‘St Loman’s was a great place to work’, locals recall

Among those who attended the launch of the book Her Name was Julia Grave number 339 in Trim last week were Odran and Noelle Hynes from Porterstown, Killucan, and Des and Kay White from Athboy. All four worked in St Loman’s Hospital, Mullingar, and had interesting memories of what it was like behind the walls of the magnificent Victorian façade of what was once the Mullingar District Lunatic Asylum.

Odran, who was co-author of The History of St Loman’s Hospital in Changing Times, published in 2014, also helped in the research for this latest book.

Noelle still works part time at the hospital, which she said has changed a lot since she started there in 1979. “It is a much freer place now, all modern, but it was never a bad place to work,” she said. She resents the fact that asylums are always depicted in a poor light, an image that is hard to change, she feels.

Noelle recalls one of the student nurses asking a patient if he liked it in St Loman’s. He replied: ‘You have to be mad to get in here, but you would have to be mad to leave.’ She pointed out that in the hospital patients had comforts that many of them would never have enjoyed at home. For instance, at the hospital they “had their own meat and their own butcher, and some of their own vegetables, and the food was fantastic”, Noelle remarked.

Odran and Noelle were among 23 students who started training at the hospital on the same day, the day after the Pope’s Mass in Galway in 1979. They married in 1985.

“It was like a town, a hive of activity,” Odran recalled. He and Noelle spoke of the many activities in which the patients were involved, from assembling and packaging clothes pegs to working on the farm and in the boathouse where as well as boats, they made dolls houses, stools, shelving units and other items, while others made concrete paling posts, under the guidance of Christy Garry. The patients were all paid for their labour, the couple explained. Des and Kay White also worked together in St Loman’s. Des started in 1965 and retired 18 years ago. Kay, a nurse from Galway, came to St Loman’s to do the three months of psychiatric nurse training she needed to work in Australia, where she was headed, till she met Des and her plans changed. They married 53 years ago.

Des remembers well the cemetery when he started. There was a mortuary nurse and every grave had a cross and a number recorded in the mortuary book, he said. The graveyard was well maintained by the patients who worked on landscaping.

He remembers too the dairy farm at St Loman’s. The patients that worked on it had a separate residence at Pettitswood.

St Loman’s was a great place to work and we made great friends there, he said, an assertion that was echoed by the others.

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