Ballinspittle Grotto — the moving statue, 1985

OVERVIEW

A grotto on the hillside above the village of Ballinspittle, eight kilometres south-west of Kinsale in west Cork. The statue is a standard five-foot-eight Lourdes model cast in concrete, put up in the Marian year of 1954 and lit by a halo of eleven electric bulbs.

HISTORY

On the evening of Monday 22 July 1985 a local woman, Kathy O'Mahony, was walking with her two daughters and stopped at the grotto to say the rosary. They said the statue moved. Within days thousands were coming every night, some travelling hundreds of miles; on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption, more than twenty thousand people were at the grotto. In all, an estimated hundred thousand people came to Ballinspittle that summer, and reports of moving statues broke out at grottoes all over Ireland. The world's press covered it.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Bishop Michael Murphy of Cork said that common sense demanded the claims be approached with prudence and caution, while welcoming the spirit of prayer in which people were gathering. Researchers in the Department of Applied Psychology at University College Cork studied the conditions and concluded the effect was an optical illusion — produced by staring at a lit figure against a dark background in failing light, with the eye's own small movements read as movement in the statue. It is still referred to as the Ballinspittle Phenomenon. The entry records one of the largest mass-witness events in modern Irish life and the scientific work that followed it: both belong on the record, and neither cancels what a hundred thousand people came for.

VISITING

A roadside grotto with a car park and steps, open at all times and free. It is still visited and still tended; a place of prayer for many people. Behave accordingly.