1985 revisited: Ballinspittle's moving statue — ‘We weren’t expecting what we saw’

“We had a car, which would have been unusual enough at the time, and we drove down because everybody was talking about it,” Colm says.

The “it” that everyone was talking about was a curious phenomenon taking place at the village of Ballinspittle, near Kinsale. On the evening of Monday, July 22, a local woman, Kathy O’Mahony, had been out walking with her two daughters and stopped to say the rosary at the grotto, a shrine to the Virgin Mary, when they saw the statue moving.

Kathy later told TV news crews that the statue appeared to her to be “breathing or sighing", and she reported being overcome with a sense of peace and protection.

Word of what the O’Mahonys had seen moved first around the parish and then further afield, and the grotto became the centre of a massive spontaneous gathering that lasted months and which, in ways, was to change the quiet community forever.

Colm and his friend were not religious, and were drawn by curiosity and the sense of occasion. Nothing could have prepared them for what they were to encounter.

“We went down to have a laugh about it, because everyone was talking about this thing,” he says.

“We went for the spectacle, and we weren’t expecting what we saw.”

Thousands of people were sitting and standing on the sloped embankment overlooking the rocky grotto on the other side of the road. There was the usual hubbub that such a crowd would produce.

“My memory is of a lovely warm summer’s evening,” he says.

“There was a definite atmosphere there: It wasn’t celebratory, just odd. Then I remember distinctly that everybody stopped talking. All the noise suddenly stopped, and I looked at the statue.

“What I saw was that the statue’s head just… shimmered. Not the body, just the head. It was shimmering, as though you couldn’t quite focus on it.”

Colm turned to his friend and asked if he was also seeing the statue move, and his friend said he was. “We were a little bit shocked,” Colm says. “The crowd, the quietness, that everybody seemed to be seeing the same thing. After a minute or two, it stopped, and everyone started talking again. We left with our tail between our legs. We came down to have a laugh at these people, and we got a bit of a fright.”

Colm describes the experience as shocking and even a little unpleasant: He had experienced something utterly outside his control and not in line with his own view of the world. Yet two nights later, he and his friend returned. Again, they believed they saw the statue move.

Colm’s feelings about this strange experience, now 40 years ago, are ambiguous.

“There was no closure on this, and there’s still no closure on it,” he says. “I saw something slightly odd happening on two separate occasions, and it stuck with me ever since. I’m not sure if it’s a good memory or a bad memory: it’s just an odd memory.”

More statues begin to move

Ballinspittle’s moving statue was joined by a veritable outbreak of other incidents at Marian shrines by the end of that summer: In August, it was the turn of Mount Melleray in Co Waterford, and claims of apparitions at almost 30 other sites around the country followed.

The Catholic Church was reticent, and wouldn’t declare the apparitions a miracle. Then bishop of Cork and Ross, Michael Murphy, called for “ordinary common sense” and told RTÉ and BBC reporters he wouldn’t visit the grotto himself in case it was viewed as an endorsement. But visitors flocked in their thousands to Ballinspittle. Busloads arrived each day.

Attempts to provide some kind of rational explanation were underway: The Applied Psychology department in UCC declared that the phenomenon was an optical illusion. Others theorised that it was a mass hysteria, that there was a hallucinogenic contaminant in the shrine’s well water, or even that locals had rigged some kind of battery-operated mechanism.

For Colm, there remains no explanation, even though there is of course a societal context: “Most people were unemployed. There was a terrible sense of no future: everyone was on the dole, everyone was scrimping and saving, and everyone was emigrating.

“There was nothing, in the ’80s. We were a shambles of a country, a shell of a place really. So that was a very odd background to the whole thing, but I wouldn’t want to try to be a pop psychologist and come up with a broader theory about it.”

Today, Colm Crowley is the head of RTÉ Cork, and, through pure coincidence, he ended up buying a house and settling near Ballinspittle. For him, though, the grotto as it is today feels like a different place to the one in which he had such an unexplainable experience all those years ago.

“It is still very much a tourist attraction and there are often people sitting there contemplating life,” he says.

“To me, it feels just like a very nice, very well-kept grotto. It doesn’t dominate life in the village, but I do think people are respectful of it.”

‘Drive slowly through grotto’

Visit the grotto today, and one of the first things you’ll see is one of the many signs urging care and respect: “drive slowly through grotto” one sign reads.

You may see a man in a hi-vis jacket, mowing, trimming, or doing other maintenance jobs. This is Paddy Simms, who has faithfully and voluntarily tended to the grotto daily for the past 40 years.

It is quiet, but regularly attended. Since 1985, the surface of the road that transects the site has been much improved, but the toilets closed during covid and haven’t reopened.

For months there has been a sign on the tap where visitors have gathered highly prized well water for generations saying the water is not fit for drinking: Some months ago, there were reports that the water was contaminated and tests are yet to be carried out.

The grotto’s care and maintenance is organised by a committee. Care of the grotto has always been an impressive community effort, dating to long before 1985, back just over 70 years, to when it was first constructed in 1954.

The Herculean efforts of locals in constructing the grotto are described by committee secretary Agnes O’Brien in this winter’s edition of local publication The Courcey Chronicle.

