Children Of The Poor Clares (6 page)

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The flames were prevented from spreading into the convent building by the country’s wartime Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) trailer pump. It was not part of the town’s fire equipment, and had been brought to the fire only because Louis Blessing sent James Meehan, the taxi driver, to arouse the crew. By the time a well-equipped fire brigade arrived from Dundalk, the nearest large town, it was 5 a.m. and the AFS had the fire under control. By daybreak only the burnt-out shell of the orphanage remained, damp wisps of smoke curling up from the debris. The main convent building was out of danger and the Sisters were all safe.

The surviving children were scattered through the town. Some had gone to the house of a local physician, Dr. Cullen. Others had fled in panic out into the fields behind the orphanage. People living on the outskirts of the town opened their doors in the early hours of the morning to find children sobbing out that the orphanage had been burnt to the ground. The babies and smaller children who had been taken from the Infirmary were brought to the steward’s house and, later in the morning, accommodation was found for all the children in the new sanatorium just outside the town.

One of the last children to escape alive had gone across to the hospital to sit with a girl who had jumped out of the window. ‘Her teeth were all pushed in and she was spitting blood. Then a doctor came and I was frightened he would examine me so I ran out and went to Dr Cullen’s house. The police were coming round to find out who had survived. Then I went over to the convent and went into the nuns and they sat up with me.’

The coming of daylight revealed to the people of Cavan the horrific extent of the disaster. All business premises were closed and, in tense silence, many people watched the removal of charred bodies from the heap of stones and burnt wood. There was a terrible stench over the town and the bodies, when found, appeared to the onlookers to resemble roast turkeys. The only body which could be positively identified was that of Mary Lowry, who had round her neck a little gold cross and chain given to her, as a prize, by the previous bishop of the diocese. She had wanted to become a nun.

A survivor: ‘In the morning I went through the yard. They were bringing out the bodies, sometimes just parts of bodies. A garda took me away from it and we were going out the courtyard door into the street when my sister came in. She looked at me as though she was going to faint. She said she had been going round and round and thought I must be one of the dead.’ One man recalled for us his fruitless search from door to door for his two sisters, aged nine and sixteen, who had been put into the orphanage because of their mother’s chronic mental illness. The mother of two of the dead children, a Mrs. Cassidy, came from Belfast. She took her surviving daughter from the Orphanage and was heard to scream at the nuns that she would never again set foot in a Catholic church. A Junior Counsel at the Inquiry into the fire said to us that the nuns had told him they had received no inquiries from some of the relatives about the fate of their children.

The convent gardener was on his way to work when he met some of the local town councillors. His son later recalled that when they told his father about the fire, he first thought they were joking. ‘He was a man who did not drink, but that night he went into a pub. He never really got over it. You see, he
knew
all those children.’

During the day, reporters arrived in the small town and watched with the local people while the thirty-six bodies were recovered and, never to be forgotten by anyone who witnessed it, placed in eight coffins. As the
Irish
Times
reported it: ‘Darkness was beginning to fall when the work… was completed. Many a strong man who wielded his shovel or pick with Herculean energy during the day wept bitterly at the tragedy of the strange and silent coffining.’ In a corner of the yard, three children were standing with the nuns and staring as the men shouldered the coffins, carried them to the convent chapel and laid them before the altar.

Dignitaries were arriving to express their condolences. The Bishop of Kilmore, Most Rev. Dr Lyons, visited the convent in the morning and spoke to an
Irish
Times
reporter of the very fine work which the Poor Clares had done for a great many years in the town. Later, Tomas Derrig, Minister for Education, serving many terms in that office, arrived to sympathise with the Mother Abbess and the community. Callers at the bishop’s house included Lord Farnham, the local big landowner, and Dr Lyons received many messages of sympathy from Cardinal MacRory and other members of the hierarchy, Mr de Valera, the Taoiseach
4
, the American ambassador, the British representative, the League of Prayer for the Canonisation of the Blessed Oliver Plunkett, and the Catholic Truth Society. During the days that followed, donations of several hundred pounds were given, as gestures of sympathy, to the Mother Abbess and to the bishop.

Irish newspapers gave wide coverage to the tragedy. In an interview, the Mother Abbess told a reporter that the children were never locked in their rooms at any time, but could always gain access through the doors to the courtyard below. Miss Bridget O’Reilly, who, it was learned, was the Mother Abbess’ sister, and who had been in charge of the top two dormitories, said that the children received instruction in fire drill once a week and had been told to use the iron staircase in the event of an emergency.

The article continued: ‘Police investigations have shown that none of the dormitory doors was locked but one door on the first landing of an iron staircase inside the building was locked. The children could have escaped by way of a corridor leading to another part of the building.’

An article in
The
Belfast
Telegraph
commented that St Joseph’s was considered to be ‘one of the best Industrial Schools in the country’.

Some of those involved in the struggle to save the children forcefully expressed their criticism in the press about the inadequacy of the fire-fighting equipment. One anonymous tradesman was quoted as saying that ‘the brigade was not fit to wash a bus’, and Louis Blessing was reported in the
Irish
Times
as saying that ‘Cavan should be ashamed of itself. Had rescue apparatus been available in time, most of the children would have been saved.’

Two of the rescuers we met could never forget that terrible night. Mattie Hand, whose ESB ladder had enabled some children to be plucked from the edge of the inferno said ‘The place went up like a box of matches because of all the polishing they had to do. It was Lent at the time and we were all on the tack
5
but we had to go on the beer after that. The
Irish
Times
were after me, buying me drink, trying to get a criticism of the nuns from me. I drank their beer but said nothing.’

