The fire in Cavan’s orphanage, February 1943

by planetparker

Sixty-eight years have now passed insce the dreadful events in Cavan town’s orphanage, yet the victims and their families are still waiting for some form of fitting commemoration. My friend Sean Galligan has been campaigning to address this, and has set up a group on Facebook dedicated the Victims of Cavan’s Orphanage Fire “Remember the Cavan Orphanage Victims”. What’s more, he’s organised a public meeting to explore possible forms of commemoration. This is to be held in the Farnham Arms Hotel, Cavan town, on March 21st at 8 pm.

 I have appended an article I wrote about the Cavan convent fire, that was published in the Cavan Echo in February 2007.

 The victims of those terrible events and their families have had to wait long enough for justice. They have been made to inhabit a world dominated by a code of silence, which will be readily understood by anyone reading recent revelations. When the Diocese of Kilmore wants to cover something up they don’t do it by halves.

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The fire which swept through the top storey of St Joseph’s orphanage in Cavan town in the early morning of February 24th 1943 is one of the most sickening events to have ever occurred in Cavan town.

 An enclosed order

 The Poor Clares were an enclosed order of nuns, eschewing contact with the outside world. They had been brought to Cavan in the 1860s by Bishop Nicholas Conaty. They built a convent, chapel and school at the top of the town’s Church Street, and in 1868 they opened an orphanage for girls there.

Its inmates embraced a sad spectrum of Irish life. Some were orphans; others had been abandoned by parents often incapable of looking after them through hardship or illness. A handful were illegitimate. At the orphanage they were sometimes brutalised by nuns who were themselves psychologically damaged through living in a world that had rejected all human feeling.

 The children were in effect prisoners. They were segregated from the other children in the school and beaten more frequently.  They were treated as slaves and were cold, badly-clothed and ill-nourished. A small book used at the orphanage described the lessons they received in cookery and laundry work. They were seldom offered the opportunity to eat the dishes they had prepared.

 The tragedy unfurls

 In the early hours of February 24th, 1943 a fire in the orphanage’s laundry quickly spread to St Clare’s Dormitory on the building’s top floor, trapping over forty young girls. Attempts at evacuating the children had been thwarted by some of the nuns, who apparently did not want any of the girls to be seen in their nocturnal attire. The town’s fire engine consisted of a cart and hose-pipe. When it was attached to a standpipe the hose was full of holes and was of no use whatsoever. Some long ladders belonging to the urban district council, which might have been capable of reaching the top floor, fell apart and could not be extended.

 The fire was eventually brought under control by the Auxiliary Fire Service. A properly-equipped fire engine eventually arrived from Dundalk at 5 am. By this time the fire was extinguished: so too were the lives of thirty-five residents of the orphanage, plus an elderly resident of the convent. A number of children were injured jumping to safety. None of the nuns was amongst the casualties.

 Heroism

 There were many acts of heroism. Some girls went back into the fire in an attempt to save their friends, often paying the ultimate price. Louis Blessing, a star of the county Gaelic football team which had first brought the All-Ireland trophy to Cavan, broke down locked doors and organised additional help. Mattie Hand, an employee of the Electricity Supply Board had some ladders capable of reaching the beleaguered children. He saved five girls who were on the point of being consumed by the flames.

 Crocodile tears

 In the days that followed messages of sympathy flooded in to Cavan, though they were seldom addressed directly to the families of the deceased or the survivors. They were directed to the abbess of the Poor Clare’s Convent, none of whom had perished, and stranger still they were sent to the Catholic Bishop of Kilmore, Dr Lyons. In the requiem mass the bishop spoke of the “… terrible ordeal it has been for the good nuns to have the fierce glare of publicity turned on their quiet sheltered lives.”

 The dead were encased in eight separate coffins. They were buried in a mass grave at Cullies cemetery outside Cavan. Initially, this bore neither their names nor the dates of their deaths.

 The response of the great and the good in Cavan was stomach churning. The town’s lack of adequate means for fighting a fire had been rightly criticised in the national press. Yet this criticism was rejected in a spirit of sullen vindictiveness by the local political elite. Senator Patrick Baxter used his membership of the upper house to deliver an intemperate attack on the press, denouncing its “misrepresentation of the facts”. Those responsible for the maintenance of safety equipment in the town made idiotic statements claiming that the hoses and ladders were in “excellent condition” and in “perfect order.” A member of the council stated that the town had been “disgraced” by the Irish Times in its exposure of the council’s abysmal negligence. Such stinging criticism was obviously more unsettling to the council than the immolation of the girls.

 The inquiry

 A commission of inquiry was set up. It met in Cavan’s Court House in April. The victims did not have any legal representation – it was clear that they did not matter. Among the evidence to trickle from it was just how remiss the fire prevention mechanisms in the orphanage had been. It also showed up the truly shambolic nature of Cavan town’s fire brigade, described by a commission member as “an afternoon’s amusement.” Its captain even claimed that he was only “sort of” captain,

 Culpability

 A finger of culpability could have been pointed with earnestness, but as it would have been directed at powerful interests the findings of the commission were something of a watered down whitewash. It stated that while it was “satisfied that more efficient means of escape should have been made available”, it added that it could not state that “… their absence of these contributed to the loss of life…” Not really to blame, only sort of. It did not require much reading between the lines to discern the urban district council’s negligence, yet the commission commented: “… we do not wish to suggest that the council was … avoiding its duty.” Not really to blame, only sort of. It did recommend the creation of adequate fire-fighting services throughout the country.

 The secretary to the commission was civil servant Brian O’Nolan, far better known as the brilliant writer Flann O’Brian and satirist Myles na gCopaleen. Perhaps he best summed up the commission of inquiry in a limerick he supposedly penned in a Cavan pub.

 In Cavan there was a great fire

Joe McCarthy was sent down to enquire.

If the nuns were to blame

It would be a shame

So it had to be caused by a wire.

 

O’Nolan’s scepticism was to cost him his civil service career in the future, for it was a Cavan politician, Paddy Smith, who, when named minister of O Nuallain’s department, oversaw his “easing out” from the Department of Local Government.

The end of the orphanage

St Joseph’s orphanage closed its doors in 1967. It must be said that not all of the nuns who served there were tyrants. It has taken many years for the acrid stench from the timbers of the orphanage to clear from the nostrils of Cavan’s town-folk, not to mention the refusal of those in positions of authority to accept blame. 

© Ciaran Parker 2007