with messages, to frail, gentle, and invariably impoverished zealots proclaiming devotion and prayer as the solution. 

I know the latter description to suit the lady who proclaimed the 1950’s apparition at Ardboe, Tyrone. I consider it apt also to the alleged appearances at Fatima, Medigoree and Knock, to name but three. 

Only the most enduring, like Lourdes, wins the attention, if not the official approval of important personages in the Church. Two Bishops and a number of priests accompanied the recent Dromore Diocesan Pilgrimage. I am now in slightly-apprehensive possession of the gift of a bottle of Lourdes water, offered by a pilgrim of that trip. 

The following account of an apparition in Tipperary at the height of the Black and Tan War, taken from Patrick Shea’s book Voices and the Sound of Drums (Blackstaff, 1981) seems apt – and to my (admittedly-sceptical) ear, fairly balanced.

 ‘When the funeral of the shot District Inspector (of the RIC) had passed, seventeen-year-old farm labourer James Welsh proclaimed to the world the apparitions and messages he had received from the Virgin. She had told him of her displeasure at the sinful happenings in Ireland. At her request he had scraped a small hole in the earthen floor of his cottage and it had become a clear, running spring well. After each vision a statue in his house had started to bleed. A small table with cloth and bleeding statues was laid out and the crowds of pilgrims began to arrive.

 “In the main street my father saw coming towards him a great crowd of people and out in front of them a wild-eyed, hysterical man dancing and leaping in the air, laughing and crying out his thanks to God, calling on all present to witness the miracle of the banishment of his disability. My father had seen this man dragging himself about the town on crutches; as long as most people could remember he had been a cripple. But there he was, leaping about – as my father said – ‘like a circus tumbler’. He had been out to Welsh’s house, partaken of water from the well and thrown away his crutches. Templemore had seen its first miracle.

The newspapers took up the story of the bleeding statues, the holy well and the straightened cripple. The story brought wonder and hope all over the country to homes where there was illness and infirmity. From all over people set out for Templemore, relatives bringing the disabled, the deformed and the sick, sad, praying people coming hopefully to the shrine of the Virgin Mary. Returning pilgrims brought home news of further cures. In every corner of Ireland charitable people were making arrangements to facilitate afflicted neighbours to make the journey.

Military authorities and insurgents alike seemed to observe a ceasefire; shootings and pillaging were forgotten. There was no point in enforcing regulations which prohibited motorists from travelling more than twenty miles without a permit. It had been imposed to hamper the movements of the IRA but was now ignored by hurrying pilgrims and by the police.

There came stretcher cases, babes in arms, invalids in wheelchairs, the mentally ill, the blind, the deformed; and outside the little cottage the pile of discarded crutches got bigger.

 Despite words of warning from older clergy, the cause of young Welsh and his bleeding statues was taken up with enthusiasm. Crowds knelt in the streets as he passed. He accepted an invitation to visit the Bishop of the Diocese and next day came the news that as he crossed the threshold of the Bishop’s palace all the statues in the house started to bleed. This was immediately denied.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun the whole thing ceased to be news. The papers mentioned it no more, the flow of pilgrims ceased and there were no more miracles. In the aftermath it became apparent that the events were put to good use by the guerrilla forces of the IRA. Men on the run were moved to new hiding places, the disposition of active service groups was rearranged and new supplies of arms and munitions were distributed.