Thanks to the Troubles, a weary number of Northern Ireland place-names have become bywords for bombings and other atrocities. Milltown Cemetery in Belfast, of course, is synonymous in many people's minds with loyalist Michael Stone's gun and grenade attack in March 1988 on the IRA funerals after Gibraltar. Three people died that day, with many others injured.
More recently, thanks to some loud public complaints, Milltown is becoming more famous for its dereliction, its overcrowded, inaccessible, overgrown graves. You can see it from the M1, sprawling up from the "Bog Meadow" wildlife sanctuary, to the Victorian monuments by the big arched gate on the upper Falls Road. All etched against the Black and Divis Mountains and, before that, the bristling communications masts of the RUC station across the road, its oft-averted security cameras affording the graveyard a kind of baleful protection.
Milltown is a haunting place, not just because of the stark mythos of the republican plots (among the best-kept in the cemetery), but the scale of it. Fifty-five acres of burial ground, with 50,000 individual plots; from the decaying splendour of the 19th-century Catholic merchant-class memorials, sloping down as fortunes diminished, to the newer graves, through a forest of Celtic crosses, Virgins, Christs, angels and saints, many now smothering in dark haloes of ivy. Milltown is also a public amenity; a shaggy place in spots, blanketed over exposed hillside, where people walk their dogs. In tidier corners, others spend afternoons with their children, dressing their graves up into little suburban gardens of memory - particularly coming up to Cemetery Sunday in May, which attracts up to 40,000 people.
But the simple fact is, Milltown is strapped for cash. As a private Catholic cemetery, by law, it cannot receive any of the £1.5 million Parks and Cemeteries budget of Belfast City Council - as is likewise the case for the Church of Ireland Abbey cemetery in Bangor, and some small Presbyterian graveyards across Northern Ireland.
Sean Armstrong, cemetery superintendent since 1990, is a grittily philosophical character in his mid-50s who, with his mixture of the folksy and formal, enjoys his Belfast humour with a touch of salt and flinty irony. "Yes, this is a stressful job. You get all sorts of people, yapping and yelling about this or that. But most folk are decent enough, on their own."
Although he now lives in South Belfast with his wife and two children, he was reared in West Belfast in Cullingtree Road, in an area nicknamed the Pound Loney. After schooling with the Christian Brothers - "they taught me Irish, and I have the highest respect for them" - he spent many years as "an ordinary working man" with P&O Ferries, and after an eight-year stint with another quango, the Ulster Historical Foundation, he took up his current post with the Diocese of Down and Connor.
He is now "in charge of the day-to day running, supervising men digging the graves, dealing with families, basically jack of all trades". He has one, part-time assistant and a dwindling budget with which to sub-contract work out to "eight young lads who dug graves in the past, and now work for an agreed, fixed sum".
Milltown is often unfavourably compared with the non-denominational City Cemetary a few hundred yards down the Falls road, with its better-maintained vaults, Masonic obelisks, tarmac driveways and mini-lawnscapes. "The City Council maintains it and subsidises burials for Belfast rate-payers, irrespective of class, creed or colour," says Armstrong, noting also that many Catholics are buried there, particularly in the predominantly Catholic Glenalina section. Ironically, while City Cemetery was being laid out in the 1860s, the Catholic bishop of Down and Connor campaigned to have a third of it set aside for Catholics. When that failed, he bought 15 acres at Milltown, continuing a tradition of exclusive Catholic burial in Belfast, which had formally begun in 1828 at the ancient Frier's Bush cemetery in Stranmillis Road.
Over the years basic plans for Milltown, even for a mortuary chapel, were continually scrapped because of lack of funds. A three-storey house, workshop and public toilets once stood by the gate, but all were demolished after an IRA bomb attack on the RUC station in the early 1970s. They were replaced by a small, clumpy-looking, red-brick office building. "The graveyard has always worked as a sort of a charity," Armstrong says. "It was always the policy of the trustees to sell off graves cheaply, because our people, especially after the first and second World Wars, didn't have the wherewithal. And even today, the church must be losing £50-60,000 a year. To make a meagre profit, we would have to practically double the charges, but then you'd be definitely be in trouble."
