The Summer Ireland Went Stone Mad

BY LLOYD GORMAN AND BRIAN CORR

The summer of 1985 was an unusually fine one in Ireland but there was only one thing Irish people were talking about, and it wasn’t the weather. Statues - specifically moving statues - swept across the country like some crazy ‘next big thing’ fad. The whole population - or at least very many of them - were in the grip of an epiphany. If you didn’t actually witness one do a little shimmy or spend hour after hour in a field with a cast of thousands of others peering intently and praying at a Marion shrine or grotto, then you weren’t a player. Funnily enough, priests were thin on the ground at these ‘mass’ gatherings. The Catholic church and its Irish bishops didn’t exactly approve of these events that saw humanity turn up at the normally secluded spots at the faintest hint there might be a mini-moving miracle on the way. Some statues of Mary moved, while other sightings were of divine figures and saints who appeared in stains on church walls. It all happened so quickly that the church’s experts barely had time to study the phenomena. The new kids on the block – so to speak – potentially posed a risk or at least competition to Ireland’s big established Marian shrine and place of pilgrimage, Knock in Co. Mayo. The faithful believe that the Virgin Mary, Jesus, St. Joseph, John the Evangelist, and angels, appeared there in 1879. Knock was one of Europe’s great Catholic shrines, alongside Fatima and Lourdes, with 1.5 million pilgrims visiting each year. Knock Airport (now known as Ireland West Airport) opened in October 1985 with three Aer Lingus charter flights to Rome. (Knock Airport reopened again on July 1st after closing due to COVID-19). There were more than 30 separate sightings, but one case in particular stands out above the others and made the tiny town of Ballinspittle world famous. Located about five miles outside of Kinsale, County Cork, the country village had little more than a post office, a national school and a GAA pitch. It also has a shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary on the side of a hill. On July 22 1985, two women claimed they saw a roadside statue of the Virgin Mary move on its own! Things started to happen very quickly. Many thousands rushed to visit the sites overnight. An estimated 100,000 descended on the sleepy Ballinspittle over a matter of weeks. A circus of TV crews and media from around the world landed at the hot spot, busloads of religious and other groups and curious tourists all flocked to this corner of Cork. Fleets of chipper vans turned up to feed the hungry hordes and the ‘Grotto’ burger was born. The local pub did a roaring trade and enough tea was made to quench a small army’s thirst. Public toilets needed to

be put in, unused rooms (and even probably some occupied ones) were dusted off as pop up B&B’s responded to the need for accommodation. Ballinspittle was a boom town. Anyone with a sighting to report was eagerly gobbled up by other believers and reporters on the look out for a story. Some even claimed miracle cures such as being able to walk again, vision restored and the like. For all the eyeballs and cameras directed towards the figurines, no actual movement of a statue was independently confirmed. It remained a matter of faith and as quickly as it started, the trend quickly faded, while a few small ‘cults’ persisted for some years. One set off by road to convert Russia. It will be interesting to see how – or if – Ballinspittle will mark the 35th anniversary of that incredible time in Ireland. You can still find old news reports and documentaries about the moving statues online and on Youtube. After all the fuss had died down, some gentle fun was poked at the whole affair in Father Ted, which hit Irish (and UK) screens about ten years later. In one episode Dougal “scares the bejaysus” out of Ted by pretending to float a statue of Mary outside a window. At the start of another episode – ‘Entertaining Father Stone’ – Ted and Dougal panic over the arrival of the painfully boring Father Stone for his holidays in their pokey parochial house. “Why didn’t you lie to him?,” asked Dougal. “I did!” replied Ted. “I told him great big massive lies with feckin’ bells hanging off them! It’s like asking the Holy Mother to stop appearing to schoolgirls at Ballinspittal.” This little anecdote – tweeted by one John King/@SeanMacAnRi – could have fitted neatly into a Father Ted script. “During the moving statues craze in Ireland someone put a sign around Mary’s head in the grotto at my local church. Sign said ‘out of order’ Was uproar in the local community!! Found out several years later it was my mum. the church organist!”

Below: The charismatic and capable Monsignor James Horan pictured here on the opening day of Knock Airport. He died just one year later but has been immortalised with a nine foot tall bronze sculpture of him in this exact pose in May 2013 (left). An inscription at the base reads: “From Famine fields to jet streams”. Newbridge, Co Kildare based artist Barry Linnane created the sculpture. His other works include Temple Bar Man, Ark of Thought and Memory (Cork County Council) and Justice Figure (Nenagh Courthouse).