Small Town

On the afternoon of 31st January 1984,15 year-old Ann Lovett was discovered in a grotto just outside the town of Granard by passers-by. She had just given birth to a baby boy. By the time she was discovered, the child had died and Ann was suffering from shock. She died later that day in hospital. Her death went unnoticed by the media until a local man, realising the implications of the tragedy, rang the Sunday Tribune to tell them what had happened. The story of Ann Lovett's tragic death was made known to the nation 5 days after her funeral and that of her baby son.

On January 31, 1984, when morning classes ended, Ann left the school as usual, but she didn't go home. After calling briefly to a friend's house, where she asked for a cigarette, she slipped back through the small streets and disappeared into the grotto by the graveyard on the hill at the top of the town.

It was cold and prematurely dark under the weak wintry sun and the only sounds she heard for the few hours she lay there were the rain falling on the dead leaves and her own stifled cries of pain.

Young Jimmy Brady found her there at four in the afternoon on his way home from school after his eye was drawn to her schoolbag lying on the ground. She was semi-conscious and fatally weak from exposure and bleeding. The lifeless body of her six-and-a-half pound newborn baby boy lay nearby.



She was found in a grotto dedicated to Our Lady, with a statue of the Blessed Mother looking down on her suffering. The Virgin Mary and the 'tainted' teenager who came to her for sanctuary. It provided a convenient symbol of the clash between old and new, Church and State, the insular and the open-minded, change and the fear of it.

In reality, Granard was like 500 other rural Irish towns, dominated by aging religious landmarks and references to saints but filled with 20th-century kids who that very week were celebrating the replacement of Paul McCartney and his twee Pipes of Peace Christmas ballad at the top of the pop charts with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the overtly sexual Relax.

Granard was besieged with reporters and camera crews all asking the same questions. Who knew Ann was pregnant? Why did no one help? What kind of a family did she have? What kind of a community was Granard? What did her plight say about the Ireland of 1984?

Ann was beyond answering questions when she was found in the grotto and her funeral had taken place by the time word of her death spread beyond Granard. Every question seemed an attempt to dig her corpse up again and hold her up in front of the town to shame it in to answering for her.

Granard did not respond to shock measures. Instead the town took cover, angry at the insinuations, embarrassed to be probed on sensitive matters, uncomfortable to be under the spotlight and fearful of being hit in the crossfire of a heated public debate. It got a reputation as a town that would not speak for its dead and while it may have been an unfair generalisation, there is still, 20 years on, a marked reluctance to talk about Ann Lovett.