John McNally: ‘That night changed me. I was devil-may-care before. I’d go to the pictures and dances with lots of fellows and girls, but after seeing the children and old Maggie Smith… Only a couple of days before I’d repaired a religious statue for her. It had belonged to her mother and I suppose it was burned along with her. After the fire I started to realise what it was to be still alive. It made me kinder. At first I couldn’t sleep, nor could a lot of us. I could still see and hear the children for a long time.’

An inquest on the victims was opened and adjourned
sine
die
at the Cavan courthouse. P. N. Smith, solicitor and town councillor, who appeared for the community of the Poor Clares, said that the Sisters would give every help to the investigation of all circumstances of the tragedy.

The funeral took place on 25 February. Requiem Mass was celebrated in the convent chapel by the bishop, while the nuns stood silently behind their grille at the back. At the end of the Mass the coffins were carried through the convent grounds by members of the Local Security Force (an official war-time organisation), past the still-smouldering ruins of the orphanage. A pile of hoops which the children had played with the day before they died were lying against the wall in the yard. As the nuns passed the burnt-out buildings, they were seen to weep. They left the cortege when they reached the convent gates.

A crowd of several thousand people had gathered silently along the street to watch as the coffins were put into hearses, and the funeral procession began its journey to Cullies Cemetery outside the town. There, as a reporter described it: ‘Men and women broke down and wept as the eight nameless coffins containing the remains of the thirty-five children were lowered into the huge grave. The most tragic figures in the crowd of mourners were two fathers and a mother, each of whom had lost two daughters.’ One of these was Mrs. Cassidy. She appeared at the funeral with her surviving daughter. Many prominent citizens were present: Lord Farnham; the local Sinn Fein Senator, Patrick Baxter; Eamon de Valera’s parliamentary secretary, and the Protestant Bishop, Dr. Hughes.

At Mass in the cathedral on the following Sunday, the bishop asked the congregation ‘to pray for comfort to be given to the relatives and friends of these little angels and to the dear Sisters who have devoted themselves to the care of these children for the love of God, so tenderly and successfully… You can realise what a terrible ordeal it has been for the good nuns to have the fierce glare of publicity turned on their quiet sheltered lives while weeping over the loss of these little ones. St Joseph’s Orphanage is an institution of which Kilmore diocese has reason to be proud. I exhort the faithful to pray fervently and humbly that it may please Almighty God to accept the sacrifice of these little ones, and thus ward off a greater affliction.’

Later in the week, after some repairs to damaged parts of the convent building, the remaining children were brought back in cars from the sanatorium. ‘Before leaving,’ the local newspaper,
The
Anglo-Celt,
reported, ‘they thanked the ladies of the Red Cross, the country and town Medical Officers of Health for their kindness and those of the children spoken to expressed their pleasure at returning to the nuns in the convent.’

At a meeting the following Monday, the Urban District Council (UDC) discussed allegations in the national newspapers about the lack of fire-fighting equipment. A councillor complained that Cavan had been disgraced in the
Irish
Times
(at that time, a predominantly Protestant and Unionist newspaper). Mr Gaffney, the town surveyor, insisted that there could be no doubt that there was sufficient equipment at the fire to deal with it—’As far as we are concerned, everything was in perfect order.’ He was supported by the other councillors except for one who, when he enquired what the arrangements were for calling out the brigade, was reprimanded by the chairman, Miss Brady: ‘Are you criticising the council?’

During his funeral oration in the convent chapel, the eight coffins laid out before him, the Bishop of Kilmore said, ‘In the presence of this terrible calamity, which it has moved Almighty God to visit on us, we bow our heads in resignation and humility… These little children, who had not the care of their parents, but had a beautiful substitute in the gentle protection of the Sisters, were snatched away in the dawn of life. Dear little angels, now before God in Heaven, they were taken away before the gold of their innocence had been tarnished by the soil of the world.’

His words were to be recalled by the poet Austin Clarke:

Martyr and heretic

Have been the shrieking wick.

But smoke of faith on fire

Can hide us from enquiry

And trust in Providence

Rid us of vain expense.

So why should pity uncage

A burning orphanage,

Bar flight to little souls

That set no churchbell tolling?

Cast-iron step and rail

Could but prolong the wailing:

Has not a Bishop declared

That flame-wrapped babes are spared

Our life-time of temptation?

Leap, mind, in consolation

For heart can only lodge

Itself, plucked out by logic.

Those children, charred in Cavan,

Passed straight through Hell to Heaven.

‘Three
Poems
about
Children’
from
Ancient
Lights
(1955)

CHAPTER
TWO
 

Inquiry

Events outside Ireland in war-torn Europe were on an immense and ghastly scale. Even the news of the deaths, that March, of 178 people in a London Underground station was pushed quickly from the newspapers. In
The
Anglo-Celt
, a typical story at the time was the sentencing of a local man to nine months’ imprisonment, with a heavy fine of £900, for selling goods smuggled from the North on the black market. But a tragedy on the scale of the fire at St. Joseph’s, then the second worst fire on record in Ireland, was the major story for days in Irish newspapers.

It was immediately understood that there would have to be a formal inquiry. Within days, Minister for Local Government and Public Health,
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Seán MacEntee moved a motion in the Dáil: ‘It is expedient that a Tribunal be established for inquiring into the following matters of urgent public importance, that is to say: the cause of the fire which occurred during the night of Tuesday 23 February 1943 at St Joseph’s Orphanage, Main Street, Cavan, and the circumstances in which loss of life was occasioned by the said fire, and to make such recommendations in relation thereto as the tribunal may think proper.’