Graveyard dispute rumbles on

Private cameras and other methods being deployed to monitor movement to and from Kilboy Graveyard amount to “high handed and intrusive actions”, according to members of the cemetery committee, who have called on the owner of the estate within which the burial ground is located to withdraw such security measures.

Kilboy Estate is owned by Shane Ryan, a son of Ryanair founder Tony Ryan, who is in dispute with the committee over a right of way that mourners use to access the graveyard, where the security measures installed include an electronic pedestrian gate operational between 9am and 9pm while a key to a larger entrance for hearses is kept at the local pub in Dolla under an agreement going back to 1990.

The committee says that in 2018 the Kilboy Estate electrified the pedestrian gate and installed electrical infrastructure on the vehicular gate at the entrance to the graveyard. “This is supplemented by at least two surveillance cameras which monitor all entrants to the graveyard,” says the committee.

They say all these security measures are controlled by the estate.

“The Dolla Graveyard Committee objects to this high handed and intrusive actions on the part of the estate. The graveyard is a sacred site, where mourners and the bereaved should feel free to grieve in privacy and without requiring the permission of the Kilboy security apparatus to do so.”

It adds: “Dolla Graveyard has been in use as a place of worship and burial for nearly 1,000 years. It is the ancestral burial ground for countless generations from the locality and continues as an active graveyard to this day.”

The committee says the graveyard is located through a right of way from the public road within the walls of the estate that has been in existence since time immemorial.

It says that following on the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 and the work of the Commission on Church Temporalities in the 1870s, Dolla was one of about 2,000 graveyards to be divested to the relevant local authority - in this case the Nenagh Sanitary Authority - the forerunner of what is now Tipperary County Council.

In common with many other graveyards, for decades Dolla Graveyard has been managed and lovingly tended to by a committee consisting of plot-holders and families of the bereaved.

But it said that in 2016 it received correspondence from Kilboy estate stating that the estate owned the graveyard. While the estate withdrew this letter within weeks, it proceeded to instal the security apparatus two years later.

The committee says the graveyard is public property owned by Tipperary County Council, and asks: “How can it be permissible for a private landholder to seize control of the access to public lands; to decide who may or may not enter these lands; at what times they may enter or must leave said lands and to video them as they do so?”

The committee is now calling on the elected members and officials of the council and on the TDs in Tipperary “to take the necessary steps as to ensure that the graveyard is registered with the Land Registry and unimpeded public access is secured in perpetuity.”

Members of the committee say the issue in Dolla has national significance. “The committee is concerned that the chilling effect of the Lissadell case is not only a brake on Tipperary Co Council’s willingness to assert its ownership of the graveyard but may also underpin a generalised reluctance on the part of local authorities to vindicate the public interest around access to significant historical or sacred sites which fall within the curtilage of private estates,” it says.

ESCALATED

The dispute has now escalated to a point where it is generating national headlines, with the Sunday Independent carrying a feature in its latest issue. One local in Dolla, Anne Marie Maher, was quoted by that newspaper summing up the upshot of the dispute thus: “The dead are locked in, and the living are locked out.”

Mourners feel they are under surveillance when visiting departed loved ones and claim they have had encounters with gardaí and the estate’s security members when they visit the graveyard.

Legal action to solve issues it has raised do not seem to be an option from the committee’s point of view. “I don’t think we can consider a legal action,” says committee spokesman, Dr Tom Collins. “This is David versus Goliath. The committee has €700 in its account, and if costs were awarded against us, we couldn’t afford it,” he told the Sunday Independent.

Dr Collins said the committee would be happy if control of access to the graveyard was in public hands.

Silvermines publican Tom Hickey, whose wife Catherine, sister Ollie and parents Annie and Jack are buried in the graveyard, said of the crux: “I think it’s the fact I don’t have the freedom to walk in and see my people. I would like to see the gate unlocked and everyone have the right to enter freely. The cameras should go. They should turn them into the fields, away from the avenue.”

Local publican Martin Ryan is happy to retain the key to the vehicular entrance to the graveyard, but would rather such a measure was not required.

The committee feels let down by the council and the gardaí: the council has never registered its ownership of the burial ground with the Land Registry and at a meeting some years ago gardaí told the committee that the gate to the graveyard would remain locked.

Two committee members, John and Breda Grace, made a complaint to the Data Protection Commissioner in 2019 because they felt it was “a huge intrusion” on their privacy to be unable to visit the graves “without being monitored”. They argued that the cameras could be moved to a less intrusive place.

SECURITY NEEDS

Kilboy Estate says it seeks to balance the rights of local people with its security needs, and therefore the cameras are placed in positions it sees as appropriate following a garda review.

A spokesman said a review of the situation “made a number of recommendations with regard to the operation of the gates and that CCTV cameras be installed at the point of entry and along the driveway, which serves both the graveyard and Kilboy Estate.”

Last May the Data Protection Commission ruled the cameras should stay. It noted they are not filming the graveyard, but recommended Kilboy Estate should share relevant information about its CCTV policy with John and Breda Grace.

Kilboy Estate’s spokesman says it “fully respects” the rights of those with family members interred in the graveyard to use the right of way and the gate, the operation of which remain “a matter of ongoing discussion”.

Dr Collins said the next necessary step is for the council to register the right of way, and its ownership of the graveyard with the Land Registry. “This case here has a wider significance relating to the general public realm in Ireland and access to not just graveyard, but national monuments and other lands,” he said.

The committee has alluded to the 2013 ruling of the Supreme Court, which overturned a High Court judgement that there were public rights of way to Lissadell House estate in County Sligo, with serious implications for the local authority, which argued there was an inferred dedication of public right of way through decades of public use.

Dr Collins believes this is a factor in the local authority in not registering the land.