This summer was one to remember. In between planned trips to Dublin and a rainy day in Killarney, we allocated time to simply drive the back roads between Dublin and Cork and see what we came across.

Before leaving Dublin, however, we made sure to venture to Glasnevin Cemetery. My father had long wanted to come here, and so we took a bus out to the cemetery, still an active graveyard, to not only see the burial site of Michael Collins but also to take a tour of the other iconic graves throughout the property. Our tour guide joked how there’s more people buried in the cemetery than the current population of Dublin, with a whopping 1.5 million internments here.

Michael Collins is one of the most famous burials here, his grave located near the museum and visitor center and regularly adorned with flowers. His gravestone is written in Gaelic, a testament to the politician’s fight for Irish independence from Great Britain. Collins was Director of Intelligence of the Irish Republican Army and even arrested by the British during the 1916 Easter Rising. During the Irish Civil War, however, which followed the Irish War of Independence and was between the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army and Provisional Government of Ireland (which Collins identified with), Collins was ambushed and assassinated in 1922 at the age of just 31.

Elsewhere in the cemetery are the graves of other notable Irish figures like Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, Arthur Griffith, Maude Gonne (yes, the same Maude Gonne who poet W.B. Yeats was enamored with), Constance Markievicz and Éamon de Valera. De Valera, also involved in the 1916 Easter Rising, was part of the Anti-Treaty group, the opposing side to Collins.

While in the cemetery, we had the privilege to listen to a speech by a re-enactor of Patrick Pearse, an Irish language activist who spoke at a funeral in 1915. His speech, known as “Ireland unfree shall never be at peace,” played a big role in the lead-up to the 1916 Easter Rising and is today considered one of the most significant speeches in 20th-century Irish history.

— Aoife O’Riordan, associate editor