It Occurs To Me: Inmates, patients, poets and other mad beings!

I’m sure many of you watched the powerful and moving All That Remains presented by Niall ‘Bressie’ Breslin on RTÉ One last Wednesday week. 

Although a Mullingar man, he is very proud of his Donegal ancestry - father from Bundoran and grandparents from Rossnowlagh and Carndonagh. Niall pointed out that some 1,300 Irish people were buried in unmarked graves on the grounds of what was once known as St Loman’s Hospital, formerly St Loman’s Lunatic Asylum. 

At the heart of the programme were photographs taken decades ago by author, broadcaster, photographer and well-known gaeilgeoir Matt Nolan. 

The graves are marked by identical small crosses bearing numbers rather than names and were later removed by the health authorities, allegedly due to concerns about vandalism.

 “They were vital pieces of information,” Matt Nolan told the Westmeath Examiner.

 “Each cross had a number, and those numbers were recorded in a burial register. People knew exactly where their relatives were buried. About 20 or 30 years ago, I photographed every single cross. I’m the only person in Ireland who has those photographs.” 

The images show long, orderly rows of identical crosses, stretching across the grounds in a scene Matt compares to the military cemeteries of Normandy.

“It was unbelievable,” he recalls. “They were all the same, row after row. Every cross had a number. Every number meant a person.”

 RTÉ became aware of Matt’s unique archive and contacted him. But as it turned out, as well as the graveyard images, Matt had other valuable images also: many pictures of patients, and short interviews with them.

“There are very few photographs of patients from St Loman’s,” Matt says. “People who wrote books about the hospital featured managers, officials, staff, everybody except the poor old patients.”

Matt had, however, spoken with them, learned their names, and photographed them as individuals rather than as anonymous residents of an institution. Many of those images later appeared in his book Mullingar: Time Goes By, and he still considers them among his most important work.

 “A lot of people today think everyone in St Loman’s was distraught or locked away,” he said.

 “That wasn’t my experience. Many of them were very well-adjusted to life there. They were happy. They had their own rhythm - life in the hospital and life in the town.”

In conversations with Matt, many patients spoke openly about why they had been admitted.

“They knew exactly how they ended up there,” he says. “And when I asked them if they wanted to leave, not one ever expressed a strong wish to do so.”

Some admissions, he believed, stemmed from alcohol issues or behaviour that simply didn’t fit social norms of the time.

 “A family would contact the local doctor, the person would be admitted, and never taken out again,” he says. 

“It was sad in one way, but in another, they lived very full lives.”

While Matt Nolan has to be thanked for his contribution, I wonder about the ‘full lives’ and it was actually sad in more than ‘one way’. 

Over 40 years ago, I read about an inmate in a Mayo psychiatric hospital who had died aged 104 but no records were available to show why he had been incarcerated in the first instance.

I thought it was desperately sad and wrote the following poem, which David Marcus published in his New Irish Writing at the time. 

                             Inmate

At the brave age of a hundred and four,

Quiet John McCorkle died,

Never having had a visitor.

Forty years old when his mother died,

He neglected his Sunday duties,

Preferring a lie-in instead.

The good people of the parish,

Who congregated once a week,

Kept an unobtrusive watch.

A meeting of their village council,

In extraordinary session,

Held he was fit for the mental.

His sister Mary, from New Hampshire,

Home after the funeral,

Claimed the house and fourteen acres.

The day they came to take him away,

The burly Sergeant apologised,

And thanked him for coming quietly.

The day he was finally buried,

His sister’s people stayed at home,

Preferring a lie-in instead. 

                                                The patients

 Children with autism were incarcerated and husbands could deem ‘contrary’ wives as eligible.

 Julianne Clarke’s great grandmother, Julia Leonard was sent to St Loman’s in the late 1800s. 

Julia was one of many committed to places like St Loman’s under vague legislation like the Dangerous Lunatics Act. 

Julia threw tea at her husband Christopher, who was cheating on her. He committed her to St Loman’s and sent their five children into a workhouse. She is quoted as saying: “I’m not mad, neither are half the people in here!”

“We’re taking it to a national level, because we’ve calculated there are 50,000 people buried at 18 institutions across the county,” added Julie Clarke and I immediately thought of St Conal’s in Letterkenny. 

‘I felt that they had been forgotten about and deserved more’

Ten years ago, the wonderful patient advocate, Betty Holmes, said:  “Back in April this year I walked up the back of St Conal’s Hospital one evening and by chance walked in a narrow pathway to discover a large stone with the words, “In commemoration of those who were buried in this cemetery 1866-1900. May they rest in peace.”

“I have to say it upset me no end, to think these poor souls who had probably in effect worked hard and built the St Conal’s that we have all heard of, I never knew about it. I felt that they had been forgotten about and deserved more. When I went home I started to try and find out who in the HSE knew about this graveyard and what could be done about it.” 

One of the most poignant photographs taken by Matt Nolan is of Joe Deegan.

READ NEXT: Donegal students support cancer patients by getting behind Daffodil Day

For years Joe was one of Mullingar’s most recognisable characters. He was a proud Mullingar man and a dedicated Westmeath football supporter.

He went to school in CBS but never liked the place. He regularly found himself sitting in ‘the dunce’s seat’. “Not a very nice place,” he admitted, for it was there that he got regular “beatings” from The Brothers. 

He emigrated to England in the early 1960s and got employment with a circus, where he worked doing daredevil tricks and feeding elephants.

He returned to Mullingar in 1970 and worked part-time with good friends like Joe Healy and Joe Dolan doing odd jobs such as gardening and caddy work on the golf course.

But gradually alcohol was taking him over and he often found himself living rough in various towns around the country. He was certain that he would have died long before he did were it not for the gardaí who often picked him up and took him out to St Loman’s, where he liked being “admitted”… just because the hospital was warm. 

The nuns were his friends too and it was with them that he dined most of the time when he was around Mullingar. He was part of the heart of Mullingar and Westmeath until, as Matt notes,  “the drink caught up on him”. He died in 2010.

                                            Poets and other mad beings!

Another poem of mine David Marcus published over four decades ago was called The Mad Farmer. 

I had read an extract from The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–51) by clergyman and scholar Robert Burton which read “All poets are mad”, and I imagined a lonesome farmer beavering away quietly at his verse, not realising the ‘good’ neighbours were watching!

He did it unbeknownst, or so he said,

His friends with education said ‘instinctive’,

Some older neighbours thought it handed down,

An hereditary trait, his friend agreed.

He gave it little thought and had no time,

An excess of it could put a man to loss,

But often while he hugged the milking stool,

He’d have to tear back in to get it down.

The boys about the road heard tell and laughed,

They figured that he caught the wee cow’s staggers,

The way he used to shake and reel his head,

And twist and turn for no apparent reason.

The word from the committee was he’s doting,

Talking, even listening to the river,

And staring, morning, noon and night at stars,

Certifiable, his friend had clarified.

The day the van came rattling down the laneway,

He was sitting at the table, pen in hand,

Doing what unbeknownst should every poet,

Rhyming off a couplet with a sonnet.