Stories in Stone

For the Republic

The revolution reached Nenagh as it reached everywhere, and some of the town's young men did not come home from it. Gathered here are the graves of those who died in the fight for the Republic — Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army and Fianna Éireann, most of them barely past twenty, killed by Crown forces in the War of Independence or lost in the Civil War that followed. Several of their stones speak in Irish, raised by their old comrades and by the republicans of North Tipperary. Read together they are the parish's quietest war memorial — a handful of limestone markers to the cost of independence in one Ormond town.