Re-creating Ann Lovett’s last day: ‘This is one story that hasn’t been faced up to’

In February 1984, The Late Late Show was about to wrap when Gay Byrne read a headline from the next day’s Sunday Tribune newspaper: “Girl, 15, dies giving birth in a field.”

“My goodness me,” the TV veteran exclaimed, before putting the newspaper aside with the words: “Nothing terribly exciting there.”

That remark and the glimpsed story, which was broken by Emily O’Reilly following an anonymous phone call, was the first media coverage given to the tragic death of Ann Lovett.

Several days earlier, the teenager had been found by local schoolboys, in shock, haemorrhaging, and close to death, having given birth to a baby boy at the grotto outside her home town of Granard, Co Longford. Beside her lay a pair of scissors used to cut the umbilical cord. Her son, later named Pat, was dead by the time they were discovered. Two hours later Ann Lovett was also pronounced dead at Mullingar Hospital.

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These events have subsequently inspired songs from Christy Moore, Jj Kikola and Cry Before Dawn, various poems, and much speculation.

Don’t forget that amongst the very strong letters we received after the death of Ann Lovett would have been a whole host of letters saying: you’re making all this up

—  Gay Byrbe

The timing added heat to the debates which ensued. Ann’s death came just four months after the 1983 abortion referendum. In that referendum, a two-thirds majority voted to include the right to life of an unborn child in the Constitution, creating confusion about mothers’ rights.

Some weeks after that headline, The Gay Byrne Show on RTÉ Radio aired a series of letters from all over the country in which women discussed their experiences of concealed pregnancy and childbirth outside marriage. Those letters were reproduced with an introduction by Róisín Ingle in this newspaper in 2017, 33 years after Ann’s death.

As Byrne recounted in a 2004 documentary, decades before anyone employed the term “fake news”, he received a lot of correspondence accusing him of just that.

“Don’t forget that amongst the very strong letters we received after the death of Ann Lovett would have been a whole host of letters saying: you’re making all this up,” recalled Byrne. “This never happened. This is total nonsense. It’s the D4 media again concocting stories. Those letters are a perfect depiction of the sort of Ireland we lived in at that time.”

Ciaran Creagh, the socially conscious writer behind Parked and director of In View, was a teenager when the details of Ann Lovett’s death emerged.

“I was aware of the story,” says Creagh. “But as a teenager, I wouldn’t have paid as much attention to the story as I would now. I remember Gay Byrne and the letters very clearly. But in 2018, my wife handed me the first article by Rosita Boland. And it really struck a chord. It was an unusual article in some ways. News stories tend to be written at a macro level. She got right down to the micro level. That was so powerful. It really conveyed the plight of a 15-year-old girl in that terrible situation. It was minute by minute. It was a gut punch.”

Creagh, who, as a writer, is accustomed to such hard-sell subjects as mental illness and grief, immediately set to work on a treatment for Ann, the first film to dramatise the events leading up to Ann Lovett’s death on January 31st, 1984.

“I am a very happy person,” says Creagh. “But I like hard subjects. Harder subjects are important subjects. So my films tend to be on the darker side.”

Ann was inspired by two painstakingly researched articles by Rosita Boland published in The Irish Times in 2018. Boland won Irish Journalist of the Year for her reconstruction of Ann’s last day and, later, an exclusive interview with Ricky McDonnell, who was Ann’s boyfriend in the months before her death.

We can never be 100 per cent certain about her day because all we know is that she left her house in the morning, when a neighbour saw her. She went to a friend’s house at lunchtime

Creagh remains surprised that no one attempted to make a film about Ann Lovett before. Even documentary coverage is scant, probably because of the tight-lipped local community described at the inquest and by multiple sources since.

(There are two notable exceptions. Scannál, the TG4 documentary series, aired a half-hour special on Ann’s death in 2004. In 1997, Lorelei Harris, a producer on the Gay Byrne programme, made a radio documentary curating the letters sent to the show in the aftermath of Ann’s death.)

It’s a tricky landscape to mine details from.

