Year: 2022

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…