Sunday Independent St Brigid’s feature 02.02.2025
Sara Colohan
A young nurse at St Brigid’s Mental Hospital in Ballinasloe, Co Galway slipped out of her uniform and into her Sunday best. Her long shift over, she was going on a first date with a handsome male nurse she’d met at work.
As she passed through the women’s ward, one of the patients, distressed at the sight of her finery, hurled a slop bucket in her direction. Frozen in shock, she stood drenched in urine. Her colleagues quickly came to her rescue, washing her down and finding a fresh dress for her to wear. Against the odds, she made it to her date on time.
That nurse was my grandmother, Annie Colohan. She and my grandfather, both psychiatric nurses at the hospital, married a year later in 1933 – 100 years after St Brigid’s was built. Their story was one of the first I heard about ‘The Big House’ and it planted the seed of a lifelong curiosity about the place and the many lives it touched.
St Brigid’s, which closed in 2013, was once Europe’s largest mental institution.
Ireland is often celebrated as a land of saints and scholars, known for its rich traditions and culture. But behind this proud reputation lies a quieter, more troubling history.
While the horrors of the Catholic Church and mother-and-baby homes have rightly dominated much of our national reckoning, another chapter of institutional cruelty has remained largely in the shadows: the vast network of mental asylums that operated across Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries.
For many, these institutions were places of heartbreak. Families, often grappling with fear, shame, or societal pressure, made the devastating decision to send loved ones there.
Once admitted, many patients were forgotten, their lives hidden behind high walls, their names and stories erased from family memory. Today, younger generations are searching for these lost relatives, piecing together the fragments of their histories.
I grew up in the shadow of St Brigid’s, its imposing structure dominating my hometown. At its peak, the hospital housed over 2,500 patients—nearly double the town’s population.
Around the country, similar institutions like St Loman’s in Mullingar, St Otteran’s in Waterford, and the Richmond in Dublin became part of the fabric of Irish life.
Built in the 1800s, these asylums often became places where society tucked away its discomforts: poverty, unwanted pregnancies, physical differences, or behaviours that defied the norm.
For some, these hospitals provided stability or purpose, particularly for staff like my grandparents, who found careers and connections within their walls. But for many patients, they were places of profound isolation and suffering. The legacy of these institutions is one of pain, secrecy, and unanswered questions which lingers over Ireland’s past and continues to touch its present.
My fascination with St Brigid’s deepened over the years as I listened to stories of the lives shaped, and sometimes broken, within its walls. One story, told to me decades ago by a young student nurse, has stayed with me ever since.
The nurse spoke of two intersex adults, abandoned to St Brigid’s as infants. They had been born in an era when support and understanding of such conditions were non-existent. Their confused parents, grappling with societal shame and ignorance, must have thought them “abominations”, as they left them to the care of the hospital.
In rural Ireland in the 1960s, grappling with sexual identity and societal taboos was unthinkably complex. These children grew up confined to the hospital’s walls, devoid of parental warmth or the loving care of guardians.
They were never taught to speak; instead, they developed their own eerie mode of communication, a series of screeches understood only by each other.
Neglect and isolation took their toll. They became aggressive, their nails growing long and sharp, a danger to any nurse brave enough to attempt contact. The story is not one of Victorian cruelty – it played out as recently as the 1990s.
For decades, I’ve pondered the fate of these two individuals, failed at every turn by a society unequipped to understand or care for them. Their story is a sobering reminder of how far we’ve come in addressing issues of identity and inclusion.
I set up a Facebook page to support discussions about St Brigid’s, and over the years, I’ve compiled a collection of stories from a wide range of people still connected in some way to the now-derelict hospital.
Here, in the week Ireland celebrates the saint after whom the hospital was named, are some of them.
These are stories of pain, resilience, humour, and humanity, aiming to remind us of the progress we’ve made as a nation and the work that remains to build an inclusive society rooted in care and empathy.
Louise
Just over 25 years ago I became an inpatient at St Brigid’s. I was around 20 years old and my first stay was after a fairly serious suicide attempt.
I was lucky my family took me in. I had been referred by Portiuncula hospital, but many of the arrivals came in via garda escort, often late at night. These always scared me as – they were often loud, shouting men, drunk or hallucinating. No one ever tried to reassure us or explain what was happening.
I had four, possibly five stays. I came across patients with all sorts of different disorders. Many were recovering from issues with alcohol. There was a frail, elderly farmer grieving for his wife, and others of all ages who were depressed and or suffering with anxiety disorders. One lady had to give her baby up at birth and her life had fallen apart as a result.
There were some incredibly kind staff members and also some I didn’t trust, one of whom I felt humiliated by.
My most positive and memorable interaction was with a young female trainee not much older than me. I credit my being here now to her.
She spent time getting to know me and talking to me. The consultant she worked with tried many medications and it took six months to find one that worked, a brand new drug that I still take to this day.
Some might ask, why I am writing this? I wanted others to know it’s possible to come back from this sort of illness.
Nurse S
As a child, I remember one particular patient used to come and help around the house and the farm. There were eight of us kids in our family and we would all come home starving and he would have dinner ready for us. He was a bit odd, but really he was the kindest soul, and would never leave without giving us something. I will always remember he would give us money when he was leaving. Ha’pennies was his usual – and if he didn’t have money he used to give us a match.
As a child I didn’t appreciate the match at all, and I used to wonder for years, what he was giving us matches for? But when I went in to Brigid’s nursing years later, I found the male patients got a bit of tobacco and two matches as their rations. It was only then I realised how precious a gift the match was.
