It was the early hours of 23rd February 1943 and smoke billowed out of the St. Joseph’s Orphanage and Industrial School on the main street of Cavan town. Locals who witnessed the plumes pounded on the doors and yelled to wake the occupants. By the time they made it past the iron railings, the fire had already engulfed most of the building.
In what became one of many controversial decisions, when the nuns inside were alerted to the fire, a sister gathered the children in a dormitory room on the top floor, in which the fire escape door was locked. She then told the girls to pray a rosary before leaving them and fleeing the building herself.
It has been claimed repeatedly by those connected with the survivors, that the nuns had refused to let the 72 children leave as they didn’t think it was appropriate or decent for the public to see them in their nightgowns, and insisted that the focus be on saving the building and putting out the fire rather than evacuating.
An ill-equipped fire brigade arrived within 45 minutes with a hose, but it was in disrepair and ineffective, and ladders they brought were found to be too short to reach the children on the top floor. Some children leapt from windows or climbed down drainpipes, and onlookers brought their own ladders and equipment to attempt to save the children trapped above, pulling a few to safety.
Eventually, the flames became too strong, and 35 children died in the dormitory along with an 80-year-old cook who had been in the basement at the time the fire started.
All of the nuns and teachers at St. Joseph’s escaped unharmed, and ensuing public anger resulted in an enquiry into the incident. It found that the fire was the result of a defective flue, and while there had been plenty of time to evacuate all of the children, a lack of fire-fighter training and an inadequate fire service coupled with no evacuation plan among the staff led to this great tragedy.
This incensed the public, who felt that the nuns put their own safety and concerns about decency ahead of the lives of the children and should be held accountable, although this never happened, and the scandal remained buried for decades.
The Poor Clares nuns, who ran St. Joseph’s, and many other religious orders have in the decades since this fire been accused of being brutally abusive to children in industrial schools, with claims of humiliation, beatings, malnourishment and neglect, as detailed in the 1985 book Children of the Poor Clares, written by Mavis Arnold and Heather Laskey.
A Limerick penned by Flann O’Brien and Tom O’Higgins captures the disgust at the state’s cover up of the orphanage fire:
In Cavan there was a great fire,
Judge McCarthy was sent to enquire,
It would be a shame, if the nuns were to blame,
So it had to be caused by a wire.
Megan this is so sad , I wonder what really happened 😔 poor little children 🤍, is the building still standing