Irish Independent, The Review These Walls are Still Talking 25/07/26

These Walls are Still Talking
By Sara Colohan

Three years ago, I walked through a broken door into the derelict shell of St. Brigid's Hospital in Ballinasloe, my hometown, and picked patient records up off the floor. Some dated back to the 1950s, ruined by damp seeping through broken roofs and windows. I double-bagged what I could carry and took them away, not knowing what I'd do with them, only that leaving them there to rot felt like a final indignity for people who had already lost so much.

This month, If These Walls Could Talk, the new book by Cork author Michelle McDonagh, was released, and my experience has become part of her fictional story. In its acknowledgements, she credits my reporting and the Facebook page I set up on St. Brigid's as a direct inspiration. Chatting to her this week, I understand just how directly.

Michelle's connection to Ballinasloe goes back further than her research. Her late mother, Lucy, was born and reared in a terraced house on St Michael's Square, in the middle of town. Michelle spent her childhood summers there with her grandparents, May and Michael Kelly, and she vividly remembers market days, cooling off in the River Suck, and the October Horse Fair.

Michelle and myself reminisce about the legendary Hills sweet shop we frequented in the 1980s, where bags of Gold Nugget chewing gum, Dime bars, white chocolate mice and candy cigarettes were factored into our daily diets. But there was another side to Ballinasloe, and we both remember the shadow St Brigid's cast, even as children.

"Some of my happiest childhood memories were spent in Ballinasloe," she told me. But even as a child, she was aware of the gloomy sprawling buildings on the edge of town. "I always had somewhat of a morbid fascination with St Brigid's," she said. "I remember swimming in the River Suck as a kid and some grown-ups telling us we all had to get out and go home. I overheard somebody on the bridge as we were passing say 'another poor soul from the hospital gone into the water', not really understanding what it meant at the time." I remember it as a frequent occurrence in the town.

"I once went with my mother to visit an uncle on my father's side who spent a short period in Brigid's. He had just had ECT and was slumped in a chair, drooling, and incapable of conversation." She adds, "We stopped telling the kids on our street where we were going at weekends after they started slagging us about going to the 'nut house.'"

That mix of affection and unease stayed with her. Her fictional town of Glenbeg, which appears in this book and her earlier novel, There's Something I Have to Tell You, is loosely modelled on Ballinasloe. Her fictional asylum, St. Brendan's, is modelled on St. Brigid's, which was once one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in Europe, housing around 2,500 patients at its peak, in a town of just 5,500 people.

That scale, Michelle pointed out, wasn't unique to Ballinasloe, and it wasn't really about mental illness. We both drew on Professor Brendan Kelly's book Hearing Voices, which argues Ireland never actually had unusually high rates of mental illness — what it had was a system that almost never let anyone out once they were in, committed for epilepsy, pregnancy outside marriage, refusing to marry an older farmer, or a nephew wanting their land.

Michelle also speaks candidly about her own reasons for being drawn to this history. "As somebody who has battled with my mental health for most of my life," she said, "I've often thought about how easily I might have ended up on the other side of those walls, in a different decade, with a different family." This is an instinct shared by fellow Cork writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose novel Said The Dead drew on Cork's old Eglinton Asylum, since converted into apartments.

During her research for her current novel, she came across a piece I wrote for the Irish Mail titled The Children I Could Never Forget. "I was struck by how you, like me, had been drawn to the building's history. The way you brought the patients and staff to life through your writing."

That piece helped inform the character of Megan, a young urban explorer in the novel who films videos inside the abandoned St. Brendan's. "I had never heard the term 'urban explorer' before I came across your feature and the incredible photos of St Brigid's online—powerful images that showed the ruined building being reclaimed by nature," Michelle told me. " During her visits to the boarded-up hospital, Megan finds private patient records strewn around the place and, horrified, removes them to hand them over to the appropriate authorities," she said. "This scene was directly inspired by reading that, on hearing of records dating back to the 1950s strewn on St Brigid's floors, many already destroyed by damp, you took the decision to enter the crumbling asylum and collect them, to offer a shred of dignity to the patients involved."

That's more or less exactly what happened. I'd heard for years people could enter the building, and one day, after years of trying, I finally found a group of urban explorers who let me tag along. I went in, filled my bag with whatever files I could save, and carried them out. I left behind black sacks full of paper that had gone soft and grey with damp, names dissolved and illegible. Medical records, private details, and more.

Oonagh Walsh, Professor of History at Glasgow Caledonian University, who grew up around St. Brigid's herself, put it well when I interviewed her for a Sunday Independent feature: "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." That's stayed with me every time I think about the documents left behind in that building.

Among the stories I've been told was one of a boy, six or seven years old, sent from a children's home in Cork. There was no space for him in St. Brigid's children's ward, so he was placed in a communal women's ward. When I put a call out on Facebook, a retired nurse got in touch—she remembered him, a small boy essentially reared by the female patients, until he grew old enough to leave and build a life of his own.

"This boy stayed in my head long after reading about it," Michelle tells me, "and was to provide the inspiration for a character in my book who had a very similar start to life in my fictional asylum, going on to play a significant role in the plot."

The boy from Cork in my factual story would now be in his fifties, the same age as both me and Michelle.

If These Walls Could Talk is a gripping fictional thriller. Hazel McDermott is on the phone to her husband Darragh when she hears the screech of tires, and the line goes dead. His jeep is found overturned in a field, but Darragh has vanished — and Hazel discovers secrets that run back through the abandoned asylum on the edge of Glenbeg.

Michelle spent her research surrounded by it. "I came across numerous photos and videos posted online by members of the urbex community which show the huge building literally being eaten alive by the natural world," she said. "The wall beside my desk was papered with these photos as I worked on the book."

