Picture: Valerie O’Sullivan
FAMILIES and undertakers have to keep the ashes of deceased people who have been cremated stored in urns on shelves and in cabinets, in their homes and on their premises, because no columbarium wall has been provided in Killarney, it has been highlighted.
The issue has been raised by Cllr Brendan Cronin who is to ask Kerry County Council to explain why it has failed to recognise the urgent need to provide the facility in local cemeteries with suitable capacity to cater for the increasing public need.
“This council takes forever to make any progress,” he said.
Cllr Cronin said councillors in Killarney were promised that a columbarium wall would be part of the new Killarney Burial Ground but he wants to know when a decision will be made and when it will be constructed.
This time last year a meeting of Killarney Municipal District Council was assured that specific details on plans to provide a columbarium wall in the new graveyard for the storage of cremation ashes would be made known “in the coming days”.
Former councillor John Joe Culloty had asked Kerry County Council officials to provide an update on the situation, including information on where, exactly, it would be located and when it would be in place.
The council had previously stated that when parking facilities and the management required for a columbarium wall were taken into consideration, the new burial ground was the most suitable location.
They said it had been designed and costed and a designated space had already been earmarked in the new graveyard.
That meeting – in January of last year – heard that the majority of people in Killarney were expressing a preference to be laid to rest in Aghadoe, as opposed to Knockeenduff, so the option of providing a space to accommodate cremation urns and caskets in Aghadoe should also be looked at.
The new graveyard, provided at an estimated cost of €900,000 to provide space for burials for an estimated 35 years, was opened in July 2018 at the side of a narrow rural roadway in Knockeenduff. It will provide approximately 2,300 burial spaces or plots and there are parking facilities for 40 vehicles.
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