“I did do a lot of research,” says Creagh. “We did a lot because I wanted it to be as close to the truth as we could get it. There’s not a huge amount of details out there. We can never be 100 per cent certain about her day because all we know is that she left her house in the morning, when a neighbour saw her. She went to a friend’s house at lunchtime. So we had to patch a lot of pieces of the story together to give an overview of the town.”

Creagh quickly discovered that, despite the story’s importance in modern Irish history, very few funding bodies were keen on the project. The writer-director says Ann was a difficult film to get made. (There are perhaps echoes here of Out of Innocence, a drama based on the contemporaneous Kerry Babies case and starring Fiona Shaw, which was released some three years – in a redacted edit – after it premiered.)

“RTÉ were fabulous; I couldn’t have asked for more from them,” Creagh says. “We had a few iterations and drafts. And they stuck with us the whole time. We were turned down twice by Screen Ireland and twice by the BAI [Broadcasting Authority of Ireland]. It was just one of those things. I didn’t understand. I think they wanted a bigger story. They wanted a couple of months before the events of our film and a couple of months after, and a portrait of a whole community. Which I was not interested in. Because I wasn’t interested in the controversy. I was interested in Ann. Our film was originally called Thirteen Hours because we just wanted to reconstruct Ann’s last day from 7.30 in the morning.

“We ended up doing fundraising in America. My business partner is from Chicago. There’s a good bit of American money in it. Maybe they were more willing to be open-minded about the project over there.”

At 26, Zara Devlin was born more than a decade after Ann Lovett’s death made headlines around the world.

The Tyrone actor recently won the Michael Dwyer Discovery Award at the Dublin International Film Festival for her arresting, tactile performance in Ann. She is currently shooting the film adaptation of Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These, alongside Cillian Murphy (Keegan’s novella Foster was the basis for the Oscar-shortlisted An Cailín Ciúin.)

“I’m not sure when I first heard about Ann Lovett,” says Devlin. “I think I remember hearing about it, briefly, when I was about 14. I actually can’t remember if I heard about it at school or if I read it in an article, but I remember that image. That stayed with me. I remember picturing a young girl in a school uniform giving birth on her own. It was just heartbreaking to think about.”

Ann, the film, opens with the schoolgirl (Devlin) rising early on the morning of January 31st, 1984. She goes to the bathroom and washes herself before the camera reveals her face and advanced pregnancy. She adjusts the teddy on her bed and finishes a note on jotter paper.

Cinematographer Dave Grennan, who previously shot What Richard Did for Lenny Abrahamson, follows Devlin’s Ann as she retrieves a pair of scissors, tears a relevant page from a biology book, and ventures out on the street where a local retired garda (Frank O’Sullivan) asks if she is ready for St Brigid’s Day.

“The way we made it really helped me,” says Devlin. “It was kind of up to me to do the work because Dave moved with whatever I was doing. I loved that. With this kind of film, you need to have that freedom. It gave me a lot of time because we would do a scene and it would be five minutes long. Sometimes, as an actor, when you hear ‘cut’ too quickly, you’re just about to get somewhere. Longer scenes really helped me to get into Ann’s mind and world, and what she would have been going through. It almost felt like we weren’t doing a movie. I was just in this world.”

Grennan and Creagh watched the 2015 Hungarian film Son of Saul and other close-cropped films in preparation for the shoot. The roving, hand-held camera lingers on various characters as Ann prepares to give birth. The film is ultimately composed of 17 sequences, featuring long, continuous shots.

“We were all very protective of the story,” says Grennan. “That was very much the spirit that the crew went into this. As we’ve seen in recent weeks with the Kerry Babies, there are stories that still need to be told. We were working on a small budget. We planned it out quite extensively. We wanted it to be a very immersive experience so that you are immediately in Ann’s world. But we also wanted it to be led by the actors. So it’s hand-held and a lot of the work is in not getting in the way of the actors and what they are doing.”

I think walking through Granard, especially to the grotto, is really eerie. To me, it feels like there’s something wrong. I thought it would be very disrespectful to shoot there.