She's not finished with St. Brigid's necessarily. She's already working on her fifth book, which is set in Galway City rather than Glenbeg, but she wouldn't rule out returning to the fictional town and asylum down the line. Asked whether she'd ever try urban exploring herself, she laughed it off: "Never say never; it would be a great premise for a thriller."

My own connection to St. Brigid's didn't start with journalism. My grandmother, Annie Colohan, nursed there through the 1920s and met my grandfather on the wards. One of the first stories I heard about "the Big House" was hers. She was hit by a full slop bucket thrown by a distressed patient when Granny was on her way to a first date and somehow still made it there on time, dried off by her colleagues. She and my grandfather married in 1933, a century after the hospital was built.

That story planted something, and over the years I've collected dozens more, from former patients, staff, and people whose relatives simply vanished into the building. Some are painful, and some, like my grandmother's, are oddly funny. All are part of why I keep going back.

St Brigid's closed in 2013 and has sat largely derelict since. Local councillor Alan Harney has his own family history in the place. "I'm from Creagh, and so many of my family, back as far as my grandfather, have worked in St Brigid's, with my mother just recently retiring," he told me. "People in Ballinasloe grew up with patients integrating and working on farms. The hospital was very much an integral part of the community."

He's been pushing the HSE to act on St. Brigid's to redevelop and repurpose. "I want the HSE to recognise their responsibility and work on short-term preservation first. They have installed downpipes, did some painting, and had windows replaced to keep it safe and standing," he said. "It's much improved, but with a long way to go. Important work on the roof is starting soon. This is about arresting the decline at the moment."

The stakes are real. "They had a fire last summer that really took off because of overgrown vegetation, so that's been cut back since, which has helped stave off a major fire. It was from people gaining entrance," he said. "There are lots of people using the spaces in positive ways, walking dogs and exercising, and we want to encourage that, but we need to secure the site if the building is to have a future."

Harney has parties interested in developing the spaces once they come to market, though he's cautious about giving too much away before formal talks with the HSE. "I can't disclose details, but the focus would be community engagement spaces, ensuring those buildings are brought back into use with a community focus."

The scale of the site is hard to grasp until it's laid out: there's the main 1833 building, a sprawling "new building" from the 1900s, two chapels, a performance hall, a football pitch, and nurses' accommodation across the road with 60 acres attached. The HSE currently has plans for an advanced primary care hub on part of the lands that, once completed, would "have the option to expand and ease the pressure facing Portiuncula Hospital, particularly for mental health care, where mental health cases present at A&E currently and staff can't cope with the volume and complexity."

Harney said the building's absence hasn't solved anything, for many locally are still unable to access the help they need.

"I've encouraged the HSE to repurpose buildings, in particular the 'new building' — this is always an important element," Harney adds. "Repurposing old buildings with chequered pasts holds high risks—we only have to look at Bessborough in Cork to understand the sensitivities that can arise. But I doubt there's anyone alive who doesn't want to see an end to the waste and destruction of these buildings and a new future for these historic sites."

He's also careful about how the hospital's history should be told. "We have to acknowledge all who worked and spent their lives there. It's so important we don't just plaster over the building and ignore the past. There's a link to Brigid's for almost every family in the west of Ireland. We shouldn't view the two-hundred-year span with a modern-day lens—we have to set it in the context of its time. And in that light, we have a positive view of the place too."

Some lands will go to a new ambulance base and primary care hub rather than community use. But the gap Harney keeps returning to is mental health provision itself. "Currently, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services for Ballinasloe are centralised under the Roscommon/East Galway team based out of Roscommon, forcing families to travel out of town for support. We are pushing the HSE for dedicated, local mental health investment. There's nothing more acute that's gone backwards here. We need support."

The HSE, in response, confirmed the land sale is going ahead, though not the entire site. They've identified plots at Creagh—the same townland Harney is from—to be retained for an ambulance base and enhanced primary care hub, while the rest of the campus, deemed surplus to requirements, goes to the open market in 2026. A spatial planning exercise is underway to determine exactly which lands are kept back for future healthcare use.

On the buildings themselves, the HSE says most of the "priority 1" works are done: scrub clearance, boarded windows, boundary wall painting. An asbestos report is still outstanding, though a consultant has now been appointed following a tender competition, with surveys about to begin. Work continues on securing the perimeter and repairing gutters and downpipes. Design consultants have been brought in for the "priority 2" works, to assess how to tackle the water ingress — the same damp that destroyed patient records before I got to them.

The HSE also says it's in "ongoing positive engagement" with Galway County Council and the Heritage Department about the campus, though no further detail was offered on what form that might take.

On CAMHS, the HSE acknowledges the delays affecting young people and families locally, noting that expansion is being explored under national strategies including Vision for Change and Sharing the Vision and that they hope to eventually establish a service based in Ballinasloe rather than Roscommon. No timeline was given.

Michelle, for her part, is cautious about prescribing an outcome. "I don't live in Ballinasloe, and it's very important that the voices of the local community are heard." She flagged something worth putting to the HSE: reports from Mental Health Reform and Amnesty International Ireland have found the promised shift to community-based mental health care was never properly funded, leaving gaps that fall hardest on services like CAMHS. If the site is sold, that money should go back into services for the area it once served.

If you have a memory of St Brigid's as a patient, staff, or a relative of someone who was there — I'd like to hear it, and so would the thousands of members of the St Brigid's Facebook page. And if you know anything of the boy from Cork, raised for a time by the women of St Brigid's in the 1970s, please get in touch in confidence. His story is one the world might want to hear.

Michelle McDonagh's novel If These Walls Could Talk is out now.