Queuing for flat whites and skinny lattes being served through a street-facing hatch from a “boutique” bakery in the small village of Ballinspittle, customers were there on a recent Saturday morning for their coffee fix rather than a gawk at the statue of Our Lady.
Mention the “moving statue” in the village and folk smile benignly but don’t seem interested in talking about the phenomenon. Forty years ago, on July 22, 1985, a 17-year-old local girl, who was in the company of family members and a few neighbours, said she saw the statue of Our Lady, in the grotto just outside Ballinspittle at Sheehy’s Cross, move.
It was shortly after 10pm. Little did Claire O’Mahony know what she had unleashed while on a walk with a stop-off for prayers at the grotto.
Thousands of both the curious, and the religious, descended on Ballinspittle, close to Kinsale in south west County Cork, to witness for themselves this oddity.
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It was the start of a bizarre summer (also remembered for its poor weather) with at least another 30 sightings around the country of statues of Our Lady and other venerables “moving”. On August 15th, the feast of the Assumption, gardaí estimated more than15,000 people came to Ballinspittle.
I was working in the newsroom (a desultory portakabin) of ERI, a Cork pirate radio station at the time. We drove down in the station’s van to the scene of the headline-grabbing silly story one evening to report on it.
The place was thronged. The grotto is in a natural amphitheatre and the source of all the fuss stands 30 feet above eye-level with a halo of light bulbs around her head. Opposite the grotto is a sloping hill where we perched up among the hordes, recording vox pops.
The next morning, live on air, chatting to presenter John Creedon (who was to go onto better things at RTÉ) I declared that I had seen the statue move.
It wasn’t a complete bid for attention. I actually did experience what the psychology department at Univesity College Cork(yes, the heavy hitters were roped in by the media) described as an optical illusion.
Stare at something static long enough at dusk and you will perceive what appears to be movement. And those twinkling lights around the Blessed Virgin’s head helped.
But that didn’t dampen spirits. A letter writer to the then Cork Examiner bemoaned the “atheist mods” who dismissed the religious fervour and said that the moving statue was a sign sent to strengthen the nation’s faith.
Psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare gave his opinion in the Irish Press, saying that the sighting in Ballinspittle “occurs late in the evening to women of great religious devotion”.
Others argued that the phenomenon was a response to an existential angst, exacerbated by the Cold War. And there was the stark reality of unemployment in Ireland at the time at 17per cent. Sociological factors explaining moving statues can be as relevant as deeply held religious conviction.
Whatever the reasons, the world’s media was enthralled by the story at Ballinspittle. Locals featured on the BBC’s Newsnight. And in 2010, Terry Wogan visited the grotto to record a piece about it for a BBC show.
Not everyone was charmed by the goings-on at the site of religious fervour and, no doubt, some mockery too. The Ballinspittle statue was vandalised by protestors against idolatry, led by Robert Draper who was found guilty of smashing other statues and went on to do six months in prison. The Ballinspittle statue was repaired.
Today, the well-tended grotto includes a rail on which dozens of sets of Rosary beads hang. There is a caretaker’s hut but no sign of life in it.
There is out-of-date information about rosary gatherings for the month of May. A woman I spoke to who lives in Ballinspittle said that she sometimes hears the rosary being recited from the grotto, relayed by loudhailers.
It sure makes a change from having your evening punctuated by social media alerts. Can you imagine the level of digital manipulation that would have been applied to photographs of statues of Our Lady had the internet been around four decades ago?
After dropping into a few shops in Ballinspittle (including two great craft stores), and annoying the staff as I tried to extract moving statue lore from them, my companion said she needed to use the loo, so we left.
First though, we drove back to the grotto where toilets had been installed to cater for pilgrims. They are in a grim grey-painted concrete building but a sign says they are out of service. A metaphor, perhaps, for the waning faith of the populace?
