Newry Man Lost

St Peter’s Mother & Baby Home”The Baby Snatchers” is the title of the book written by Mary Creighton recounting her horrific experiences as a young mother trying to keep her baby and escape the Sacred Heart Nuns at St Peter’s Mother and baby Home Castlepollard. The Sacred Heart Nuns arrived in Ireland in 1922 not long after the formation of the Irish Free State on request by the newly formed Irish government to deal with what they called “the problem of women having babies out of wedlock.”The building of St…

The hospital, which was designed by William Murray, opened as the Connacht Asylum in 1833. After a redrawing of the asylum district boundaries in 1850, it was renamed the Ballinasloe District Asylum. New wings were completed in 1871 and 1882. As it expanded conditions became very overcrowded with nearly 1,200 patients by the early 1900s and, having been renamed Ballinasloe Mental Hospital in the late 1920s, it accommodated some 2,000 patients by the 1950s.The facility became St. Brigid’s Hospital in the 1950s. After the introduction of deinstitutionalisation in the late…

I found Brigid’s abandoned house sitting peacefully at the roadside while driving through Co.Donegal. Built in the early 1930s and serving as a family home for over 50 years, this once bustling abode now sits lonely in decay.One can only image the happy memories created within these walls which now leaves a sadness when you see what it has become. Judging from the possessions left behind it is clearly evident that religion played a massive part in family life. There was also an abundance of books, that and the absence…

I visited William’s house in 2012 but due to a lost hard drive that i’ve recently recovered I have just come across these images.Once the Jewel in the Crown of the Galway coastline, William’s house now lies idle.It was built in the late 18th century by an aristocratic family of barons from Sussex who came to Ireland and were granted – or rather, grabbed – vast tracts of land and decided to create “as fine and elegant a private gentleman’s seat as any in Europe”.Lying vacant from 2004 there is…