Memories of the Pope’s visit to Drogheda in 1979
St. Oliver brought back to St. Peter’s Church in a Garda car!!
By Andy Spearman
Since he became sacristan of Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Drogheda in 1963, Sean Walshe has served six Parish Priests, six Archbishops or Cardinals and seven Popes!
Sean started in the job just four years after the Lourdes Church opened but he had already been associated with the parish since he started serving as an altar boy when he was seven years old.
Since then he has been awarded two papal medals, one when he reached 50 years of service and the other on his 60th anniversary last year. These medals and a message from the current Pope are treasured possessions.
Sean has a lifetime of memories, some of them sad others of great joy, shared on wedding days, christenings and other important life events.
He was serving as an altar boy on the day the Lourdes Church was consecrated by Bishop Conway who later went on to become a Cardinal.
He vividly remembers that one of the servers at the consecration mass, Michael Coyle, spilled a vase of holy water straight on to the Bishop’s lap. Luckily the Bishop saw the funny side of it and everyone heaved a big sigh of relief.
Cardinal Cushing of Boston, who visited Drogheda in the early sixties, also made a lasting impression on Sean.
“He was a shocking man to boast” Sean said, “but he was a great fundraiser and made a huge contribution to the Medical Missionaries of Mary and the Lourdes Hospital and to the new school building for Greenhills College.”
The visit to Drogheda of Pope John Paul the second in September 1979 provided Sean with the busiest and most memorable day of his long career.
The original plan was for the Pope to visit Northern Ireland but following the murder of Lord Mountbatten and three others at Mullaghmore in County Sligo on 27 August 1979 and the killing of 16 British Army paratroopers at Warrenpoint later that same day, the Vatican decided that it would be too dangerous for him to travel North.
So they changed the venue to Drogheda but the scheduled date of 29th September could not be changed. Suddenly, Sean and a small army of volunteers, were very busy because the whole event had to be organised and the site at Drogheda had to be developed very quickly.
In fact they had only ten days to organise the huge event and to turn Terry Grant’s field at Killineer into a site capable of accommodating the huge crowd that was expected to attend.
Construction of the huge altar began almost straight away, a road was built through the site, security was arranged, flowers and shrubs planted, communications systems were set up, underground facilities built and walls painted.
On the day itself everything was just about ready as people who had travelled from far and wide started entering the site from very early in the morning. Soon the road to Killineer was a river of people making their way out from Drogheda on foot.
By the time the Pope arrived there were between a quarter of a million and three hundred thousand people on site all corralled into various zones by a small army of volunteer stewards who were selected and vetted by Gardaí from every Gaelic Club in the Diocese of Armagh.
There was worldwide interest in this leg of the Pope’s visit to Ireland because it was in Drogheda that he would make an appeal for peace in Northern Ireland.
Special platforms were built for the world’s media to film the proceedings and a special communications tent was provided from where journalists could file their stories to newsrooms around the world.
“I wish to speak to all men and women who engage in violence” the Pope said. “I appeal to you in language of passionate pleading. On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence and return to the ways of peace.”
The speech was watched on TV by millions of viewers worldwide but sadly the violence continued for another two decades.
The Pope had arrived on time and the mass went very smoothly. He received a rapturous reception as he toured the site blessing the crowd from the Pope mobile. Nobody present had a better view than Sean though, as he was on the altar throughout the day.
Miraculously there were no major accidents on the day although one man, a Mr. Hughes from the Windmill Road, died of a suspected heart attack on his way out to the site.
Well organised as it was, the huge job of organising this massive event was not without its hitches. A special leaflet was printed and ready to be delivered to every household in the diocese of Armagh but it had to be scrapped when someone noticed they had printed the wrong date – September 30th instead of 29th!
Within minutes of the Pope leaving the site by helicopter the altar was invaded by souvenir hunters who grabbed whatever they could get their hands on to take home as souvenirs of the day.
The head of St. Oliver Plunkett, which had been brought out to the site from St. Peter’s Church on an army gun carriage, was still on the Papal altar as this invasion started and was in danger of being toppled so the Garda Chief Superintendent of the time, Dick Cotterell, had to take control very quickly before anything happened to it.
“Get that effing head out of there and bring it back to St. Peter’s” the Chief Superintendent roared. And so it was that St. Oliver was brought back to St. Peter’s Church in West Street on the back seat of a Garda car!!
All photos by Andy Spearman.