Oonagh Walsh (Professor of History, Glasgow Caledonian University)
Growing up in an Irish town with a large psychiatric hospital was an experience shared by many. In the 1960s, there were 19 such public institutions across the country, almost one per county.
St Brigid’s was one of the largest and oldest hospitals, having begun as the Connaught District Lunatic Asylum in 1833. Its location just on the edge of the town meant that the fabric of both places was interwoven.
I spent what felt like endless hours staring at the limestone walls of St Brigid’s when I was a child: my mother (Phil Russell) was a psychiatrist there, and she’d have the five of us kids in the car and say ‘I have to check something, I’ll just be a minute’, and we’d be stuck in the car, playing with the cigarette lighter.
Sometimes she’d park near the day rooms, and patients would chat to us through the windows – for me, the hospital was never a scary place, and I had no conception that people there were ill (the way I understood that patients in Portiuncula were ill).
You’d see the long-stay patients in their regular rhythms walking to town, or going to Staunton’s for a drink. The able-bodied patients often worked outside the hospital on farms as paid labourers.
Some people lived the bulk of their lives in St Brigid’s. We owe them the dignity and respect of an accurate reflection of their complex stories, and not the often patronising presumption that they were helpless victims.
The walls contained much sadness and cruelty, but they also held contentment and acceptance, if we are willing to listen.
Anonymous
When Brigid’s started closing down a patient came to me and told me she was being transferred to Merlin Park. Her name was Margaret. She begged me not to let them transfer her and even got down on her knees.
God help her, she told me she would get the priest to say a mass so that she didn't have to go. She cried. She told me she was in Brigid’s for 30 years and it was her home. She had friends there and she would know no one in Galway.
I contacted the powers that be, but they never contacted her – they just transferred her.
That was in the late 1990s. I do think it was right to close the old long-stay wards back then. Some of those patients should never have been in the hospital. Some were there because of family feuds over land, because of incest, because they were unmarried mothers had learning disabilities.
People blame the state or the church but personally I think it was the families themselves. It was and probably still is a stigma to some people to have a family member who had a mental illness.
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Patient P
I was an involuntary patient there, back in the 90s when I was 17 years old. I still remember how frightened I was when I was told I had to go there. To this day I still shiver at the thought of the place.
I ended up in St Brigid's just because I was a rebellious teenager. My parents and their GP, who was also their friend, thought it would teach me a lesson. My file stated I was anorexic but that wasn’t the case.
I have so many horrible memories of the place, and I was afraid of some of the residents in there. What scared me the most was seeing people been wheeled down for ECT treatment. It was a horrible sight. Sedated, they were silent. They would wheel them down through the day room and everyone could see the person being brought down.
Other patients would remark “why is a child like you in here?” There were so many middle-aged woman put in by their husbands. They got their local GPs or gardaí to sign them in.
My biggest fear was that I would be brought back to that place again.
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Oliver Colohan (with picture)
During the Christmas of 1968 there was a major outbreak of influenza in St Brigid’s. Many nurses were affected and it resulted in staff shortages. To fill the gaps the management asked the staff members to send in their sons and daughters.
My father was the hospital carpenter so I got my first proper job at 16. I was on school holiday. My abiding memory is of the big breakfast at 7.15. Full Irish and porridge.
It was a proud feeling to lead a platoon of 20 patients into the hurling in Duggan Park in my white coat. During the match I noticed that my ‘charges’ were looking very attentively at a man who was engrossed in the game smoking his fag.
I knew what was coming next. When he threw the butt on the ground they all dived down for it in unison. The rest of the incident is best left to the imagination but suffice to say no harm was done.
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Mary
An uncle of mine, Patrick, was a long-time resident. I visited him several times with my mother (his sister) over the years.
I learned from my mother that he was admitted as a young boy and never left it. He died about 40 years ago and I still think of him.
He came from a farming background but he was an intellectual. He was only interested in reading and writing poetry, when he was expected to work on the farm. So he was considered insane/mad.
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Nurse C
I started as a student nurse back in the 1940s before EST and antidepressants or sedatives had been introduced. If someone needed to calm down they were put in the padded cells. Back in the 40s we used to perform a treatment called deep insulin, where the patients were given a dose of insulin to put them into a coma. We used it for schizophrenia mostly.
As the student nurse, I would prepare the room, laying down about 15-20 mattresses on the ground. The patients would come in and be given the insulin then they were monitored for the duration. The whole treatment was stopped when EST came in. I remember hearing that someone tried out the EST on the farm donkey who used to roam around the grounds of Brigid’s. It was so new no-one knew the real effects and just did it for a laugh.
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Kevin Turbitt
My uncle died in Brigid’s as a result of wounds received in World War I.
Thomas Turbitt was his name. He enlisted in September 1915, at 19. He was medically discharged in April 2017.
Sadly, the family never mentioned him and if it wasn't for Covid and researching the family tree, I wouldn't have known about him at all. I believe a lot of soldiers were sent to St Brigid’s and died there. Some never got out.
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Bernie
I wish the people knew the full truth of lovely Christian Ireland. Patients were thrown in and relatives only came back after they had died to see what they could get. Many [patients] were happy in there as it was the only home they knew. God love them all, angels in heaven.
Sara Colohan is a freelance writer who also runs a Facebook page sharing facts, photographs and stories from St Brigid’s, Ballinasloe
FINDING OUT MORE
To request historical records from St Brigid’s under Freedom of Information legislation, emailFOI.GMHS@hse.ie, or write to FOI Office, St Brigid’s Campus, Ballinasloe, Co Galway H53 N243
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