Sir, – In March 1995, I was one of a team who visited (the then-open) St Loman’s Hospital Mullingar as part of a survey of local authority records carried out by the National Archives under the auspices of the Department of the Environment. The summary report of the survey’s steering group (published in 1996) is still available online on the gov.ie website.
In the basement of the large Victorian building there was an extremely large quantity of records dating back, as far as I can recall, to the foundation of the hospital in 1855. These were dumped in appallingly unsafe and unsanitary conditions.
I am horrified to see that, 29 years on, patient and other records are still stored in the premises in a totally unsuitable and unsecured manner (“TikTokkers find death records in former psychiatric hospital in Westmeath”, News, June 25th).
St Loman’s was not the only psychiatric hospital where the survey discovered historic records in such conditions, but the situation there was particularly appalling and has remained fresh in my memory. – Yours, etc,
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DONAL MOORE,
Ferrybank,
Co Waterford.