accessible enough for a list of interments to be included in John Healy's official centenary history. About 1910 a new gateway erected at the entrance to the cemetery incorporated stone panels on either side upon which the names of those interred were inscribed using a numbering system to indicate the order of burial.

 

At the same time, to judge from the graphic style of the numerals used, a series of decorative iron crosses was installed to mark the graves of twenty-three students who had died in the first century of the college’s existence.

 

The numbering system used in the entrance gateway inscriptions would seem to have been followed very clearly in the sequence of iron crosses, each carrying a number but no name. These are laid out in the adjacent segment of the grounds, also on the left hand side, but farther from the gate.

 

(The numbers are 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19*, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26*, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39, 41, 44; * indicates possible duplication – the lettering system is very difficult to determine in the case of some numerical figures)

 

The Latin inscriptions at the entrance gateway, in what appears to be a totally individual lettering style, contained the name of the person, the diocese for which they were ordained or (in the case of students) intended, their status and/or title (abbreviated), their year or date of birth and their year or date of death.

 

Based on that numbering system, the first burials from among the staff were of Francis Power (1817); Paul O’Brien, the first professor of Irish at the college, and a nephew of the great musician Turlough O’Carolan (1820); Andrew Dunne, a former president of the college (1823); and the French professors Anglade and Delahogue (1827 and 1834 respectively).

 

In general, the location of the individual burial plots follows the numerical order; the exceptions are where a staff member requested a burial place beside that of a colleague, something that occurs from the earliest (Montague and Power) to the most recent (Casey and Callan) times.

 

The first student to die in the college and be buried in the cemetery would seem to have been Denis Gorman, a sub-deacon from Waterford who died in 1820. This would make him the third person to be interred there, but he is listed at number 11 in the inscribed list, after several professors who died in the 1840s and 1850s, and who in effect constitute a 'top ten'.

 

Denis Gorman's death was followed by that of another sub-deacon, William Dignan of Dublin, who died in 1821, and is listed at number 12 on the inscribed list. However, no cross with the number 12 can be found.

 

LATER BURIALS IN THE ‘PIONEER’S PLOT’

 

There were no burials other than that of students between 1834 and 1845, when a former president, Michael Montague, died. His tomb is among the most elaborate in this section, being surrounded by a five-foot high railing, and placed immediately to the left of Power’s at his own request.

 

Of the other early presidents of the college, four (Hussey, Everard, Crotty and Slattery) died as bishops of the sees to which they had been appointed from Maynooth, and one (Byrne) died as a parish priest in his native diocese of Armagh. Another president, Daniel Murray, was already a bishop when he was appointed in 1812 (he served for one year).

 

The pioneering scientist Nicholas Callan (d. 1864) is the most notable of those buried in this first section; perhaps because of this, Fr. Michael Casey O.P., longtime professor of chemistry, was also buried here, in fact just adjacent to the Callan grave, when he died in 1999.

 

Also buried in the section are Laurence Renehan of Tipperary (d. 1857) and Charles Russell of Down (d. 1880), among the most distinguished scholars in the Ireland of their day as well as  being notable 19th. century college presidents. Nearby are buried long-forgotten academics of almost equal stature, including Matthew Kelly (d. 1858) and John O’Hanlon (d. 1871) of Kilkenny, and James Hughes of Carlow (d. 1877); all died in their forties and had played important roles in the cultural and spiritual development of the era. 

 

The staff complement in this section of the cemetery is completed by a handful of others: Behan, Gillic, O’Donnell, Jennings, Crolly, Tully and Whitehead; some of these died at a comparatively young age (O'Donnell was 33, Gillic 34, Jennings 37, Behan 38, and Kelly 44). In 1988 Gillic's tomb was refurbished at the instigation of Fr. Ronan Drury, using funds subscribed by priests of the diocese of Meath.

 

Laurence Renehan left £100 in his will for the purpose of enclosing the cemetery area, and this was done shortly after his death in 1857. His tomb, designed by the architect J. J. McCarthy, is the first in a low-profile Gothic-style that was followed in the case of four others (Kelly 1858, O’Donnell 1861, Tully 1876, Hughes 1877). With the interment of Nicholas Callan in 1864, the Celtic cross style that became the norm for subsequent grave markings was introduced.

 

 

*Though Cloyne is noted as his diocese of adoption in his epitaph, some lists give Waterford