Clodagh Finn: ‘Mrs Come Quick’ — a tribute to our rural midwives

That nickname brings to mind an account, from John Joe McCusker, of a woman in Fermanagh who gave birth in the early 1940s by the light of a lamp used to hunt rabbits. He wrote: “One night Bessie [the midwife] was delivering a baby by the light of a rabbit lamp when baby boy, number one arrived — followed by [a] girl, baby number 2; another camogie player, number three, then made her appearance.

“‘For Christ’s sake,’ says Bessie, put out that flash lamp or I’ll be here until broad daylight. Apparently, the rabbit-catching lamp was ‘attracting’ the babies.’”

McCusker’s anecdote is funny and it has a happy ending — the birth of healthy triplets — but the story of our rural midwives, so beautifully told in a new exhibition, is also stitched through with accounts of high infant mortality, hardship and poverty.

Bina Kelly, a nurse and midwife from Kilconnell, Galway, saw it all. Resources were sometimes so scarce that she blew out the candle between contractions and then used her bicycle lamp for the birth.

She rode her Raleigh bicycle thousands of miles to attend mothers-to-be all around the county, dispensing care to everyone from the “blue bloods”, as she put it, in the luxurious nursing rooms of the Big Houses to Traveller women in rain-sodden camps.

“I didn’t know what I was facing,” she told Jim Fahy in an episode of his radio series Looking West in 1983. “You went into the home of the patient and you would see the mother in the bed and all of her other little children looking at her from the bottom of the bed and I hoped and prayed to God they would have their mother at the end of this.”

Local historian and exhibition curator Emma Laffey takes up the story. Between them, Bina and her mother delivered babies in the area for 80 years, between 1890 and 1970.

“She educated herself in nursing and midwifery during a time when women were literally battling to be able to vote,” she says.

It was also a time when the belief that babies were found in the cabbage patch — or that they sprang from the midwife’s medical bag — was prevalent among children and, sometimes even adults. That explains why Bina’s bag once went missing. The guards were even called in to help find it.

Their plight was understood because, as Emma Laffey explains, if there was one thing that characterised Bina Kelly and all the community midwives, it was their kindness. They all had “oodles” of it.

“I have a huge admiration for these women’s passion, commitment, diligence and intelligence. And most of all, kindness. Every person I spoke to about community midwives, kindness was the top element of it,” she says.

Community midwives also used their knowledge and experience to help women negotiate the challenges that followed birth. One woman recounted that her mother suffered postpartum depression, and, as she had more children, it progressively got worse. Without Bina’s kindness and help, they would not have had their mother for as long, or as healthy, as they did.

In a sense, Emma Laffey is the perfect person to tell the stories of our community midwives and the thousands of families they helped before the regulation of midwifery in 1918

She is a mother of six, a healthcare assistant at the maternity department in Portiuncula Hospital in Ballinasloe, Galway, and a volunteer with the Skehana & District Heritage Group. More than that, her own family history contains the most affecting vignette that illustrates the many hardships faced by mothers.

While researching that history, she found out that her great grandmother, Sarah McBride, died aged 41 from “maternal exhaustion”. Her two-year-old child was still feeding from her body when she was found, according to family lore.

The discovery prompted her to research the history of Ireland’s forgotten ‘handy women’. She collected photographs, interviews, documents and old video footage which resulted in an award-winning e-book, An Bhean Ghlúine. Now that fascinating material forms an exhibition, Mary Anne Fanning, Remembering our Community Midwives, which opened at the National Museum of Ireland — Country Life, Turlough Park, Castlebar, on Thursday.

It’s exceptional work; not only because it shines a light on an obscured past, but because it showcases the research of Emma Laffey, a volunteer who went about uncovering the many hidden stories stored within our own communities

It’s also a fine example of what has been achieved by the Irish Community Archive Network (iCAN), an organisation set up by the National Museum of Ireland in 2009 to encourage and support communities to collect and share their local history online.

The exhibition brings together the stories of many women, but it centres on Mary Anne Fanning (1880-1964) who spent 48 years working as a district midwife and nurse in Caherdaniel, Co Kerry, and later in Garristown, Co Dublin.

The artefacts — letters, certificates, her Aladdin’s cave medical bag and a christening gown used by up to 200 children — provide an insight into the life of a woman who successfully wrote to the authorities to retain her position after marrying Patrick Fanning in 1901.

She went on to have eight children of her own and cycled around the district to dispense care to mothers-to-be. But she helped anyone in need. In 1916, she was one of the first to give medical aid to the volunteers during the Thomas Ashe raid in Ashbourne.

In her later years, she got a car but her petrol ration was revoked when it was discovered she was giving lifts to farm labourers. It was restored, though, after the matter was raised in the Dáil.

Mary Ann Fanning also had a second career as a vegetable-growing entrepreneur. When her husband died, she built a glasshouse in Garristown and grew broccoli and tomatoes which she sold at market in Dublin.

“She’d come home with over £700 in the early 1900s for her vegetables, which she in turn then used to buy more land to try and set up her sons in a farm as they grew up,” Emma Laffey says.

Mary Ann’s story is just one of many gems unearthed with such care by Laffey. As the local historian says herself: “The community is where all our secrets lie. Not just for midwifery, but all of our heritage. People are very willing, if they put enough trust in you, to talk to you and tell you all of the little things.”

This exhibition, an extraordinary collection of those “little things”, runs until March.