St Conal's Hospital () was a

psychiatric hospital A psychiatric hospital, also known as a mental health hospital, a behavioral health hospital, or an asylum is a specialized medical facility that focuses on the treatment of severe Mental disorder, mental disorders. These institutions cater t ...

located in

Letterkenny Letterkenny ( , meaning "hillside of the O'Cannons"), nicknamed the Cathedral Town, is a large town in County Donegal, Ireland, on the River Swilly in the north-west of Ulster. Along with the nearby city of Derry, Letterkenny is a regional eco ...

County Donegal County Donegal ( ; ) is a Counties of Ireland, county of the Republic of Ireland. It is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Ulster and is the northernmost county of Ireland. The county mostly borders Northern Ireland, sharing only a small b ...

Ireland Ireland (, ; ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe. Geopolitically, the island is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially Names of the Irish state, named Irelan ...

. Opened in 1866 (as the Donegal District Lunatic Asylum), it had people work on its

farm A farm (also called an agricultural holding) is an area of land that is devoted primarily to agricultural processes with the primary objective of producing food and other crops; it is the basic facility in food production. The name is used fo ...

as recently as 1995. The building is still extant.

History

The hospital, which was designed by George Wilkinson in the neo-Georgian style using a corridor layout, was built by Matthew McClelland at a cost of £37,900 and opened as the Donegal District Lunatic Asylum in February 1866. At that time it accommodated 300 patients (150 male and 150 female). It has been described as "one of the finest buildings in the country". A large new building was erected at the rear of the site in 1912. The facility became the Donegal Mental Hospital in the 1920s and benefited from a new chapel, designed in the neo-Norman style, being erected in the 1930s. The facility was renamed St Conal's Hospital in 1956. As the hospital expanded nursing staff numbers reached close to 500 in the 1960s. After the introduction of

deinstitutionalisation Deinstitutionalisation (or deinstitutionalization) is the process of replacing long-stay psychiatric hospitals with less isolated community mental health services for those diagnosed with a mental disorder or developmental disability. In the 1950 ...

in the late 1980s the hospital went into a period of decline. However patients were still required to carry out activities on the hospital's working farm which only closed in 1995.

Electroconvulsive therapy Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a psychiatry, psychiatric treatment that causes a generalized seizure by passing electrical current through the brain. ECT is often used as an intervention for mental disorders when other treatments are inadequ ...

(ECT) was still being carried out on patients in the hospital in the late 1990s. The hospital had people work on its

until 1995.

Seosamh Mac Grianna Seosamh Mac Grianna (1900 or 190111 June 1990) was an Irish writer. He was born into a family of poets and storytellers, which included his brothers Séamus Ó Grianna and Seán Bán Mac Grianna, in Rann na Feirste (Ranafast), a village in The ...

spent three decades at St Conal's Hospital. On 27 August 2007, a blaze which broke out at 5:45 pm in a downstairs room took fire services approximately four hours to extinguish. The main hospital closed in 2010. In March 2020, a memorial was to be unveiled at new Leck Cemetery to remember the hundreds of patients whom the Management Committee had buried in unmarked graves there from March 1902, when the means to dispose of their bodies on a site at the back of the hospital grounds ceased. The memorial had been due to be unveiled the previous December but poor weather forecasts prompted its postponement. The practice of burying dead patients there continued late into the twentieth century, almost until the hospital shut. Since 2015, Lugh Films have been working on a documentary about life behind the hospital walls, intended as a "

social history Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians. Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading f ...

". During the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

, St Conal's Hospital was used as a drive-through test centre.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Saint Conals Hospital 1866 establishments in Ireland 2010 disestablishments in Ireland Buildings and structures in Letterkenny Defunct hospitals in the Republic of Ireland Hospital buildings completed in 1866 Hospitals disestablished in 2010 Hospitals established in 1866 Hospitals in County Donegal Conals 19th-century architecture in the Republic of Ireland

History

See also

References