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Sat 03 Mar 2007Glasnevin Cemetery, one of Ireland's liveliest spacesCulture Shock Fintan O'TooleThe plan to refurbish Glasnevin Cemetery in time for the Easter Rising centenary is a belated official recognition of its cultural consequence'While Ireland holds these graves," Patrick Pearse intoned in his famous oration at the graveside of the Fenian O'Donovan Rossa in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, in 1915, "Ireland unfree shall never be at peace." The idea that graves were political assets to be held by the nation would not have seemed especially strange to Pearse's listeners. Nina Witoszek argued that, while other European cultures centre on the wedding, Ireland's centres on the funeral. The Taoiseach's announcement this week that Glasnevin Cemetery is to be given a €25 million refurbishment in time for the centenary in 2016 of the Easter Rising can be seen as a belated official recognition of the cultural consequence of the place. It is important, though, that the context of the centenary of 1916, significant as it is, doesn't reduce that culture to a single, simple framework. For what Glasnevin displays, perhaps better than any other Irish space, is the contested nature of Irish culture. There has always been more to last rites than the simple act of burying the dead.