St Fergal’s Cemetery in Ballacolla is relatively new with just 46 names recorded on the headstones – the oldest is on the front row, dated 1989.
A number of headstones include photographs of those residing in the graves but it was the photograph of Fergus Hanlon that paused my ramble – that face looked familiar.
I should not, in hindsight, be surprised that my recording of roadside memorials and my walks through graveyards should occasionally overlap. It doesn’t happen often but it did last week. Yesterday, I went searching through folders of photographs.
It was in 2015 that I stopped at the memorial on the R445 outside Portlaoise that remembers Matthew Peters, Aoife Carroll, Raymond Cuddy, Lorraine Bowe, and Fergal Hanlon. The memorial contains a photograph of each of the five who died twenty seven years ago today.