John Daly, a Mullingar native and a resident of St Loman’s Hospital. He is photographed going for a walk in the town. In the background is St Patrick’s Male unit. Photo taken 1989.

Nolan’s photographs give voice to forgotten lives of St Loman’s

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A powerful new RTÉ documentary on St Loman’s Hospital, Mullingar, is set to bring long-forgotten lives back into public view, and at its heart are photographs taken decades ago by author, broadcaster, photographer and well-known Gaeilgeoir Matt Nolan.

The hour-long documentary, ‘All That Remains’, to air on Wednesday March 11 at 9.35pm on RTÉ One, focuses on patients who were buried in the grounds of St Loman’s Hospital over the last century, their graves marked by identical small crosses bearing numbers rather than names.

The crosses were later removed by the health authorities due to concerns about vandalism, severing the last link between the memory of those people, and the exact plot in which they were buried.

“They were vital pieces of information,” Matt Nolan explains. “Each cross had a number, and those numbers were recorded in a burial register. People knew exactly where their relatives were buried.”

Fortuitously, Matt, as it transpired, had already created what may now be the only surviving visual record of those graves.

“About 20 or 30 years ago, I photographed every single cross,” he says. “I’m the only person in Ireland who has those photographs.”

The images show long, orderly rows of identical crosses, stretching across the grounds in a scene Matt compares to the military cemeteries of Normandy.

“It was unbelievable,” he recalls. “They were all the same, row after row. Every cross had a number. Every number meant a person.”

RTÉ became aware of Matt’s unique archive and contacted him. But as it turned out, as well as the graveyard images, Matt had other valuable images also: many pictures of patients, and short interviews with them.

“There are very few photographs of patients from St Loman’s,” Matt says. “People who wrote books about the hospital featured managers, officials, staff, everybody except the poor old patients.”

Matt had, however, spoken with them, learned their names, and photographed them as individuals rather than as anonymous residents of an institution. Many of those images later appeared in his book Mullingar: Time Goes By, and he still considers them among his most important work.

“Most of those characters are dead now,” he says. “But they’re going to come to life again in this documentary.”

Many of the patients were from Mullingar and the wider Westmeath area. Far from being invisible, they were familiar faces around town.

“You’d see them walking through Mullingar, going into betting offices at the weekends, or just generally going about their business,” Matt recalls. “They were very well-known characters.”

“One or two of them used to go into Christie Maye in the Greville Arms every morning for coffee,” he recalled, referring to the well-known Mullingar hotel. “They were very much part of places like the Greville.

“They were part of the town,” he says. “You’d see them sitting in Market Square, chatting away. Lovely, lovely people.”

Matt believes modern perceptions of psychiatric hospitals often miss this reality.

“A lot of people today think everyone in St Loman’s was distraught or locked away,” he says. “That wasn’t my experience. Many of them were very well-adjusted to life there. They were happy. They had their own rhythm - life in the hospital and life in the town.”

In conversations with Matt, many patients spoke openly about why they had been admitted.

“They knew exactly how they ended up there,” he says. “And when I asked them if they wanted to leave, not one ever expressed a strong wish to do so.”

Some admissions, he believes, stemmed from alcohol issues or behaviour that simply didn’t fit social norms of the time.

“A family would contact the local doctor, the person would be admitted, and never taken out again,” he says. “It was sad in one way, but in another, they lived very full lives.”

For Nolan, those encounters changed him.

“They gave me a completely different slant on life,” he says quietly.

The RTÉ documentary, while using Nolan’s photographs to illustrate daily life in St Loman’s, will place particular emphasis on the burial ground and the people once marked only by numbered crosses, restoring identity where it was stripped away.

The cemetery at St Loman’s Hospital in Mullingar holds the remains of 1,300 patients buried there between 1907 and 1971. Their graves were marked not by names, but by small iron crosses bearing only simple reference numbers. Those interred were patients of the Mullingar District Asylum, later known as St Loman’s Hospital, with two notable exceptions: Dr Arthur Finnegan, resident medical superintendent from 1886 to 1912, and his wife, Eleanor Finnegan, who served as matron of the District Asylum from 1882 to 1897. The iron crosses were removed some years ago, and the photograph above is believed to be the only surviving image of those once-familiar markers. In March, RTÉ will screen a new documentary, All That Remains, which will feature these photos by Matt Nolan. It examines the history of the cemetery and seeks to restore identity and dignity to those buried there by recording the names behind the numbers. Photo taken 1989.
Two old friends who would often meet in the mid-morning at the Market Square, to discuss how Mullingar was getting on. Jimmy Nooney, a storeman with Westmeath County Council, (on left) lived in Old Springfield and Jimmy McArdle was a resident at St Loman’s Hospital. Photo taken 1982.
For years Joe Deegan was one of Mullingar’s most recognisable characters. He was a proud Mullingar man and a dedicated Westmeath football supporter. He went to school in CBS but never liked the place. He regularly found himself sitting in ‘the dunce’s seat’. “Not a very nice place,” he admitted for it was there that he got regular “beatings” from The Brothers. He emigrated to England in the early 1960s and got employment with a circus, where he worked doing daredevil tricks and feeding elephants. He returned to Mullingar in 1970 and worked part-time with good friends like Joe Healy and Joe Dolan doing odd jobs such as gardening and caddy work on the golf course. But gradually alcohol was taking him over and he often found himself living rough in various towns around the country. He was certain that he would have died long before he did were it not for the gardaí who often picked him up and took him out to St Loman’s, where he liked being “admitted”… just because the hospital was warm. The Nuns were his friends too and it was with them that he dined most of the time when he was around Mullingar. He was part of the heart of Mullingar and Westmeath until ‘the drink’ caught up on him. He died in 2010. Photo taken 1999.
Mick Bracken, long-term resident of St Loman’s, was someone who liked to have a flutter on a horse most days. He is photographed in Austin Friar Street checking on results at Barrys Betting Office in 1984.
John Daly, a Mullingar native and a resident of St Loman’s Hospital. He is photographed going for a walk in the town. In the background is St Patrick’s Male unit. Photo taken 1989.

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