Opinion: just why are we drawn to sites and locations associated with death and suffering?
As Patrick Kavanagh observed, "we are a dark people". If you asked my grandmother how she was, she would invariably say "dying away". As far back as I can remember, she would comfortably chat about death and dying. When she returned from one of the innumerable funerals she attended, I asked her if Mrs Burke had been there too. She replied "arra, she was, barely. That woman would be dead years if she’d the sense to stiffen".
Once when I accompanied her on a trip back home to Clare, I listened as she and her old school friend Catherine talked. As I sat in a súgán chair by the fireside eating Swiss roll and drinking cups of tea so strong "you could trot a mouse across them", they worked their way through an inventory of illnesses, deaths and funerals in the parish where they were born and raised. As we left, my grandmother muttered "shur, the whole world is dead". As they were both in their 90s, much of their world really was.
I returned home from college on another occasion to find the fire lit, but no-one in the living room. I heard a voice summon me down the corridor: "come here, I'm in the bedroom". I wandered down to my grandmother's bedroom to be greeted by a remarkable sight: there was my grandmother laid out as a corpse on the bed. She was wearing a brown patterned dress that she'd had made for my uncle's wedding some 30 years earlier and her rosary beads were threaded through her fingers. "Take a photo", she demanded, "I want to see what I look like".
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From RTÉ Radio One's Countrywide, a report on Arron Grew's unique funeral business
The genesis for this macabre incident was a conversation two nights previously where she'd outlined her plans for her funeral. This was not unusual. Over the years, as my grandmother progressed through her 80s and into her 90s, I got regular updates about this imagined funeral. She was insistent that she would be laid out in the brown patterned dress. I objected, telling her that not only was it old-fashioned, but that she was now a much smaller woman than she had been 30 years earlier. "Yerra, it'll be fine", she said, "shur Kirwins [the undertaker she had decided on] will sort all that out."
Now it turned out she wasn't entirely convinced about Kirwins' ability to make the dress a snug fit, so a dress rehearsal took place. She concluded that I was right and the mother of the groom dress was abandoned. When my grandmother did eventually die, some fifteen years after her dress rehearsal aged 97, she was buried in the suit she'd bought for her 90th birthday.
I've been surrounded by conversations about dying and death all my life and I'm sure this background has fed into the work I do as a historian and my interest in dark tourism. I'm drawn to cemeteries and memorials, to thinking about those that have gone before us and the impact they've had on the world.
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From RTÉ Radio One's Marian Finucane Show, Gillian O'Brien discusses the concept of dark tourism
I’m far from alone in this. All over the world, there are museums and sites associated with death and suffering and they attract huge numbers - over two million people visit the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau annually, 340,000 go to Robben Island just off Cape Town and about 1.3 million visitors a year arrive at Alcatraz off the coast of California.
Perhaps it's an obsession with our own mortality that causes us to seek out graveyards and tombs; perhaps in part, it is pilgrimage. Visits to concentration camps may be to better understand a horrific chapter in our past and to serve as a reminder that such things should never happen again.
I’m fascinated by the level of public interests in sites, especially those that combine education and entertainment. As Philip Stone has pointed out, dark tourism comes in many shades. Some sites reflect sombrely on the past, others are there to entertain more than educate and many, indeed, do both.
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From RTÉ Radio One's History Show, John Borgonovo on the history of notorious prison island Alcatraz and Colm Flynn reports from Spike Island, known as Ireland's Alcatraz
I find it strange that a country that often seems obsessed with death and dying like Ireland hasn't embraced dark tourism to any significant extent, or at least not in any "branded" fashion. Thanks to Fáilte Ireland, most of the country has been branded with the Wild Atlantic Way, Ireland’s Ancient East (which is far more than just the East!) and now Ireland’s Hidden Heartlands. Given the enthusiasm to stick a label on almost everything, I’m surprised that something like "Dark Ireland" or "Ireland in the Shadows" hasn’t been developed yet as there are certainly plenty of sites that could be branded as dark.
Over the next few months I'm going on my own tour to see how Ireland tells stories of death, famine and incarceration. For this phase of the project, I'm focusing on site-specific locations: places that are not only associated with the stories they tell, but also have a museum or heritage centre associated with them. Armed with a camera and voice recorders I'll be visiting prisons, workhouses, graveyards, ships, and haunted houses to see what (and how) stories about Ireland’s difficult history and heritage are being told.
At the moment I've nearly 30 sites on my list, but I'm sure there are many more scattered around the country. I'm interested in any and all suggestions of places that I should visit on my travels so please email me at g.p.obrien@ljmu.ac.uk if you have any sites (or indeed stories) to add to my list.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
