Country Living with Francis Farragher

WE can tend at times to get slightly overwhelmed about how things are so bad in Ireland with the rising cost of living, the difficulty young people have in funding a home for themselves and the extent of illegal drug abuse across all social sectors.

A lot though has changed for the better over the past half-century ago and over recent weeks there was a certain solace in reading about the growing openness in talking about depression and mental health issues, especially in rural Ireland.

Last month the national farming advisory body Teagasc held a comprehensive Open Day in Moore Park, Fermoy, County Cork, with a special section devoted to the work pressure, stresses and mental health issues that can affect farmers the same as anyone else, and maybe even more so, given the often isolated nature of the work.

Being a child of the 1960s, I can remember hearing quite harrowing tales around the kitchen table about how ‘such-and-such-a-one’ had been in ‘The Mental’ for the last 30-years. Often the summary would be: “Once they got him in, there was no out for him.” Even in a young mind it sent little shivers of fear through the brain caverns. ‘The Mental’, of course, was St. Brigid’s Psychiatric Hospital, Ballinasloe.

Here and there, tales would be recounted of family disputes over land where one of the disenfranchised members had been committed to ‘The Mental’ becoming totally institutionalised there without ever having any medical or psychiatric diagnosis to confirm the need for his or her confinement. In local dialect, it was often referred to as ‘Céilí House’, ‘The Mad House’ or just ‘Ball’ with those ‘inside’ said be ‘bad with the nerves’.

St. Brigid’s Hospital in Ballinasloe dates back to the 1830s when it was called the Connacht District Lunatic Asylum designed to accommodate 150 ‘lunatics’ but by the 1950s, there were over 2,000 patients in the institution [mostly all from the Galway-Roscommon area . . . the population of a decent sized Irish town. Even by the mid-1980s there were still nearly 900 patients there.

A most insightful short history of St. Brigid’s Hospital previously the ‘The Mental Hospital’ and before that “The Connaught District Lunatic Asylum” written by local historian, Barry Lally, recalls the piece of legislation which governed admissions to the institution between 1838 and 1945.