Joyce Fegan: Ann Lovett’s story finally gets big screen treatment

You were too young to have the slightest notion about the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, what was legal and what was not when it came to the flesh of your very own body, and yet the innate wisdom was: do not get pregnant. You just knew.

And that was for a generation of girls, now women, who were able to access condoms without prescription and not necessarily end up interned in an institution should they become pregnant out of wedlock. What were their mothers’ and grandmothers’ relationship to “the girl in the grotto” story, generations of women who had no access to contraception whatsoever?

Today, Ann, a film about the final hours of 15-year-old Ann Lovett’s life, opens in Irish cinemas. Ann gave birth to a baby boy in a grotto, entirely alone, on January 31, 1984, in Granard, Co Longford.

Haemorrhaging, and close to death, she was discovered shortly afterward by local schoolboys. A pair of scissors by her side — a 15-year-old girl cut her own umbilical cord.

The mother and baby both died. But almost 40 years on, neither Ann’s memory nor her story has left our national psyche.

It’s things like justice, reckoning, and truth, that allow for integration, a moving on, but after nearly 40 years there has been little processing when it comes to the girl in the grotto — a girl who could have been any of us.

Ann was a sister, a daughter, a cousin, a friend, a neighbour, a private person. And so there is a sensitivity and a right to privacy to consider.

But Ann’s story is also a story of Ireland — how a girl could end up giving birth alone in a grotto, and what systems and strata of social control led to these circumstances.

Today’s cinema release is remarkable for a few reasons. Since Ann and her baby’s death, there has been little made about the story. On the major scale, there was an RTÉ radio documentary in 1997 and a TG4 documentary in 2004. And on the minor, there was a song by Christy Moore, ‘Everybody Knew, Nobody Said’. 

There were poems too.

And yet Ann’s story never went away.

There was then the award-winning journalism of Rosita Boland, published in The Irish Times on May 5, 2018, a Saturday, a few short weeks before Ireland went to the polls on the abortion vote.

It was called: “I was Ann Lovett’s boyfriend”. It was accompanied by a powerful portrait of Ann’s boyfriend Ricky McDonnell, having garnered the courage to speak publicly for the first time in his adult life.

The questions this piece of work raised were countless, its fact-checking rock solid and there was a feeling, a hope, that something major was going to come of this. This was, as we had all perhaps intuited, not just a story of an Irish girl birthing alone.

Here is one major standout line from that 2018 article: “Despite extensive efforts by The Irish Times, the current whereabouts and contents of the Garda file in relation to Ann Lovett’s death, if still in existence, could not be established.”

It was this piece of work that inspired filmmaker Ciaran Creagh to make Ann.

Getting this film over the line was no easy feat, despite no one having ventured over this territory before. Funding was an issue.

Mr Creagh credits RTÉ as being “fabulous” in terms of support and staying power, but the film experienced rejection by Screen Ireland twice, and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland — twice. The filmmaker and his business partner ended up fundraising for Ann in America.

This money bit matters, we fund what we believe in, what we think matters, and — when it comes to movies — what the executives think will drive sales. But just like the loud phenomenon of An Cailín Ciúin/The Quiet Girl, which went all the way to the Oscars, shattering box office records en route, there’s a knowing sense that Ann will do the same. And it will be the result of a determined filmmaker and a public ahead of financiers and industry insiders.

Ann is a story waiting to be told on a large screen. Yet when you go looking for screening locations and times, many of the big theatres haven’t a slot.

There is also a sense that this will change as the people of Ireland start talking.

As this film opens in cinemas today, there is a story, a quote, from back in the day doing the rounds. It’s from Gay Byrne. He was doing a quick Sunday newspaper review at the end of The Late Late Show on February 4, 1984.

“Girl 15, dies giving birth in a field,” he read out from the Sunday Tribune, adding: “Nothing terribly exciting there”.

And yet here we are, almost 40 years later, making a film about that very incident.

Gay Byrne, in fairness to him, did return to Ann’s story and on his radio show a few weeks later, read out letters from all over the country where women discussed their concealed pregnancies and childbirth outside of marriage. 

Many years later, he admitted that the reaction was not all cathartic or compassionate, with lots of people accusing letter writers of hyperbole or lies.

“Don’t forget that amongst the very strong letters we received after the death of Ann Lovett would have been a whole host of letters saying: ‘you’re making all this up. This never happened. This is total nonsense. It’s the D4 media again concocting stories.’

“Those letters are a perfect depiction of the sort of Ireland we lived in at that time,” said Gay Byrne in 2004.

But what sort of Ireland do we live in now? One that has the capacity to reckon with the fate of “the girl in the grotto” once and for all? One that asks all the unanswered questions? Or, an Ireland that still looks away at best, and disbelieves at worst?

Hopefully, nearly 40 years on, we can look directly at this depiction of Ann’s story knowing that the way we ran our national ship back then meant that 15-year-old girl could have been any Irish girl.