Remembering Anne Lovett

On the 31st of January this year, thirty years will have passed since a 15-year-old girl called Anne Lovett was found semi-conscious, bleeding and suffering from exposure in a Grotto to the Virgin Mary in the small town of Granard in County Longford.

The body of her baby son, to whom she had given birth some hours previously, lay lifeless beside her. She died later that day in hospital in Mullingar.

I would have been three years older than Anne Lovett at that time. I know from many that are around the same age as me, that the death of Anne Lovett and her son is a memory seared in our consciousness.