A TOTAL of 102 people were treated for hysteria and more than 2,000 fainted. No, it wasn’t the audience at a One Direction concert. It was pilgrims who attended the Eucharistic Congress when it last visited Ireland in 1932.
Records gathered by the Dublin Diocesan Archive show that the Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland provided first aid to more than 3,000 people during the four-day celebration of faith.
Faints and exhaustion accounted for 2,381 cases but the scouts also had to deal with 72 epileptic fits, 14 poisonings, six cases of sunstroke, and 14 haemorrhages.
Some 5,000 scouts were on duty during the event and those from outside Dublin set up the largest camp the country had ever seen, across 20 acres of ground in Terenure College.
The sheer scale of the congress is captured by the archive. More than one million people attended the final Mass in the Phoenix Park with the first train arriving at 2am on that Sunday morning.
By midday, more than 150 trains had carried pilgrims to Dublin. This was in addition to 700 buses, 25,000 cars and thousands of bicycles. Some 5,000 people slept in the Phoenix Park.
Loudspeakers were positioned around the park and right into the city centre, effectively making Dublin an open-air church. Photographs show people gathered around loudspeakers, listening to the proceedings.
After the Mass, a million people marched from the park to O’Connell Bridge for Benediction, which was the final act of the congress.
The archive and memorabilia gathered by archivist Noelle Dowling will go on display in Dublin’s RDS Library next week as the city prepares for the next congress.
It includes original footage from 1932 provided by Peter Dunn of the Radharc Trust. Voice-overs recounting memories of those who had attended the event include one person recalling “a day off school”, while another said the event had “changed people”.
It tells the story of visitor Fr Philip Gordon, a Native American who was also known as Fr Sign in the Sky. He wore his chief’s feathers during the congress and spent time with president of the executive council Éamon de Valera, who had been made a chief of the tribe and given the name Eagle Dressing his Feathers.
The documents show that the altar used in the Phoenix Park was later chopped up and its wood used to make crucifixes. The plants decorating the altar were auctioned off.
The event received international coverage. The Yorkshire Evening Press reported that pilgrims were still singing hymns in the streets at 4am after the greatest night in Dublin’s history. The Western Evening Herald in Plymouth reported concerns about food shortages in Dublin because the city’s population had doubled.
Memorabilia on view includes a set of vestments used during the congress, embroidered by Lilly and Lottie Yeats, sisters of writer William Butler Yeats and artist Jack B Yeats.
Archbishop of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin and Fonsie Mealy, RDS president, will view the items when the exhibition is launched tonight at the RDS Library.
The free exhibition will be open to the public from Tuesday to Friday next week.
It will be accessible only to pilgrims attending the Eucharistic Congress the following week but will reopen to the public from June 18th-22nd.
