Calls to restore Dundalk's Paupers’ Graveyard
Famine Graveyard work sparks calls to preserve historic site
In recent years many people have visited the Dundalk Famine Graveyard, off the Ardee Road.
The dedicated work of a volunteer group led to the respectful restoration of the previously neglected burial site.
The Paupers’ Graveyard, opened in 1853, was used for the burial of patients from the nearby workhouse.
Prior to that, those who died in the workhouse were buried in a graveyard within the bounds of the workhouse.
Local author and historian, Noel Sharkey, recently visited the site in the company of, among others, Senator Erin McGreehan, Fr Pádraig Keenan and Cllr Conor Keelan.
Noel is anxious that the work carried out on the Famine Graveyard can be replicated on the older plot.
The site had been well maintained in the past, and in 1983 a plaque was unveiled by His Eminence Cardinal Tómas Ó Fiaich on behalf of the Old Dundalk Society.
It reads:
“In memory of the hundreds of men, women and children, inmates of Dundalk Workhouse, who died in the years between 1847 and 1853 and were buried in the adjoining plot.”
The site, however, has become overgrown and neglected, and Noel Sharkey is seeking support to restore it to a respectful state.
For those interest in the history of the workhouse, a seminal piece of research by Maureen Wilson was published in the Louth Archaeological Journal Vol. 20, No 3 (1983), which is available online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/27729565.