Ann Lovett

Ann Rose Lovett (6 April 1968 – 31 January 1984) was a 15-year-old schoolgirl from Granard, County Longford, Ireland, who died giving birth beside a grotto on 31 January 1984.

Her baby son died at the same time and the story of her death played a huge part in a seminal national debate on women giving birth outside marriage.

Ann Rose Lovett was born in Cóbh General Hospital (now Cóbh Community Hospital) on Aileen Terrace in Cóbh, a town on the south coast of County Cork, on 6 April 1968.

She was the seventh of her parents eventual nine children (three girls and six boys).

Her father, Diarmuid Lovett, was from Kilnaleck, a village in the south-south-west of County Cavan (however, he may have been born in Ballyshannon in the south of County Donegal, but was raised in Kilnaleck).

Her mother was Patricia Lovett (née McNamee; born in Dublin).

Diarmuid had moved to Cóbh for work, and the family lived in Graham's Terrace in the town, a row of Victorian houses directly overlooking the harbour.

He moved his family back to his native Kilnaleck in 1972, where he ran a building firm.

In 1981, the family moved again, this time to Granard, a nearby small town in County Longford, where Diarmuid had purchased The Copper Pot, a pub on the Main Street in Granard.

The family lived in premises immediately above the pub.

While living in Granard, Diarmuid returned to occasionally working as a carpenter while also working as the landlord at The Copper Pot.

It seems that the pub was not a success under Diarmuid's management, with the pub rarely being open and Diarmuid being unemployed much of the time.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, 31 January 1984, in Granard, County Longford, fifteen-year-old Ann Lovett left her Catholic Cnoc Mhuire Secondary School and made her way to a Grotto dedicated to the Virgin Mary at the top of her small hometown in the Irish midlands.

It was here, beneath the statue of Our Lady, that she gave birth, alone, to her infant son.

At around 4 pm that day, some children on their way home from school saw Ann's schoolbag on the ground and discovered her lying in the Grotto.

They alerted a passing farmer who rushed to the nearby Parochial House to inform the parish priest of the chilling discovery of Ann and her already deceased baby in the adjacent grotto.

The response of the parish priest, Francis Canon Gilfillan, to his request for help was; "It's a doctor you need".

Ann, still alive but haemorrhaging heavily, was carried to the house of Canon Gilfillan, the parish priest, from where a doctor was phoned.

She was then driven in the doctor's car to her parents' house in the centre of the town.

By the point an ambulance arrived it was already too late.

Ann Lovett and her child were quietly buried three days later in Granardkill cemetery.

"A quarter of a century on from a tragedy that shocked the nation, many questions remain unanswered about the deaths of Ann Lovett and her infant child."

On Saturday night, 4 February 1984, Ireland's most popular television show The Late Late Show was coming to an end, when host Gay Byrne read this headline from the next day's Sunday Tribune newspaper: "Girl, 15, Dies Giving Birth In A Field".

Stating angrily "nothing terribly exciting there", Byrne cast the newspaper onto the studio floor.

This moment marked the first introduction the world had to the story of Ann Lovett and her newborn child.

A phonecall had been made to the Dublin newspaper by an anonymous caller from Granard and the story, broken in the Sunday Tribune by Emily O'Reilly, drew the attention of the world to the tragic incident.

The next day Granard was swamped with national and international media.

The story shocked the nation and left many asking how such a thing could happen.

For others it was an opportunity to finally reveal similar stories that had remained hidden for decades.

The Gay Byrne Show on RTÉ Radio began to receive letters from all over the country – "Too many letters. They couldn't be ignored."

The local community and clergy, including the order of nuns at the school which Ann had attended, remained tight lipped, apart from a terse statement, denying any knowledge of the teenager's pregnancy.

While the statement issued by the nuns, following legal advice, said they "did not know" about her pregnancy, they subsequently refused to confirm whether they had suspected it or not.

Rumours also abounded about the identity of the child's father and the difficult family circumstances in which Ann herself was reared.

Many residents of Granard accused the media of being overly intrusive and of wrongly attaching blame to the community for the tragedy.

Diarmuid and his wife Patricia would spend the rest of their lives living in Granard; Diarmuid died in August 1987 aged 54, following a stroke, while Patricia died in June 2015 aged 81.

In National Archives of Ireland documents released in December 2014, a letter was revealed written by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Armagh to poet Christopher Daybell which claimed Lovett's "sad death reflects more on her immaturity than on any lack of Christian charity".

An inquest was held in Mullingar a few weeks later and found that Ann's death was due to irreversible shock caused by haemorrhage and exposure during childbirth.

The inquest also confirmed that, contrary to claims emanating from the local community, some people did indeed know about Ann's pregnancy before her death.

Subsequent enquiries by the Gardaí, the Department of Education and the Midlands Health Board have yet to be published leaving the tragic events of that day and the circumstances that forced a young girl to leave her classroom on a cold, wet winters day to give birth alone in a grotto, still shrouded in uncertainty.

Ann Lovett's death came just four months after the outcome of a divisive abortion referendum in the Republic of Ireland in which a two-thirds majority voted to enshrine the right to life of the unborn in the Constitution of Ireland, creating confusion over where that left the rights of the mother.