My knowledge of the latter was rather skimpy until I watched TG4’s fascinating documentary on the matter last week – originally on Wednesday and repeated Saturday.
With a mixture of reconstructions, archive footage and interviews Deora De detailed the sequence of events. It was 1920, during the War of Independence, when young Jimmy Walsh claimed to be getting messages from Our Lady, and more dramatically to see her statues bleeding.
As thousands of pilgrims flocked to the town miracles were reported and the situation started to get out of hand. The people of Templemore benefited financially, which no doubt they welcomed as the town had recently been half destroyed by British troops in reprisal for the murder of police inspector Wilson.
There were many comic touches in this telling of the bizarre tale – initially the IRA welcomed it – they gained from ‘donations’, from stewarding the massive crowds and even from tolls they exacted as people travelled between two pilgrimage sites.
Under IRA questioning the fearful Walsh said Our Lady approved of the guerilla campaign and wanted it stepped up! But then members started drinking the proceeds and forgot about fighting for Ireland.
With the War of Independence fizzling out in the area the IRA tried without success to get an unsympathetic Church to put a stop to the hysteria. Eventually they even brought Michael Collins into it – he sent Dan Breen to investigate and eventually Breen’s threats put a stop to ‘Saint’ Jimmy Walsh’s gallop. Sadly the local IRA also murdered two policeman and the pilgrims scattered to avoid the inevitable retribution.
The general consensus of the local and national historians interviewed was that while Walsh might originally have believed that he saw ‘something’, he built on the elaborate story because he liked the adulation or the money, or was just delusional.
The idea of the story being a fake was added to in a the final scene based on the testimony of one IRA man, when we saw Collins breaking one of the statues and finding a clockwork device inside that was pumping blood from the statue.
Just before that there was a shot of the front page of The Irish Catholic from those times.
The headline shouted: ‘The Greatest Fraud on Earth’.