Another crisis looms, in that "with approximately 180,000 souls, we've come to our extractive limit. It's like a coal or a tin mine: when you come to the end of the pit, what do you do? All our money comes from opening pre-existing graves, but the number of burials has decreased massively to about 500 a year, and diminishing. And so, therefore, is our income."
Despite the difficulties, he battles on. "Apart from digging graves in all sorts of weathers, we constantly fix fences, repair paths, fill in holes, and cut every clear patch of grass three or four times a year, even in the depths of winter. "But with the Victorian lay-out, you get stone surrounds and no paths. So work has to be hand-done with strimmers. And because you're liable to damage a strimmer, or scratch the stone, our policy is not to cut grass on those graves. Ideally I'd like to remove surrounds, level areas out and grow grass, so we could run a lawnmower right across them.
Down near the bog meadow, he exasperatedly pointed points out little streams of water trickling down the paths, even through the densely packed graves. "It's boggy land and after the heavy weather, the grass is still soaking. That water is quite fresh - but it's continuously sweeping away paths laid in gravel - we get a lot of criticism about that."
A drainage system is just one of his many hopeful plans. Another is to erect a monument in the blank meadows of the Common Ground to the "paupers or unbaptised infants or stillborns who neither have a stick nor stone to their memory".
"Normally, these people were buried in a pauper's field, but our local church spurned canon law. There's a bishop buried at the edge of each field, so that our poor dead are buried in consecrated territory. I admire the local church for that, although I could criticise them for many's a thing."
Another ambition is to computerise the records of the big ledgers in the office, and the indispensable, pencil-marked little grave-digger's notebooks, which tell how deep a grave was dug on various occasions, and hence, whether it can be opened again. Yet another is to write a definitive history of the cemetery.
He is resentful of some of the labels put on the cemetary: "A lot of visitors have one thing in mind, that this is a republican graveyard, while it's a Catholic graveyard where some republicans are buried. "People choose to be buried here for family traditions, or because they're Catholics, or perhaps because of the republican section, their cohorts or whatever. Or descendants of Italians who came here at the turn of the century. There's plenty of traditions."
We took ourselves into the republican area, close to the quiet plots of the religious and teaching orders: Sisters of the Cross and Passion; na Braithre Chriostai; Redemptorists, Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Mary Rathmore Grammar School; the De La Salle brothers, who once ran a Borstal (now derelict) next to the graveyard, before moving to the Glen Road in the 1960s.
The main republican monument, the County Antrim Memorial, lists casualties, from many factions, from 1798 to today. "It was erected after the National Graves Association purchased the plot in 1955, and came into use in 1969 as a burial ground. After that, it filled up pretty quickly. There's 50 or so in there."
Further along, he points out the Official IRA plot, and the large IRSP plot. And against the corrugated perimeter fence is the INLA plot.
Above the lone headstone to Maire Drumm, the Sinn Fein vice president murdered in her hospital bed in 1976, we walked up on to the raised "active service plot" of the Provisional IRA. Inside its low, green fence, its small conifers almost blot out the plaques to names such as Mairead Farrell, Bobby Sands and Thomas Begley; buried three and four to the grave. For all the state-within-a-state atmosphere of republican Milltown, the cemetery fetches up many apparent anomalies. For example, among the Clarkes, Kinevanes and Maguires, there are also names such as Carson and Irvine, Pinkus and Tang. Or take the many, grey "Old IRA" headstones dotted about, emblazoned with the red hand of Ulster in a white circle.
We stopped at Eamonn O Treodain, died 1920. "That was before partition, during the pogroms of West Belfast. The NGA bought the graves, erected headstones and gave them to the families."O Treodain's family aren't is not marked, Armstrong gives the old flinty twinkle. "But they didn't die for Ireland . . .?"
Throughout Milltown, there are also 56 plots maintained by the British War Commission. Armstrong showed me the refurbished second World War army plot, with its five Polish air force men who crashed in Kerry (their bodies were shipped up by the government in the South); and the memorial to the Catholic dead of the first World War - "All Belfast men, many of them Redmondites, who fought for the British war machine, hoping to get Home Rule after the war". Vandalism and joyriding are no longer a major problem, but Milltown's appearance is that of a place about to topple to the elements: the wind, rain and frost; the rampant tussocks of vegetation. A place in need of reassurance about the future.
