Mount Jerome Cemetery (Ireland)
I am familiar with Mount Jerome Cemetery as I lived beside it's outer wall for two years (1981/82) and two of my grandparents are buried in there.
I cannot understand why my grandparents chose to be buried in Mount Jerome as it was, at the time, a depressing place relative to other locations that they could have chosen. In fact, as my grandfather was involved in the 1916 rising it is surprising that he was not buried in Glasnevin.
After my grandmother's funeral a very old uncle of mine described the graveyard as "an excellent advertisement for cremation" (back then Irish Catholics did not consider cremation an option). It is therefore somewhat ironic that as the result of the opening of a Crematorium in 2000 revenues have recovered and the Cemetery has undergone a complete reversal of fortune.
When I lived in the area the graves were often vandalised and at night a group of children would steal flowers from the graves in order to re-sell them the next day.
As Mount Jerome was established during the Victorian era, the monuments featured in some of my photographs are a materialistic expression of the success of the Victorian middle classes from that period.
Without doubt, Mount Jerome Cemetery the finest collections of Victorian memorials, tombs, vaults and crypts in Ireland.
Due to the declining burial numbers in the 1970's, the condition of the Cemetery began to deteriorate as revenues fell. In 1984 it was put into voluntary liquidation. By the late 1990's, it had fallen into a serious state of neglect with large swaths of the cemetery covered in overgrowth.