The Historic Maynooth College Cemetery: An Introduction

 

Welcome to the Historic Maynooth College Cemetery, one of fourteen burial places in Maynooth and its vicinity and the most prominent and diverse within the town of Maynooth itself.

 

AN ANCIENT  TERRITORY The area where the cemetery is located is part of the ancient territory of Maigh Nuadhad, noted in the Christian era for its three monastic centres at Donaghmore, Taghadoe and Laraghbryan, and for its domination and defense by the native Irish O'Byrne clan. 

It reached the height of its civilisation between the 12th and the 16th century, when it formed part of the domain of the FitzMaurice and FitzGerald families, whose authority over their Anglo-Norman and native Irish compatriots made Maynooth a political power centre. The ruins of their castle is still visible as you enter the college's South Campus today and we know that there were many other buildings in the enclosure around it, including a college and a church, that have long since disappeared. This followed the decline of the Fitzgerald family as a result of the punishments they suffered for their rebellious activities in the sixteenth century.

However, the present 18th century Anglican Church of Ireland beside the college entrance is on the site of the original late medieval church. There may have been early burials in or near the castle enclosure, but today the tower beside the church contains the remains of several members of the Fitzgerald family who died in the 19th century, including Edward Fox Fitzgerald, the son of the noted patriot Lord Edward Fitzgerald.

 

THE FOUNDING ERA The original community at St Patrick's College was established at the end of the eighteenth century in two small new Georgian mansions, both still in existence, that had been built by a father and son named Stoyte, and located near the entrance to the South Campus of today.

The college was founded in those two buildings by the British colonial government with the support of the Duke of Leinster, William Robert Fitzgerald, whose grandfather had recovered the Fitzgerald lease of the Carton lands at the other end of the village more than fifty years previously. The return of the Fitzgeralds to Maynooth was marked by the building of their vast new Carton House in the mid-18th century, still in existence today as a resort hotel.

The purpose of the Royal College of St. Patrick was to provide education in Ireland for Irish priests, and so avoid the dangers of exposing them to revolutionary ideas at the French seminaries where they had been forced to attend because of the anti-Catholic penal laws in Ireland.

These penal laws had forbidden Catholics to organise or attend schools but towards the end of the 18th century there was a softening of the rules and educational establishments were allowed under strict conditions. 

Because France was implementing the persecution of Catholics under the revolutionary regime, the early professors at the new college were mainly either French priests or Irish priests who had been working as pastors or teachers in France following their education there and who were now also fleeing the persecution.

Using money provided by the British government, the college quickly expanded on either side of the main Stoyte House and formed a cosmopolitan community that at one time included more than a dozen priests of French origin or residence, and some with connections to Spain and Portugal.

 

EARLY BURIALS AND THE PIONEER PLOT For the first twenty years of the college's existence staff members who died were buried in the historic cemetery at Laraghbryan five kilometers to the northwest of the college site.

The first person to be buried within the college boundaries was Fr Peter Flood, an Irish priest who had been educated in France and was a college professor there before returning to Ireland. He is interred in a grave located in front of a side altar in St Josephs Chapel at the front of the South Campus, which is also the site of the original college chapel.

As the college developed, its footprint grew very quickly with the aid of British funds but when it was decided to create a cemetery in this location in 1817, the area was still a significant distance from any building and so was a tranquil spot surrounded by open fields

To the left as we look towards the top of the site is the section known as the Pioneer Plot. This is where twenty pioneering staff members of the resident college community were buried between 1817 and 1877 and where twenty-eight students who died in the college during the course of their studies were also buried from 1820 to 1866.

The staff members buried here include Frs. Anglade and Delahogue, two of the six French-born professors involved in the founding years of the college (several others returned to France when persecutions there eased). Some of the professors and deans buried here died at very young ages. as a result of the ill health brought on by spartan living conditions and the rigours of intense study and academic life.

Many of those buried in this section were notable leaders of Catholic studies and thought in the 19th century, including theologians and historians such as Laurence Renehan and Charles Russell, and the great natural philosopher and scientist Nicholas Callan who played a  major role in the development of electricity generation and whose grave is identified by a special heritage marker. 

Secular subjects were also taught from the beginning, and there are several professors of Irish, English and French buried here, including the noted poet-priest and musician Paul O'Brien.

