Finally, at peace

“It really went well. About 300 people attended. I was nervous about it but you couldn’t have asked for better,” said Reilly.
And that included better weather than was forecast for an event that included a salute by a Hibernian honor guard outside St. Peter’s Church and the arrival at the Mass of Cardinal Edward Egan, visiting Irish foreign minister Miche_l Martin, Irish ambassador to Washington, Michael Collins, and Consul General in New York, Niall Burgess.
Cardinal Egan delivered a moving eulogy for the impoverished immigrants who had made the harrowing voyage across the Atlantic only to die after making landfall in America.
“Imagine the pain of those who saw their relatives put into a mass grave. But somehow we made it, and we became citizens of the United States of America,” the cardinal told the congregation.
The centerpiece of the of the memorial ceremony was the arrival in the church of two coffins, one light brown, the other cream colored.
The former contained the remains of adults, including most of the remains of two individuals who were discovered during excavation for a new courthouse complex for the borough.
The lighter colored coffin contained the remains of immigrants children.
Both were carried into the church by kilt-wearing Hibernians. Members of the congregations included other Richmond County Hibernians, men and women members of the ladies auxiliary.
After the Mass the remains were interred in the nearby Moravian Cemetery. But they will stay there for just a couple of years.
The plan is to re-inter the remains at the original site of discovery in 2012, this once the construction work has been concluded at the court site. The final resting place will be known as “Memorial Green.”
The remains were exhumed in 2007 from an existing parking area, the St. George municipal lot, which dates to the 1950s. The site is at the intersection of St. Mark’s Place, Hyatt Street and Central Avenue in the St. George neighborhood.
The dig site was once known as the Marine Hospital Complex, a facility that operated from 1799 until 1858 and was propelled into the front lines of the Great Hunger tragedy during the 1840s.
The advocacy group, Friends of Abandoned Cemeteries of Staten Island, headed by local activist Lynn Rogers, led the campaign to properly memorialize the long dead immigrants who have now been granted an unlikely new lease of a historical life, long due recognition and a finally known final resting place.