Sir- Chris Dooley's article on the gathering of the Emmets(June 26th) repeats the widely held belief that Robert Emmet's burial site "remains a mystery". In fact its whereabouts have long been known.
Emmet's headless body was taken from the "Hospital fields", in which it was first buried =, and placed in a vault of the Trevor family in St Paul's Church, North king Street. It was generally believed throughout the nineteenth century that it was there; and, when the vault was opened in 1904, it was found to contain one coffin more than the family accounted for , and in this was the headless skeleton of a young man.
The American Scholar, Helen Landreth, exhaustively researched the details of Emmet's death and burial, and published the evidence in The Pursuit of Robert Emmet (1949).The only mystery is a modern one. What happened to all the bodies in the vaults, including Emmet's, when St Paul's church was converted into offices in 1987? - Yours, etc., Seamus O'Brogain,
Shankill.Co Dublin.