On land donated by Mr Denis O’Leary, parishioners banded together to clear the site, even with the assistance of Kinsale Fire Brigade, who used their fire hoses to wash down the stone and concrete of the grotto’s cavern before the statues of the Virgin Mary and St Bernadette were installed.

St Bernadette was the young girl who saw visions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in 1858, and so what the grotto itself depicts is someone seeing an apparition of Mary.

1954 was a time when a lot of shrines to the Virgin Mary were erected around Ireland. It was 100 years since the immaculate conception had been declared a dogma of the Church by Pope Pius IX, and Pope Pius XII had called on the faithful to mark the occasion.

The Ballinspittle statues themselves were the work of statue-maker Maurice O’Donnell, whose workshop was once where Paul St Shopping Centre now stands in Cork city.

Hammer attack

It was also to Maurice that the committee turned when an outrageous attack against the statue took place in October 1985, when a group of three evangelical Protestants headed up by one Mr Robert Draper took hammer and axe to the statue, hacking off its face and hands. The 5’ 6” statue was restored and returned to the grotto.

Aisling Minihane, who was just 12 at the time, remembers the local outrage at the attack well.

“When the statue was defaced it was awful,” she says. “I think he felt people were worshipping false gods. He chopped her face off with a hatchet. Local people got really angry. Some people went to the court and they were almost ready to attack him.”

On the night the statue first moved, Aisling and her sisters were at home in bed when their father came home from the pub, the Corner House, with the strange news of what Kathy O’Mahony saw.

Aisling’s parents were religious, especially her mother, and she says she was raised in a household where the rosary was said every evening. 

“They got us out of bed in our pyjamas and we went down at about half eleven or twelve that first night,” she says.

Aisling saw the statue move that night, and has seen it on many occasions since. 

While she can’t remember her reaction or how she felt that first night, she does remember the complete upheaval to life that arrived in the following weeks: The hype, the crowds, the queues, and the lack of facilities.

“It was a small area and there was nothing to facilitate the thousands of people,” she says.

“There were no toilets, so it was actually my dad who built the toilets down there. There were people coming into the pub, people did teas and coffees and scones.”

Scenes from a sci-fi

An aunt of Aisling’s had a B&B at nearby Garretstown: It was booked out, and still people called begging for a place to stay, until not only the beds were full but the floors too, with people in sleeping bags in every available space. The scenes around the village and along the laneways were surreal to behold.

“It was like something from a science fiction movie, really,” she says. 

“We lived a few minutes away up by Barrett’s Cross, and we were all blocked into our driveways. Then the army came down and was directing people. We were quiet, country people. It was just such a huge change to our lives.”

Aisling is now 52. She left Ballinspittle and raised her own children in the Cork City suburbs, but eventually moved back to her birthplace, where she is now an active community volunteer with Ballinspittle Tidy Towns.

Although she isn’t officially a member of the Ballinspittle Grotto Committee, in recent years she has begun helping out at the site, planting shrubs and bulbs and decorating the grotto for different occasions.

Why did it end?

How and why the large crowds eventually thinned in the autumn of 1985 remains unclear to Aisling, but she feels the Church’s refusal to endorse the apparitions played a role, as did the attack on the statue and its removal for repairs.

But as far as she and some other parishioners are concerned, the crowds and the hype didn’t stop because the statue stopped moving.

In fact, as far as Aisling is concerned, she still sees it moving regularly. The last time she saw the statue moving was “about three weeks ago”. What do the movements look like? “Each time it’s different,” she says. “Logically, when a stone statue moves, it’s not a comfort: It’s actually frightening. I’d be trying to rationalise it. Her movement is a lot from the waist, like a swaying of her upper body, and it can be very rapid at times. I’ve seen it all my life.

“It’s something unexplained, something powerful and beautiful. Even people of no faith who come for the water will stop and thank Our Lady. The crowds may have stopped coming like they used to, but there’s always someone there. It’s a place of solace and comfort.”

Looking back from the age of instant answers

Forty years on from the fervour and passion of Ballinspittle’s moving statue, we now live in an era when we expect all our answers to come at the scroll of a screen.

It may be tempting for a younger generation to cast around for rational explanations when they hear the strange tale of the Ballinspittle moving statue. Would such a phenomenon even take place today, outside of the backdrop of mid-1980s Ireland?

The apparitions at Medjugorje, with all the attendant attention in a small rural community, had begun just four years earlier in 1981. Unemployment was high, as was an attendant boredom.

Would Google and Netflix, and the country’s changing demographic, and the shockwaves and scandals that rocked the foundations of the Catholic Church for so many in Ireland throughout the 1990s and 2000s, even permit such a phenomenon today?

For Aisling, the question is irrelevant: She has never doubted what she believes she has seen for so many years, and she thinks the scepticism and mockery she has encountered is part of an entrenched, rigid way of looking at the world.

Some of the coverage of the phenomenon and some of the mocking attitudes she has encountered have made her angry.

"All I do is ask them if they will go down and take a look for themselves," she says.  

"They say no — it’s total fear, and to me it’s defensive. They don’t want their beliefs to be shaken.”

Her message is clear: If you want to know what happened 40 years ago at Ballinspittle, and if you want to know if you believe it could possibly be true, go down and take a look for yourself.