New ways of dealing with the mysteries

An outsider looking at events in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin last weekend might have concluded that nothing much changes with the Irish way of death. By taking a sharp left turn at the Republican Plot, however, the same visitor might have come across something infinitely more interesting, and far more eloquent in what it says about social change in the Republic. One of the most arresting open spaces in Ireland is the area of the cemetery that is commonly known as the Holy Angels plot for infants who died before, during or shortly after birth.

Last Saturday, while the area near the entrance of the cemetery was wrapped in the hubbub of police, workmen and TV engineers preparing for the following day's State funerals, the calm quiet of the Holy Infants was broken by a different kind of noise.

A young couple with a toddler and a buggy were hanging a new set of wind chimes from a small tree near the grave of their dead infant. Its tinkle mingled with the pings and jingles of a dozen others as a warm light breeze caught the dying leaves and stirred the branches.

This strange autumnal crop is mixed with a more vibrant array of fruits. Hanging from every tree is an exotic harvest of tawny teddy bears, Day-Glo tigers, meekly smiling My Little Ponies and cuddly monsters.

Some have messages pinned to their chests, promising undying love to the lost little ones. Watching this multicoloured menagerie from the few individual graves that skirt the collective plot is a frozen army of toy trains, pretty dolls and sleek synthetic kittens.

Just as striking as what is there is what, by and large, is not. There are hardly any angels or crucifixes, madonnas or plaster saints. Religious trappings have been almost entirely replaced by the intimate, immediate symbols of childhood.

The symbols chosen to represent the souls of the departed or wished-for babies are the wind-chimes, a fairly recent import from the east that seem, with their tender, placid insistence, to hover quite happily in the damp Dublin air.

Two things are especially striking about this deeply moving display. One is that it contrasts utterly with what this place was like a few years ago, when it was stark, bleak and almost shameful.

Until recently, the Holy Angels plot did not draw attention to itself. It was about oblivion, not memory, a place to bury the pain of a miscarriage, a still-birth or a life that ended when it had barely begun. Now, it has been transformed into a real garden of remembrance.

The other remarkable thing is that all of this has happened spontaneously. Somebody with a lot of guts must have started it all, by dangling the first teddy from the branches. But that somebody must also have been touching a need that was just waiting to be expressed. If the seed blossomed so quickly, it was because the soil was hungering for it. What you have here is something quite rare, an utterly spontaneous, entirely unofficial and therefore completely authentic expression of a culture.

It is obvious what this cultural shift concerns. It is about something very basic: the status of the unborn or stillborn or very young child. In the wonderful Tom Murphy play currently at the Peacock Theatre, Bailegangaire, the ancient Mommo speaks of the hugger-mugger burial of such children: "the unbaptised and stillborn in shoeboxes planted, at the dead hour of night. . . An' tryin' not to hasten, steal away again, leaving their pagan parcels in isolation forever."

Nothing illustrates both the official nature of these attitudes and the sharp shift away from them more potently than the scandal over the retention by hospitals of organs and tissue from dead babies which arose two years ago.

The medical establishment seemed to be caught almost completely unawares by the hurt and outrage of parents who discovered that pieces of their children's bodies were being harvested for sale or kept for research without their knowledge or consent. Even in a society which officially accorded a very high status to the unborn, Catholic hospitals did not really treat these bodies as if they belonged to dead human beings.

What is most interesting, therefore, is that the revolution in the attitudes of ordinary people to these things has come about largely outside the official apparatus of religion, law and medicine. The prevailing culture has become more civilised, more tender, more respectful, not as a result of the official institutions but in spite of them.

All this has happened, moreover, at a time when social conservatives were taking an increasingly bleak view of the way Ireland was going. What they saw as a shallower, more materialistic secular culture was actually extending its notion of what was sacred far beyond the previous boundaries.

I wish those who are preparing for another holy war to roll back the tides of decadence that have washed over us since the Supreme Court knocked a hole in the dyke with the X case would stop for a few moments at the Holy Angels plot in Glasnevin. What they would see is people in pain freed by the emergence of a more open society to seek new ways to deal with the great mysteries of birth and death.