An Irishman's Diary

AMONG ITS MANY other distinctions, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham is home to two of Ireland’s oddest gravestones. Visitors can frequently be seen standing over them, looking puzzled. And well they might be: because one of the gravestones marks the final resting place of a man who never lived, while the other was erected in loving memory of a horse.

Situated close together in the grounds’ formal gardens, the two memorials give a new twist to the old Irish marriage proposal: “How would you like to be buried with my people?” For their juxtaposition is a result of the uneasy matrimony between the 325-year-old RHK, built just in time for the Battle of the Boyne, and its latter-day occupier: the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma).

The grave of the man who never lived is an exhibit in the latter. As the headstone notes, it contains the mortal remains of “Patrick Ireland”, who was pronounced dead in May 2008 at the age of 36 (his first anniversary passed last week). But the remains consisted only of an effigy, because Patrick Ireland was a mere alter ego: that of Ballaghaderreen-born artist Brian O’Doherty, who is still very much alive.

Indeed, he attended his own wake last year, which even by Irish standards was a cheerful affair. The invention of Patrick Ireland in 1972 had been his response to Bloody Sunday and to the general denial of civil rights for Northern Ireland’s minority. Ever since, the artist – now a long-time resident of the US – had signed all his works with that name, as a protest.

Hardline unionists could withstand such pressure for only so long; and sure enough, they caved in eventually and agreed to power-sharing. Patrick Ireland’s work was done. So, to celebrate the triumph of the peace process, his effigy was laid to rest last May, amid much ceremony.

The grave of a horse, on the other hand, was the creation of the old Royal Hospital. And its occupant was 100 per cent real; although his remains are probably not under the gravestone that remembers him. He was buried in the formal garden all right, in June 1899 (his 110th anniversary falls next week). But nobody knows where, exactly.

The headstone was found during refurbishment of the site, which had been long derelict, after the then taoiseach Charlie Haughey decreed that the abandoned RHK should become Imma in the 1980s. It was re-erected in the southwest corner of the garden; which being the shadiest corner, may well be near enough the right spot anyway.

As the marker says, the horse’s name was “Vonolel”; and he was, by any standards, a war hero, decorated repeatedly by Queen Victoria for his services in Afghanistan and other far-flung battlefields. Even so, he probably owes his distinguished burial place to high-placed connections in the British army.

He was the charger of the great Anglo-Irish military man, Lord Roberts, who despite diminutive stature – 5ft 3in – rose to be chief of staff of the British army during the heyday of empire. Known as “Bobs”, Roberts was a favourite of Kipling, who wrote a poem in his honour, in the voice of an admiring Cockney soldier: “There’s a little red-faced man,/Which is Bobs,/Rides the tallest ’orse ’e can/Our Bobs./If it bucks or kicks or rears,/’E can sit for twenty years/With a smile round both ’is ears/Can’t yer, Bobs?”. In fact, at 14 hands, Vonolel was not much taller (in horse terms) than his owner. But bought in Bombay as a five-year-old, he served Roberts for the next 23 years, most famously when relieving the Siege of Kandahar, but also in India, Burma, and South Africa. His owner estimated the horse had travelled 50,000 miles during his career and was never sick or lame until the day he ate his last oats in Kilmainham.

Like the modern Desert Orchid, Vonolel also happened to be white: which no doubt added to his popular appeal. There’s even a painting of him, with Roberts on board, in London’s Tate gallery.

So perhaps we can excuse the sentimentality of the gravestone, an appeal in verse for the horse’s admission to Paradise: “There are men both good and wise/Who hold that in a future state/Dumb creatures who have served us here below/Shall give us joyful greeting when we pass the golden gate./Is it folly that I hope it may be so?” There are many graves in the RHK, in fact: although the rest observe the convention, so far as I know, of containing only human remains.

At the western end of the grounds, there are separate cemeteries for the hospital’s former inmates: officers in one, rank-and-file soldiers in the other. In between is Bully’s Acre: one of Dublin’s oldest burial places. Brian Boru camped here on the eve of the Battle of Clontarf, 995 years ago: and his son and grandson, both killed in that conflict, are thought to be among the graves.

A few yards away, incidentally – outside the RHK’s castellated rear gate, in the realm of the living – is another dramatic juxtaposition of old and new. On the north side of Inchicore Road, just opposite the gate, stands a modern Hilton hotel. And across from the hotel is one the area’s older places of accommodation, both long and short term: Kilmainham Gaol.