Milltown Cemetery, Chrissie Price’s funeral site

Milltown Cemetery, Chrissie Price’s funeral site, is presented as more than a burial ground: it is where private loss took visible form amid republican commemoration and official surveillance. The account places funerals and a separate Easter gathering there, making the cemetery a setting in which mourning and political presence could not be cleanly separated.

Funerals and family loss

When Dolours Price and Marian Price returned home, they learned that their aunt, Aunt Bridie, had died in February. A minor republican icon, she received a large funeral, and authorities sent photographers to take surveillance photographs of the mourners. Four days after that funeral, Chrissie Price died of pancreatic cancer. The sisters were distraught; until recently, it had seemed more likely that their mother would outlive them than that they would return to mourn her.

The sisters petitioned for compassionate leave to attend Chrissie’s funeral, but their request was refused. They sent a wreath of Easter Lily flowers instead. Four hundred people joined the slow cortège from Slievegallion Drive to Milltown Cemetery, where Albert Price walked beside the coffin with his head bowed. At the head of the procession, a young girl played the bagpipes, wearing an Irish Republican Army black beret and dark glasses. The funeral’s scale and public ritual stood beside the sisters’ enforced absence: their grief was present through the wreath, but they could not accompany their mother to her burial.

Commemoration and surveillance

The funeral of Aunt Bridie had already shown that a republican burial could attract not only mourners but official attention. The cameras were there to record the gathering, turning the funeral procession into an object of surveillance as well as an act of remembrance. The cemetery therefore appears within a public landscape where commemorative gestures carried political meaning, whether or not those attending intended them as statements.

A separate episode makes that overlap more overt. After an Easter commemoration at Milltown Cemetery, an event the authorities would have monitored closely, the Irish Republican Army announced that Brendan Hughes had attended “under the noses of the British Army”. Hughes was then moving about Belfast under an assumed identity, and the claim turned his concealed presence at a watched gathering into a public challenge. The cemetery was thus associated both with solemn rites for the dead and with a living movement’s ability to assert itself under surveillance.

A place within contested memory

The book’s epigraph observes, “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Milltown Cemetery gives that idea a concrete setting: funerals preserve personal losses, while public ceremonies and the attention paid to them place those losses within the continuing political story of the conflict. The cemetery’s significance in the narrative comes from this conjunction, not from any claim that mourning resolved the divisions around it.

The wider account describes the post-conflict period as lacking a formal process to establish how the Troubles should be commemorated or understood. Against that unsettled background, the cemetery’s funerals and commemorations become acts through which memory is carried in public, while surveillance and political claims contest what such gatherings mean. Milltown Cemetery remains in the narrative as a place where the dead are mourned and the past is still made visible.