It looks, at first glance, like an ordinary neighbourhood park. But local tradition holds that the ground beneath it contains the dead of the Great Famine, buried here in association with a Union workhouse and fever hospital that once stood on the land now occupied by the hospital to the south. There are no memorials, no boundary walls, no inscriptions. The surface gives nothing away.

The workhouse system, introduced across Ireland in the 1840s, created institutions that were legally required to bury those who died within their walls. Burial grounds attached to these facilities were often unmarked, their occupants interred without coffins or recorded names, the graves laid out in the east-west orientation that was standard Christian practice. Mercy Park appears to follow this pattern precisely. A scattering of uninscribed stone grave-markers was reportedly visible here in the early and mid-twentieth century, but none survive today. The original extent of the burial ground has never been established. In January 2009, exploratory trenching in the north-eastern corner of the park, carried out in advance of sewage pipe installation, partly exposed two adult burials lying side by side, east to west, with no evidence of coffins or formal grave cuts. The bones included finger bones, pelvis, and leg bones from one individual, and leg bones from a second immediately adjacent. An archaeologist recorded both sets of remains before they were reburied, and the pipeline route was altered to avoid further disturbance. It was not the first time the ground had yielded remains; unrecorded human bones had reportedly come to light during construction work in the area in the late twentieth century as well.

The park today is unremarkable in appearance, which is itself something worth sitting with. The burials are almost certainly more extensive than the two exposed in 2009, and the precise boundaries of the ground remain unknown. What lies underfoot at Mercy Park is, in all likelihood, a large and still largely undocumented Famine-era cemetery, hidden not by remoteness or neglect but by the ordinary texture of a busy town.