Squandering National Resources

On 13 September 1847, the Lord Lieutenant and Council of Ireland made an order that an Asylum for Lunatic Poor be constructed near Mullingar, County Westmeath, to accommodate 300 inmates and to be known as the Mullingar Lunatic Asylum. The following year a site for the building was established after 25 acres and nine perches of land on the edge of the town were purchased from a local man, Thomas Tuite, for the sum of £829. Work began in 1850, the architect given the commission being Dubliner John Skipton Mulvany, responsible for many railway stations and other similar public buildings throughout Ireland. When completed in 1855, some £35,430 had been spent on the hospital. That sum and the cost of a number of other such asylums around the country led to allegations of extravagance and an investigation by the Treasury Commissioners later that year. Specifically in relation to the Mullingar asylum, complaints centred on what some deemed overuse of architectural decoration such as projecting bay windows and Tudoresque chimneystacks, as well as the employment of high-quality limestone which had to be brought by cart from a quarry some 20 miles away. However, the investigating officers, while conceding that there may have been too much embellishment, judged the resultant structure to be ‘pleasing in style and built in a manner highly creditable to the architects engaged and ornamental to the country.’ The south-facing, three-storey building runs to an extraordinary 41 bays, with an advanced central five bay entrance incorporating a single-bay gable-fronted section and advanced single-bay gable-fronted sections on either side, plus further advanced full-height gable-fronted blocks at the east and west ends. Between these, the risk of potential monotony is avoided by the intermittent deployment of shallow projecting gable-fronted bays which give the façade a consistently engaging rhythm and make it a delight to behold.The north side is now harder to read, since it has been much altered over the past 170 years, but intermittent glimpses suggest it was always plainer and more functional in appearance. Growing numbers of patients being admitted, meant that not much more than a decade after first opening, the hospital needed to expand and following the acquisition of a further ten acres on either side of the site, in 1868 architect George Moyers was appointed to design extensions to each end of Mulvany’s original block, as well as a new dining hall and general purpose room, at the cost of just over £4,698: this work was completed in 1870. By this time, there were 400 inmates on the premises and over the following decades a number of substantial freestanding buildings were erected around the campus, beginning with Petitswood, built in 1895 and accommodating 150 male patients.

The original building that opened as Mullingar Lunatic Asylum, later renamed St Loman’s Hospital continued to serve the same function, albeit with modifications to the services provided, until some 13 years ago. Long before that date there had been discussion about the suitability of the building, particularly in the closing decades of the last century when long-term residential care for psychiatric patients began to be discouraged, particularly in older institutions constructed in an era with different attitudes towards mental health. One of the problems which the hospital faced was insufficient maintenance: not an unusual phenomenon in Ireland. A much-cited report produced by the country’s Inspector of Mental Health Services in 2007 noted that ‘Apart from the admission units, the conditions in areas of St Loman’s Hospital remained very poor with damp, peeling paint, tiles lifting on floors, poor sanitary facilities, curtains falling down and drab and institutional-style furnishings and decor. A significantly large number of these areas were dirty, including sluice rooms and bathrooms and toilets. In short, the conditions that people with enduring mental illness have to live in permanently in St Loman’s Hospital were deplorable… every effort must be made to close the hospital immediately.’ In other words, the building had not been properly maintained but instead allowed to fall into a bad state of repair. In consequence, it was inevitable that in December 2013 the last ward in the building was moved elsewhere on the site and the building closed, seemingly without any plans being made for its future use.

In the 13 years since its closure, St Loman’s Hospital has sat empty and falling into an ever-worse condition of repair: a number of intrepid venturers have gained access to the interior and posted images showing abandoned wards and public areas, often still containing furnishings that might be salvaged and given alternative use. The problem, as so often with national bodies such as Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE), is that there appears to be a want of concern over the care of what are public assets: this is a property which belongs to the Irish people and which is being permitted to decline in value through inadequate maintenance. The HSE has form here, see: A Poor Example « The Irish Aesthete. The indifference displayed time and again towards these historic buildings is truly shocking, and represents an appalling waste of the country’s resources. In 2024, more than a decade after the hospital had been closed to patients, the HSE announced that it was ‘open to finding an alternative use’ for the building, instead of actively seeking to do so at a time when many citizens struggle to find somewhere to live and the figures for homelessness climb ever higher. Last December, the organisation’s national director and head of Strategic Health Infrastructure and Capital Delivery informed a Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health, ‘If we identify a property surplus to our requirements, we put it on the state register in line with all our requirements for disposing of state assets’ while another employee, this time a regional executive officer, advised that discussions were ‘ongoing’ with regard to St Loman’s. In this instance, as in so many others, there appears to be no particular rush to engage in the ‘disposal’ of the building as it is left to deteriorate still further. There is absolutely no reason why this should be so. One large property, formerly called St Patrick’s and constructed in the 1930s to provide accommodation to some of the hospital’s male patients, was successfully redeveloped in the late 1990s as Deravarra House, a private apartment block. If and when some similar scheme is devised for the original hospital here, it will benefit the public purse less and cost whoever takes on the task more – thanks to the dilatory behaviour of the HSE.