Sisters of Mercy arrived in Mayo's county town in 1853

PART ONE

By Tom Gillespie

A SOUVENIR booklet entitled A Doorway Through Time, citing the history of St. Angela’s National School, Castlebar, 1894 to 2015, recalls how the proprietor of The Connaught Telegraph, Sir Frederick Cavendish, among others, played a vital role in getting the ball rolling in securing the site for the school for the Sisters of Mercy.

Ireland’s rules of the 19th century did not facilitate a local beneficial administrative system as we know it today.

The people were rules by Dublin/London more or less by a local landlord system and any improvements of facilities or other developments attempted by the people would have to be sanctioned and have the full consent of the landlord.

At that time it was extremely difficult to establish a Catholic sponsored educational system, for example, in the mid-1800s and the people fo Castlebar were in extreme need of education and support of every kind.

In 1845 the local parish priest, Fr. Richard Gibbons, who was a native of Keelogues, approached the local landlord, Field Marshal George Charles Bingham, the 3rd Earl of Lucan, seeking facilities and permission from him to allow a convent in the area.

The landlord had such a dislike for both the priests and the nuns that he refused point blank and would not have a convent anywhere in or around Castlebar and stated that he considered it to be against the law.

It was about then also at the height of the Famine that Lord Lucan closed the Workhouse doors in the face of the local people who were then in despair.

The Connaught Telegraph, in an article of October 10, 1953, the occasion of the Sisters of Mercy centenary celebrations, reflected on how four local gentlemen in the late 1800s – Mr. Mathew Gibbons, Mr. William Walsh, Mr. Martin Sheridan and Frederick Cavendish – between them purchased a private dwelling for Catholic use, thereby outwitting the landlord and securing a foothold for the future.

The needs of the people at that time were enormous and the professional ability of the nuns soon found its way with great affection into the hearts and minds of the people.

In early 1854 a group of 16 Mercy nuns – led by Mother Superior Jane Francis Bridgeman from Kinsale Convent and born in the village of Ballagh in the parish of Ruan, Co. Clare, in 1912 and who was a relative of Daniel O’Connell through her mother Lucy Reddan – ventured the arduous journey to Crimea on a world humanitarian mission to minister to the sick and wounded on the battlefields and barn hospitals, as war was being waged there by England, France and Turkey against Russia.

In Crimea they worked alongside an English lady, Florence Nightingale, who was also known as 'Lady of the Lamp’.

Mother Bridgeman found Nightingale to be a very strong-minded and independent character but found that she was wise enough to listen and learn when she discovered the advanced nursing knowledge and superior professional governance ability of the Irish nuns. Nightingale even expressed her admiration for their nursing knowledge and skill, and declared her dependance on them on matters of nursing practice and management.

At that time also nuns from both Galway and Westport convents had volunteered to minister in Crimea but they were refused permission to travel by the them Bishop of Galway and Oughterard native, Dr. Laurence O’Donnell.

Towards the end of the war, the Mercy Sisters lost one colleague, a Sister Elizabeth Butler, to typhus on Sunday, February 23, 1856, and whom they buried in Crimea. At her funeral, her coffin was carried by soldiers from the battlefield with great dignity and mourning, such was the respect and high regard she was held in by those men of battler.

The Mercy nuns were not awarded their due official recognition on returning home, while Nightingale accepted full credit and honour. It was long after in 1897 and at the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria that the Irish nuns were fully recognised and honoured, when at that time the Mother Superior, Aloysius Doyle, who was the only surviving member of the original nursing missionary party, accepted on behalf of her colleagues the Royal Red Cross Decoration.

Mother Doyle was too ill to attend the Royal Ceremony and the award had to be sent on to her to the Mercy Convent in Gort, Co. Galway, which she herself had founded in 1857 and where she died in 1908 at the age of 94-years.

Coincidently, Field Marshal Bingham went to fight in the Crimean War where he took leadership of men on October 25, 1854. With other commanders he led soldiers into what is now known as the infamous Battle of Balaclava, where a large number of soldiers of the Light Brigade were slaughtered. For the folly of his actions, Lord Lucan was recalled home by his authorities and returned to Castlebar in dishonour in 1855.

While in Crimea, Lord Lucan saw the nuns at work in the barn hospitals attending with dedication and merciful care of the sick and wounded of all creeds and colours. What he had seen changed his harsh dislike of the nuns to one of admiration and he became more amenable to the possibility of allowing a convent to be built in Castlebar.

Unfortunately, Fr. Gibbons died of fever in 1847 without witnessing this transformation and change of heart towards the nuns. It fell to his successor, Archdeacon James McHale, to approach the landlord again on the idea of having a convent in the area.

On December 16, 1852, for the sum of £1,375, he purchased from the landlord the building known as Rock House and locally referred to as 'Lord Lucan’s Bank’. The building stood on a site of the original gate house to the old castle at Rock Square.

This was prepared for the establishment of the house of Mercy in Castlebar, which was inhabited on May 31, 1853 – the Feast of St. Angela – by a Sister Margaret White and four other sisters from St. Vincent’s Convent, Galway.

This party arrived in Castlebar by the rickety stagecoach of the time. Sr. Margaret returned to St. Vincent’s two months afterwards leaving Sr. Aloysius Langan as superior of the new St. Angela’s Convent in Castlebar.

NEXT WEEK: Margaret Burke-Sheridan was student number 1,117.