The Virgin Mary and the 'tainted' teenage girl who came to her for sanctuary

Caroline O'Doherty - on what the death of a teen mother taught us.

LUNCH-TIME at Mercy College passed with the usual boisterous mix of hurriedly eaten sandwiches, eagerly exchanged gossip, last-minute homework and stray footballs.

Most days, Ann Lovett missed the bustle and banter, preferring to take the short walk to her family home on Main Street where she would eat in the company of her younger sister, while their mother attended to the copious housework generated by a household of 11.

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.

The lonely deaths of 15-year-old Ann Lovett and her secret child became an event used to define the growing pains of a country caught half-way between past and progression. Personal tragedy became national scandal and both sides in a bitter wrangle over the future direction of Ireland used the incident to advance their case.

Some bemoaned the loss of Catholic values among the young and lamented the demise of the Church's influence. Others argued the tragedy was the inevitable product of a repressed, hypocritical society which spouted Catholic diktat but spurned a frightened pregnant teenager.

It was an emotive argument strengthened by the outcome of the divisive abortion referendum four months earlier in which a two-thirds majority voted to enshrine the right to life of the unborn in the Constitution, creating confusion over where that left the rights of the mother.

The Catholic Church had urged a yes vote and now a young mother had died in a town where the physical landscape was dominated by its church, St Mary's, which sat high on Cnoic Mhuire, the hill that gave its name to the Mercy Order secondary school, where Ann was a fifth-year student.

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.

Cnoic Mhuire may have been built on the site of a workhouse and run by nuns with names like Sister Immaculata, instantly creating an image of starched wimples and hand-scrubbed floors, but in fact it had been one of the first co-educational schools in the country, throwing open its doors to boys and a whole new way of school life as far back as 1959.

St Patrick may have once honoured the town with his presence but it was latter-day heroes like showband singer Larry Cunningham and showjumper Eddie Macken who would be most often cited as its most famous sons.

Whether or not Ann Lovett's family were aware of the religious imagery surrounding them and the significance outsiders were investing it with, the hill where their daughter died became their own Calvary.

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.

The local GP who was called to the grotto and later dared to suggest that other young women had endured secret pregnancies, retired a decade ago and his practice is now run by his son who appealed with genuine concern that his now elderly father not be made go over the details again.

The coroner, who was in the pressured position of presiding over the only public inquiry into the events surrounding Ann's death, sent word that he felt no good would come of dragging up her case again. The school, still run under the banner of the Mercy order but with a lay male principal at its helm, did not want to take questions. The reticence of those who knew Ann to speak about her may purely have been a reflection of their desire to protect her family. As they struggled with the grief of Ann's death and the bewilderment of being a national talking point, the Lovetts suffered another devastating blow.

Three months after Ann died, a fortnight after what would have been her 16th birthday, her 14-year-old sister, Patricia, died from an overdose of a drug prescribed primarily for anxiety and blood pressure.

Three years later, their father, Diarmuid, who had suffered with high blood pressure, took a stroke and died at the age of just 54 in the decrepit Jervis Street Hospital in Dublin which would be shut down a few months later. The family had borne enough and it was probably too much to ask that they appreciate Ann's fate as representing some kind of landmark in the social and psychological development of the country.

In the years that followed, Granard kept a low profile, hitting the headlines for the wrong reasons again in the early 1990s during a nasty industrial dispute at Pat the Bakers bread factory, the town's biggest employer.

Its population declined, from more than 1,300 in 1986 to just 1,013 in 2002, but it has been spruced up and looks a busier, more prosperous place than it did in 1984. But then, it is arguably a different place than it was 20 years ago. Four years ago it hit headlines again when John Carthy, a young man suffering from manic depression, was shot dead by gardaí after a siege at his home two miles down the road in Abbeylara.

Again the cameras and microphones flooded in and again the awkward questions were asked. Who knew about John's problems? What was done to help? What kind of community did he live in? What did his plight say about the Ireland of 2000? But this time the questions are being asked in an open public forum, the Barr Tribunal, and local people are openly giving their views. A quiet corner of rural east Longford is speaking for its dead and the rest of the country is listening.