Council call to re-inter Invincibles in Glasnevin Cemetery

A MOTION calling for the bodies of five members of the Irish National Invincibles to be re-interred in Glasnevin Cemetery has come before Mayo County Council.

The Invincibles were set up in 1881 as a retaliation group to hit back at the brutal treatment by the crown forces, Councillor Seamus Weir, who tabled the motion, explained at the monthly local authority meeting.

In Mayo, in October 1881, two women were killed at a demonstration in Belmullet. In May 1882, in Ballina, a crowd of boys and girls following a band were shot at, with one boy (14) killed and other children injured.

The following day, the Invincibles carried out a number of assassinations in the Phoenix Park, for which five members were executed.

Now, the Office of Public Works are being asked to recover the remains of those men - Joe Brady, Daniel Curley, Michael Fagan, Thomas Caffrey and Tim Kelly - from what is commonly known as the Invincibles Yard at Kilmainham Gaol.

Their bodies lie beneath the paving slabs of the yard where they were executed in 1883 for their part in the Phoenix Park assassinations.

The families of the five men are represented by the National Graves Association and it is their wish that their relatives will be exhumed from the gaol and reinterred in consecrated ground at Glasnevin Cemetery.