Come Here To Me!

The crossroads of Ballybough Road and Clonliffe Road will be known to many Dubliners who make their way to and from Croke Park to watch Dublin compete. Today dominated by large advertising boards on what is prime advertising real estate, there is nothing to indicate the rather macabre history of the corner, which it seems was once home to a so-called ‘Suicide Plot’. This was essentially an unconsecrated burial location in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for those who took their own lives, as well as the occasional outlaw. It has entered local folklore, and was even mentioned in the Dail in 1990 by a TD who commented “there is also a suicide burial plot in the area and it is said that spirits are still in the park beside the Luke Kelly Bridge.”

Google Street view of the corner in July 2014. It has since been improved and includes recreational seating.

Ballybough’s name derives from the Irish language ‘Baile Bocht‘, meaning ‘poor town’. Before urban development, the district from Ballybough to North Strand was known colloquially as Mud Island, with the Rev. John Kingston noting in a 1950s piece that “Ballybough had an evil reputation during the eighteenth century…Beside the bridge was a noted suicide plot, where the bodies of suicides were interred in the time honoured fashion, transfixed with stakes, which according to belief, effectually prevented these unhappy beings from wandering about and alarming the public.”

There was little sympathy or understanding in most cases for those who took their own lives in earlier centuries. In an interesting History Ireland feature on Theobald Wolfe Tone, who made the decision to take his own life rather than face the death of a criminal, Georgina Laragy rightly notes that “At the time of his death suicide was a mortal sin, condemned by both Catholic and Protestant churches, and a crime under common law. It was punishable by burial at the crossroads with a stake through the heart, and the confiscation of one’s goods and chattels (both these punishments were overturned by legislation in 1823 and 1872 respectively).” Tone, a formidable political figure, was buried in consecrated ground at Bodenstown in Kildare, which very much defied the norm for such a death.  Felo de se, or ‘Felon of himself’, was the archaic legal term used to describe those who took their own lives.

Curiously little has been written about the site, with most of what has appeared in print bring rooted primarily in local lore. In his popular Dublin history The Labour and the Royal, Eamonn MacThomáis talks of Larry Clinch, an early nineteenth century highwayman figure, who was hanged in the vicinity following a shootout with militia men in November 1806: “The bodies of Larry and his gang were left lying on Clonfliffe Road to warn all other highwaymen. Later they were buried at the end of Clonliffe Road, at Ballybough Crossroads. Down the years many people have reported seeing a strange horseman rising up and down Clonfliffe Road late at night.”

A 1939 local history feature from the Irish Independent eludes to Larry Clinch and the “suicides’ ground at Ballybough.”

In Dublin, facts need not always interfere with stories of course, and the manner in which the plot is remembered (and even geographically placed) by locals is important in itself. It is certainly something most locals of a certain vintage seem to have at least heard of, which is interesting given the absence of a historic marker. The excellent East Wall for All blog has speculated on its potential literary importance, but there is undoubtedly a lot more work to be done.