This Europe: Des res in city of the dead is a step too far

More than a quarter of Ireland's residents are crowded into the Dublin area, and thanks to a decade-long property boom the city is now the second most expensive capital in the eurozone.

Space is like gold dust, and churches, factories, army barracks and warehouses have all been converted for residential use. This week, however, brought a step too far.

Because of a public outcry, managers of the historic Glasnevin cemetery in the north of the city said they were shelving plans to build 11 luxury houses within the 160-acre (65-hectare) graveyard.

Called "Ghoulish Row" by the media, the plan would have led to about 200 paupers' graves being moved to make way for townhouses retailing at €250,000–€350,000 (£160,000–£220,000) each.

According to George McCullough, the cemetery manager, the plan has been dropped, for now, after what he called "an orchestrated campaign by the National Graves Association" – which tends the graves of dead Republicans.

Although Glasnevin is non-denominational, it was opened in 1832 by the Dublin Catholic Committee as the first graveyard in the city where Catholic burial rites could be legally conducted. Since then, 1.5 million people have been buried there, comfortably outnumbering the city's population today.

Among those interred are the Irish nationalist leaders Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell, and the British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Apart from the 160-foot (49m) replica of an Irish round tower that marks O'Connell's tomb, the cemetery's most curious feature are its high walls studded with watchtowers. Musket-toting guards used to sit in them and watch for "resurrectionists" out to steal fresh corpses for the Trinity College medical school.