The future of hospital provision in Omagh is still somewhat uncertain, so while we wait for developments to unfold, it may be as good a time as any to look back upon Omagh's hall of healing in former times.
In the centre of Omagh near the present Northern Bank and beside SuperValu, stood a hospital known as The Infirmary, which served the people of the town until the Tyrone County Hospital opened its doors at the beginning of the 20th century. The Infirmary, like the County which took over from it, was built and maintained by public subscriptions and private charity. There was no National Health Service until after World War II. No one would have actually been turned away from its doors, but there was treatment and treatment in it, as the saying goes. People of means could engage the services of the best consultant surgeons; the poorer people had to make do with whatever attention or treatment they could manage to secure. It was not unlike the system today in the United States of America. Before the 'Titanic' left Belfast, the public could pay for a guided tour of the vessel, the proceeds going to the Royal Victoria Hospital. That's how it was done then.
At the foot of Brook Street, then a fashionable part of town in the early 19th century, there was a hospital known locally as The Typhoid Hospital. The building, in its latter years, was occupied by the late Hannah Shannon and the site was close to the tree sculptures just down from the present St Colmcille's School. The former hospital was badly damaged in a fire, about the year 1970, a fire from which Hannah herself never fully recovered. In the great famines of early 19th century Ireland, more people died of typhus than actual hunger, the atmosphere frequently pervaded by dangerous airborne viruses. There was an imposing four-storey edifice just across the street from the typhoid hospital, a military institution which was destroyed in a fire in 1953, and it is likely that in the post-Famine era, the Brook Street Hospital catered for military patients in its time.
At the crown of the lower Kevlin Road in Gallows Hill, and opposite the Hill Shop, there is a row of spacious houses now called Glenview Terrace. It was originally built in the 1830s as a military hospice, and old soldiers from the Crimean War would have died there. The morgue for the hospice was in a building just across the road from the front gate of the Christian Brothers residence. In the 20th century, the morgue became a dwelling-house. I lived in it for 20 years.
On the Mountjoy Road, near the present Government Training Centre, there was the Omagh General Hospital, in its latter years a geriatric hospital but in its original conception the site of the Omagh Workhouse. These institutions went up all over Ireland in the late 1830s and early 1840s – it was almost as if they could see the Great Famine approaching. During the period 1845-1848, the numbers of hungry, ill and desperate people who crowded Omagh seeking help, food and medicine was such that the Workhouse was quite incapable of meeting the demand. Field tents were erected in the grounds of the Workhouse and military medical personnel were drafted in to deal with the emergency. Many people perished in those years, and in later decades, and were buried in paupers' graves in the confines of the hospital, and there was some controversy in recent years about plans to build new buildings over the site of the burial ground.
Omagh's oldest surviving hospital is the Tyrone and Fermanagh Hospital, dating from 1850. The imposing Victorian block that constituted the nucleus of the complex is still in use for administrative purposes, but the amenities used today for psychiatric nursing are of a much more recent construction. In the early 1960s there was an ambitious scheme to virtually amalgamate the T&F with the County Hospital. Several chalet-type units were built in the mid-1960s, but then the scheme was abruptly abandoned. At its height in mid-1960, the Tyrone and Fermanagh Hospital contained some 1,200 souls. Since then, a large slice of its catchment area in East Tyrone sent its patients to St Luke's in Armagh and different approaches to treatment such as 'Care in the Community' (so-called), have meant that the figures today are little more than a couple of hundred. In its heyday, the T&F was an important part of the local economy, both as source of employment and consumer of local goods and services.
I can recall, just about, being a patient in the former Fever Hospital on the Dublin Road, just beyond the cemetery, on the other side of the road. The only detail which sticks in my mind is of big, cream-painted wooden shutters on the windows: I understand that the building was known as Dergmoney House.
There were also various maternity, convalescent and nursing homes, but I do not think that they really count for the purposes of this survey. Up until about 1950, most people around here were born in their own homes.
In evidence, the court heard that the defendants, the municipal authority who were responsible for the management of the local crematorium, were being sued for occasioning distress and anxiety to a group of mourners, after a recent cremation. The deceased had been a renowned singer and musician, and several members of a local choir and of a local orchestra had come along with a view to giving their former colleague a musical send-off, but the authorities were quite adamant that that would have been against the rules. Rules were rules and there was no way by which an exception could be made for anyone. "Their policy seems to be," said the presiding judge, "that all men are cremated equal."
A passenger going through Heathrow has been cautioned for wearing a t-shirt depicting a robot holding a gun. Images of guns, it seems, as well as actual guns are now taboo at the airport. Gunners fans in replica shirts had better watch out at Heathrow.
Omagh was, once again last Sunday, full of intoxicated young men parading through the streets, and waving red and white flags. Except on this occasion, half of them were Poles, supporting their nation playing that day in the European Cup finals.
One group in John Street kept shouting "Polska! Polska!" A group of locals, not to be outdone, shouted "Up Tyrone." To which the Poles riposted, "Up Tyrone, Polska, Polska." Funny old world.
A daguerre-type image of Margaret Thatcher, etched onto a tin surface, has been unveiled at Westminster, where it will repose for the next three months. Ian Paisley used to maintain that Mrs Thatcher was not so much an Iron Lady as a "tin cutty."
'Which' magazine claims that it has persuaded 52 people to try various self-tanning appliances, 'including green options'. Should go over well with Martians.