Spartan conditions and the rigor of academic studies were also behind the deaths of many of the twenty-eight students who are are buried in the Pioneer Plot. We know that their individual burial places were recorded on paper but we do not know how they were marked on the grounds of the cemetery itself before 1907.

In that year a permanent numbered record of those buried in the cemetery was inscribed on the interior of the cemetery's new cut-stone entrance arch, and the student graves were each given an iron cross with a number keyed to the arch inscription.

The first female to be buried in the cemetery was a young nun of the Presentation order who died in 1827 at her Maynooth convent before it had a designated cemetery.

The first lay persons to be buried were a bursar's clerk and a matron of the college infirmary. They died before 1895 and are buried in anonymous graves, although we believe their gravesites may be identified by two un-numbered crosses in the top left-hand corner of the Pioneer Plot.

 

A MAJOR DEVELOPMENT In the 1850s the British ceased their annual funding of the college and gave it a large one-off payment to compensate. That allowed the college to further expand its buildings, giving us the extensive complex that we have today. It also brought the campus closer to the cemetery and so it was decided to install a walled boundary enclosure and also create the tree-lined approach that is so striking and appropriate.

By now the college had grown into a substantial community of professors, domestic and farm staff and hundreds of students from every corner of Ireland. In 1896 it was granted status as a Pontifical University, with the power to award degrees in theology and Canon Law. In 1909 its instruction in secular subjects was certified as of university standard and St. Patrick's College became a recognised college of the National University of Ireland, awarding degrees to a student body still confined to aspirants to the priesthood.

Twenty-eight professors who died in the college between 1881 and 1988 and are interred in the main section of the cemetery. They include four Presidents of the institution in the twentieth century, as well as some other notable academics - Heinrich Bewerunge, the German professor of Music who spent twenty-eight years at the college between 1888 and 1923; Walter McDonald, the controversial theologian; and Peter Coffey, the philosopher and social activist.

One of the most interesting gravesites is the small mausoleum erected to house the remains of Fr. Eoghan O'Gramhnaigh, a Professor of Irish for a short period in the early 1890s who was forced by ill-health to go to the western United States where he died at the age of thirty-five in 1899. But his fame rests on the work he did earlier towards the restoration of the Irish language during his brief  life and this resulted in his body being returned from America to be interred in this memorial chamber after ceremonies involving over sux thousand participants.

Adjacent is the place of rest of forty-three students who died between 1866 and 1942. Four nuns of the Daughters of Charity order, who supervised the college infirmary (now the Columba Centre to the left of the College Chapel) from 1905 to the early 1980s are also buried here. The last resting places of thirteen lay staff who worked as stewards, administrators and domestics and who died from 1906 onward are located along the southern boundary of the cemetery.

 

A NEW ERA From 1966 a new era dawned in the life of St Patrick's College and its recognised universities when enrolment was opened first to other religious personnel and then to lay students, leading to the situation today where the combined institutions on the campus - St Patrick's National Seminary and Pontifical University and Maynooth University - have an enrollment of over 15000 students.

That new situation is reflected in burials in the most recent section of the university, which contains the remains of clerical professors who transferred to the new secular university, including the Classics scholar Gerard Watson, the historian and former College President Patrick Corish, and the internationally-recognised moral theologian Enda McDonagh. It also contains the remains of the first lay member of the university academic staff to be buried there, the philosopher Thomas Kelly. 

Along the western wall are a set of stones commemorating three students who died in the 1990s and are buried in their native areas. A plaque on the wall nearby notes twenty-five members of the resident clerical academic staff who died between 1982 and 2023 and who were part of the transition of the college to a diverse campus over the past sixty years but who are buried elsewhere. Though some were lifelong residents of the college, their burial places indicate the great variety of locations from which they came and to which they returned in retirement or death, or the appointments to which they moved - as bishops, pastoral priests or to academic positions elsewhere. 

Today the Historic Maynooth College Cemetery is a peaceful oasis in a busy campus, and a location where the rich academic and religious heritage of 'Maynooth College' and of Irish church history can be contemplated while also recognising the almost miraculous development of those traditions to form the vibrant community that exists today across the three major institutions occupying the site - National Seminary, Pontifical University, and Maynooth University.