Eileen Gray was evicted from a Paris grave. Her ashes remain lost but a new memorial has been created

On the last day of November 2025, lawyer and activist Bill Shipsey and the then Irish ambassador to France Niall Burgess were among a group paying respects at the grave of Oscar Wilde on his 125th anniversary.

Afterwards, while still in Père-Lachaise, they decided to drop by the resting place of Ireland’s other celebrity resident of that great Parisian cemetery: architect and designer Eileen Gray.

Born in Enniscorthy, Gray lived much of her long life in France. When she died in Paris at Halloween 1976, she was cremated and her ashes placed in Père-Lachaise’s underground columbarium.

The simple plaque mentioned the date of death but not her birth (August 9th, 1878) because, as Gray’s long-time companion Louise Dany, who had taken care of the arrangements, put it: “Mademoiselle did not like to speak of her age.”

But when Messrs Shipsey and Burgess went looking for the memorial that day, they searched in vain. For as it soon emerged – quelle horreur! – Gray had been evicted from her posthumous home in 1998, for nonpayment of rent.

In this, she repeated the fate of WB Yeats, who also fell foul of French funerary bureaucracy in the 1940s when being ejected from his original grave to a common ossuary at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.

It seems likely Gray’s ashes were moved from her dedicated “niche” into Père Lachaise’s ossuary. Another possibility is they were dispatched to the huge cemetery at Thiais, out beyond the périphérique. Either way, they remain unfound, a year on.

But in the meantime, another quest overtook that one: to regain a niche for Gray at Père-Lachaise, in advance of any return of ashes, and to erect a new memorial there in time for the 50th anniversary of her death, so that her name at least would be remembered.

This was a tight deadline by French bureaucratic standards. Happily, the campaigners enjoyed strong support from Benoît Gallot, dynamic young curator of Père-Lachaise, who lives with his family on the grounds and has published a history of the great necropolis.

He set about securing a new niche for Gray, on the same corridor of the columbarium as before, and only 11 doors up from the old one.

Then there was the question of the plaque. But as a founder of Art for Amnesty (Amnesty International’s artistic programme) and head of its successor, Art for Human Rights, Shipsey is something of an expert in that field.

He commissioned Ciarán Ó Gaora to create a memorial inspired by Gray’s work. The result was an elegantly modernist plaque in blue, black and white, paying tribute to the “Designer et architecte irlandaise”.

It also features one of her guiding principles: “To create, one must first question everything.” In keeping with which spirit, the memorialists questioned Gray’s former reluctance to mention her age, so that the new plaque includes the full parameters of her 98-year-long life: 1878–1976.

For all her success, only three people attended Gray’s funeral. But last Saturday morning, on a beautiful late autumn day in Paris, about 25 of us gathered at Père-Lachaise for the unveiling of the new memorial.

Up at the ground level, a service was taking place to the accompaniment of a loudly-broadcast Pink Floyd song. Down below, we had the more soothing soundtrack of pigeons cooing in the central atrium, as the plaque was jointly unveiled by our new Irish Ambassador in Paris, Alison Milton, and Cloé Fontaine-Pitiot, a French design curator who has championed Gray.

Those present also included Gallot, welcoming a former resident of his cemetery back, if only in name.

Tiny though it is, the Irish community at Père-Lachaise is, he told me, an important one. Wilde remains one of the venue’s star attractions, his grave among the three most visited, alongside those of Jim Morrison and Edith Piaf.

In the absence (for now) of ashes, organisers thought it might a good idea to get a relic – a stone perhaps – from Gray’s homeplace, Brownswood House, to place in the niche.

This job was first delegated to the Irish Diarist. But it took on a literary subplot when I recently met Oisín Ó Nualláin, son of “the brother” and nephew of Flann O’Brien, who mentioned he was going down to Curracloe for the weekend.

The Brownswood mission was then entrusted to him, and he rose to it heroically, returning to Dublin with a whole chunk of Wexford in a Tupperware container: earth, stones and fallen leaves.

I was about to bring all this to Paris last weekend, then panicked about transporting soil across borders without an importation licence.

So instead, I brought only the stones and leaves (pressed between the pages of A Year’s Turning by Michael Viney). These will take their place in the Gray niche in due course. For the moment, pending one final piece of paperwork, even the plaque is not permanently in place yet.

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The thoughts of a restless Shipsey, meanwhile, have already moved on to other possible memorials. You may yet hear more about an Eileen Gray international design competition.