Children Of The Poor Clares Read Online Free Page A

the night of 23 February 1943 a fire took hold in the building in which the children were asleep. The outside world burst open the doors of the convent; breaking locks and forcing doors, men intruded into the silent orderly life of the nuns. Within forty minutes the fire had taken the lives of thirty-five girls and old Maggie Smith, and, for a few weeks, would bring St. Joseph’s and the town of Cavan into the public eye.

CHAPTER ONE 
    The Sacrifice
    The ground floor of the Orphanage, built over a basement, consisted of a laundry, fuel store, refectory, kitchen, and a corridor with a wooden staircase. This led to the first floor where, over the laundry, there was a classroom. Over the refectory and kitchen was Our Lady’s dormitory. Twenty-one girls aged from nine to nineteen slept in this dormitory, under the supervision of a lay teacher, Miss Harrington, who slept in a cubicle. The wooden staircase continued up to the second floor landing. Off this landing were three doors: one led to the Sacred Heart dormitory in which slept nineteen girls from the age of fourteen to eighteen. They were under the supervision of a middle-aged lay teacher, Miss Bridget O’Reilly, who slept in a cubicle in the room. A second door led to St. Clare’s dormitory. In it slept thirty girls aged from five to seventeen, also under the supervision of Miss O’Reilly. The third, a double fire escape door, led over an exterior metal landing to a door into a classroom. An adjacent door in the classroom led onto an exterior metal staircase down to a yard.
     
    The Orphanage and Convent buildings were structurally separate but connected by doors on the ground floor through the refectory, and on the first floor through a corridor by Our Lady’s dormitory. They were not connected on the second floor. There were two ways of leaving the building from the second floor dormitories, the Sacred Heart and St. Clare’s. One exit was by way of a wooden landing and down the wooden staircase to the ground floor and then along the corridor beside the laundry and through a door out into the orphanage courtyard. The other exit was through the double fire escape door.
     
    The twenty-five members of the religious community, under the Mother Abbess, Sister Benedict, slept in their own cells in the Convent. The exception to this was Sister Felix, who had a cell in the Infirmary, where the babies and very young children slept. Although this was on the second floor of the Orphanage, it was structurally separate, and inaccessible directly from the dormitories. It was reached by a separate flight of stairs from the first floor. Sister Felix was one of the two nuns in charge of the children then in the orphanage.
     
    The Report of the Official Inquiry was to state that the fire originated in a smouldering oily deposit in the flue of the laundry’s boiler. This had probably been caused by the wartime use of turf instead of coal for fuel. The fire spread through a leak into adjoining timbers, through to a wooden clothes drier inside the laundry and to the wooden staircase behind the laundry wall, the staircase itself becoming a flue for the fire.
     
    The following reconstruction of the events which took place between approximately 2 a.m. and 2.40 a.m. on the morning of February 24, 1943, is based on evidence given at the Inquiry into the fire, the Report of the Inquiry into it, newspaper reports and conversations with a survivor of the fire and with two men involved in rescue attempts.
     
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    On the night of the fire, a small group had gathered in the kitchen of Sullivan’s general store. Warmed by the new Aga stove, members of the family and some of the staff were sitting up late over a game of penny poker. A young man called Louis Blessing was visiting for the evening. A local Gaelic football hero, he was courting Cissie Reilly, the attractive girl who worked on the grocery counter.
     
    Across the yard, in the orphanage, the electric lights