—  Ciaran Creagh

“The idea was that the camera would pass from one character to the next,” adds Creagh. “There’s a bit of trickery with the over-the-shoulder point of view. We had to play around with it a bit. But generally we’re moving from behind one character to the next. I always wanted fluidity. It was a difficult production, especially for Dave, as he had the camera on his shoulder for days. I think we only have one shot using a tripod.”

Ann also stars Ian Beattie, Senna O’Hara, Joe Mullins and Seán T Ó Meallaigh, and Eileen Walsh as Ann’s mother, Patricia. It was filmed during a brief hiatus during lockdown in the summer of 2021.

“It was crucial that we had good actors and that we talked a lot,” says Creagh. “For example, Eileen came to me to discuss the scene in which Ann’s sister runs home to say: Ann’s had a baby. Eileen said she felt like she had to slap her. She didn’t know why. But when you give an actor like that freedom, they bring amazing stuff to the screen. I like to think of myself as an actor’s director. I’m there to give the cast whatever they want.”

The film was shot in Boyle, Co Roscommon, with the assistance of the Film Office in Roscommon County Council. Creagh and his creative team had no desire to intrude on Granard.

“I think walking through Granard, especially to the grotto, is really eerie,” says Creagh. “To me, it feels like there’s something wrong. I thought it would be very disrespectful to shoot there. It wouldn’t have worked either. The film is designed to flow. I knew Boyle very well because my mother is from Sligo. I made a map the size of my kitchen table of Boyle so that we could plan the entire film. It’s a town that has been bypassed so a lot of shopfronts are unchanged for years. It looked great from our point of view. We were working on a very small budget and we definitely didn’t have the money to re-create the 1980s for the screen.”

The film inevitably culminates in an affecting and bloody sequence at the grotto. It was a daunting prospect for Devlin.

“This was huge for me,” she says. “It’s one of the biggest things I’ve ever done in my life. I knew going in that no film had been made about Ann Lovett before. I knew there were poetry and songs. I had heard Christy Moore’s beautiful song. Just to think of what this girl went through and that I’m portraying her? That just blows my mind. I couldn’t let that get to me. I read a lot of articles about Ann and her personality. She seemed to be really strong and independent and beyond her time. But at a certain point, research wasn’t helpful. For me, it was always about staying in the mind of a 15-year-old girl. That was a huge responsibility. ”

That sense of responsibility extended to the rest of the cast and crew, says Creagh. Some of the actors involved in the production made pilgrimages to the grotto where Ann died.

“We were very aware of Ann and her story throughout production,” says the director. “Zara sang a song in Ann’s honour. And we all felt like we were involved in something that really meant something. There was a duty of care to ensure we did this right.”

Just going back to basics, imagine a 15-year-old child going to a grotto to give birth by herself. Imagine what she went through. I wanted people to think about that.

—  Ciaran Creagh

Ann premiered at the international competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival last November. The film subsequently screened at the Dublin International Film Festival where it was shortlisted for the Human Rights Film Award.

“In Tallinn, it was really interesting,” says Creagh. “There was a 45-minute Q and A afterwards and everybody stayed. They all had questions. They all wanted to know how this could happen. And people really felt it. From the moment Ann hugs her friend goodbye, you are listening to people sobbing around you in the cinema.”

“I remember the opening at the Light House Cinema and I can only remember the silence afterwards,” adds Devlin. “It was bizarre sitting with an audience watching it. There was a Q and A session afterwards and there weren’t a lot of questions. I had people come up to me and it was so beautiful. Especially older people that knew Ann’s family or that went to her school, saying thank you. You could feel in the room how people were moved by it.”

For Creagh, the aim remains precisely the same as when he started writing the script five years ago.

“This is one story that hasn’t been faced up to,” he says. “Mainly because people in Granard and the family will not talk. And I also think people listening are maybe afraid of the story. From my perspective, I just felt that Ann needed her day in the sun. Just going back to basics, imagine a 15-year-old child going to a grotto to give birth by herself. Imagine what she went through. I wanted people to think about that. I’m just a writer. But writers have opinions. And this, in my opinion, is something that’s wrong.”

Ann opens in cinemas on April 28th