Trip from Croke Park that took a very strange twist

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Trips down from Croke Park on the evening of All-Ireland finals for Galway fans tend to be gloomy affairs. It’s just a fact of life that Galway tend to lose far more finals than they win so on Sunday week last as myself, and three more seasoned travellers, made our way down the motorway, we were kind of welcoming hosts to any kind of hurling distraction that came our way. The Marty Squad on Radio 1 is grand for a while especially if you win, but being far outside the range of local radio, we stuck with the national channel. It was to prove something of an experience.

We started listening to the Documentary on One, and given its rural orientation set in the Kerry town of Listowel, the four listened in for a few minutes before as we would normally expect, the conversation would inevitably drift back to the match, but this time it didn’t.

The title of the documentary In Shame, Love, In Shame, took a peep back in time to 1946 when a 25-year-old Kerry single woman, called Peggy McCarthy, found herself pregnant and in desperate medical trouble as she went into labour. This really was the awful Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s where the quite natural event of a woman having a baby turned into a horror story of almost unimaginable proportions.

The facts of the case are worth recalling. Local hackney driver, John Guerin (his son Tony has written a play entitled Solo Run about what happened) was given the job of bringing Peggy McCarthy to the nearby local hospital where she obviously required urgent medical attention. She was refused admission and the hackney man was directed to bring her to Tralee Hospital 20 miles away. Here again, she was refused admission by a nun who was carrying out hospital policy: the reason for the admission refusal being that she was an unmarried mother. Their care for mothers in labour was only for those who were married.

Another 20-mile hospital journey followed to another hospital in Killarney, The Union, where the young woman died but her baby daughter, Breda, survived. There Peggy McCarthy’s troubles had ended but the travails of the hackney driver were far from over.

He was entrusted with the job of bringing back the coffined body of Peggy McCarthy to the local church only to find the gates of the so-called House of God locked in front of them. The local PP, a Canon Patrick Brennan, had made the decision that her remains would not be allowed into the church.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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