While I’m spoiled for suitable areas nearby to walk my dogs (Killiney Hill, Killiney Beach, the fields near Shankill etc.), I do like the quieter corners. Shanganagh Cemetery on a weekday morning is such a spot. When the new DART station, being constructed nearby, is up and running this may no longer be the case. The cemetery itself is a newish one and visually undistinguished - although there’s a nice view of the Scalp in the distance. There’s space for the dogs to run around and you can amuse yourself by checking out the gravestones. There are plenty of familiar names. I spot the ever-amiable Bill O’Herlihy of RTE soccer fame - a bit surprised he wasn’t returned to his native Glasheen in Cork but I suppose he made his life in Dublin. I also came upon the grave of poor Raonaid Murray, one of the more egregiously unsolved murders of young women in this country.. The Glenageary girl’s gravestone contained a quote from Schopenhaeur: “I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light of which our sunlight is but the shadow.” An uncharacteristic piece of positivity from the old pessimist. The artist Anne Yeats (W.B.’s daughter) was nearby alongside her brother Michael the FF senator - both with simple minimal grave stones. I pass one with the name Paddy Berkery and wonder was it the red-haired Irish rugby international full-back who played for Landsdowne and always seemed to be enjoying himself on the field - the date of death (2013) was right. I saw him kick a touch-line conversion in Musgrave Park playing for the Rest of Ireland against the Combined Universities - Jack Kyle was also playing that day in what was always an entertaining fixture. Near the newest part of the cemetery I came upon two acquaintances from Cork, both of whom died in the past year: Denis Casey who was in my class in CBC, Cork and with whom I never got on. He was prone to indulge in that classic Cork trait: the sneering put down. The trait that Sean O’Faoleain famously described as “acidulous”. He also pinched a girl from me in 1964 and then gloated about it to my face. I still don’t forgive him. And I confess that I took some pleasure in finding a typo on his gravestone - the capitalisation of a preposition in a headline style sentence. Quelle horreur. He was never very good at English. Not far away, the other Cork man was a more amiable character and a lover of the good things in life. I’d last met him in Caviston’s in Glasthule a few years ago where he was looking for goose fat. The lean lothario I’d known in Cork had transmogrified into a portly bon vivant. He died of a heart attack on his journey back from a sybaratic holiday on Capri. He set up a very successful business (Behaviour & Attitudes) and I also remembered him dabbling for a while in rock journalism - writing for Hibernia. He was very sniffy, in one piece, about the quality of the Stones playing at Slane in 1982. If you gauge your walk properly, moving up and down the lines of graves, you can get a good hour’s exercise in and there’s a open area at the far end for your dogs to disport themselves in the overgrown grass. I only covered about a third of the graves so I’ll be back for more.
