Famine dead remembered at Mass in Robinstown graveyard

While you scour the cemeteries for markers and proof that your ancestors lived in your County then save a thought for the famine dead and others of Robinstown Mullingar whose last place of rest is unrecorded. No pretty church or Celtic Cross adorns Robinstown Famine Graveyard.Those who braved the weather for the now annual commemoration at the Famine Graveyard in Robinstown were present at a summer evening of prayer and peace which aptly remembered the some 7,000 buried there when they died of starvation during the Great Hunger.Father Colm Browne led those who had gathered in the rosary and Aodán Moynihan provided moving music on the accordion which also accompanied the final hymn 'How Great Thou Art'.After the service teacher and historian Seamus O'Brien gave a talk on famine landscapes and made an appeal to leave alone the uneven field at Robinstown where so many were taken from the workhouse to be buried."If this cemetery is landscaped it won't be a famine graveyard anymore," he said. "Every year now there are famine commemorations across the country but in 1945 at the centenary of the beginning of the famine De Valera had to offer grants to get Irish academics to write on the subject and TD Williams was one of those academics and between himself and another they could only come up with two books of essays. People had been so traumatised by the Famine and were still so poor that they could not talk about it. It left such an impact on the Irish psyche."Then Cecil Woodham Smith wrote the Great Hunger which became by far the best selling book on Irish history but still there was little written about such an enormous and traumatic event."Believe it or not it was actually in the mid-1990s that we saw a lot of material being written about the Famine and that was because we had enough and we felt comfortable talking about it."One of the great symbols of the Famine is the workhouse and Mullingar's is a particularly fine example. The Irish workhouses were built just before the Famine in 1842 and we could say that this was brilliant planning, or it was cynical or we could say that this was prophetic as two years later they were filled with Irish people."Mr O'Brien told those who had gathered that the people in Mullingar had struggled against plans to dismantle the workhouse; "Symbols such as the workhouse and this Famine grave yard must remain untouched," he said.