Since the opening of St Mary’s Hospital in 1886 known then as the Lunatic Asylum many staff who worked in different departments could tell stories about patients who spent most of their lives in the hospital. Some men took on the jobs of messenger or postman for members of the staff. Others worked with the tailor, the butcher, the baker, in the boiler house. Many worked on the farm at that time and some also went to work with local farmers off the campus. That practice was the subject of debate then and now as to whether those people have been exploited and used as cheap labour.
The ladies would have worked in the laundry and the kitchens and sculleries and cleaning throughout the hospital. Some went to work with families helping to rear the children and conducting household tasks. Some of their experiences seemed to have ended in good outcomes for the ladies involved.
James from Westport spent 54 years of his life in the hospital. He was born in 1905 and arrived in the hospital in 1925. He is described by the people who knew him as never being aggressive, addressing people by their surname and never seeing anybody in a bad light.
During that time, he would have witnessed many challenging events in Ireland and around the world including the 1914 –1918 world War, the 1916 rising, the black and tan war, the war of independence, the treaty, the civil war, and finally peace and an Irish Government. This was a fearful and turbulent time for any young man like him growing up in Ireland with the reporting of the deaths of General Michael Collins TD and Arthur Griffith President of Dail Eireann.
Would he have taken refuge from all of this in the asylum? His first choice was farm work. On the farm, they soon found out that he would be the ideal man to drive the horses, feed them, and make sure they were properly shod and cared for. He became more involved on the farm. Obviously, the life suited him as he loved the land and was keen to be independent by making his own tea and eventually cooking his own food.
He worked on the Drum Conlon farm haymaking and tending to crops etc. Locals in Castlebar at that time were unhappy with the patients being transported out there on the back of a tractor and trailer wearing polyethene coats in oftentimes very poor weather conditions. Thankfully, this practice was stopped we believe. We do believe he was spared of this humiliation and travelled in the van when the era of the horse had passed on.
He always talked about his horses both cart horses whom he worked on his own farm at home. He appeared to be very proud of those two horses by all accounts. He said he drew stone from his own farm to have it burned in a lime kill near Westport and would return with the burned lime which was used to improve the condition of his own farm.
The farm labourer said that when he came in here, he was a little bit disturbed. He went on to say I suppose it took him a while to settle down and the more he got out to the farm the better he became. You could take from that the farm work was therapeutic or was he becoming institutionalized,
At that time all the goods that came into the Hospital came from the railway station as there were no lorries delivering materials Goods like sugar etc for the kitchen and building materials for the maintenance staff would have come from the railway station. There was no vehicle at that time. It meant that the materials had to be drawn by horse and cart. He found himself to be an ideal choice due to his experience working with horses.
The farm labourers’ view was the longer he got involved in farm work he began to distance himself from the hospital routine to the point he decided to cook his own meals. It looks like the farmyard staff made him feel part of the team on the farm.
He owned his own dog and would go to the Post Office and have him licensed annually. He liked to socialise and have a pint. He would go downtown every Saturday and have two or three or four pints. He would ask that three pints be filled together, and he would drink the three point’s one after the other and come back to the hospital. One evening according to the farm staff he felt that he had drunk too much prior to Christmas and he gave a new year’s resolution that he would never touch drink again. The farm staff recall he kept his promise. That was at Christmas time that he had visits from family who brought gifts which he brought to the farmyard and shared them with the staff.
Since he went to work on the farm, he seemed to enjoy the freedom that brought to him a farm staff member recalled. He technically lived in a community the farmyard and slept in the mental hospital only.
Paddy died in 1983 at Christmas. One day he was feeling unwell which he had attributed to a meal he had prepared for himself. He died later that day feeding the livestock. Those who have faint recollections of that day remember gathering around him saying a prayer. He was taken back to his parish church in Westport and buried with family. An old man in the pub was heard to remark that he remembers James passing down through the town with two horses on any occasion. The belief is that he would have loved to be remembered in that way.