St. Mary's Hospital, Old Westport Road, Castlebar.

Castlebar (Mayo)

St. Mary's Hospital was known as Castlebar Asylum in 1866 when it first opened and catered for 132 patients.  The name was changed sometime in the 1920s to Castlebar Mental Hospital before finally being renamed in the 1950s to St. Mary's Hospital.

The building now is home to Mayo's only third-level institution, Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, and also Department of Nursing, Health Sciences and Social Care.  The hospital originally had a farm attached to it and this was operated by the residents of the facility.  This farm provided basic food for those in the hospital with items such as milk and vegetables.  The hospital had a high wall surrounding it and also had its own graveyard.  A new ring road has cut through what were the grounds, and a beautiful memorial garden has been preserved with a part of the original wall.  There was a plaque erected in 2004 remembering those who died there from the Spanish flu 1918.

The building nowadays is about four times the size it was originally with extensions built in 1878, 1882, 1902, and 1936.  When Noel Browne was Minister for Health, transformations took place and the high wall was knocked down in the early 1960s.  Before that, the locked front gates had been removed.  It is believed that in the 1950s, there had been 1,300 residents living there.  Then in the 1980s, with a new emphasis on Community Care, Mayo Mental Health set up a number of residential homes around Castlebar.

At the same time in the 1980s, there was pressure on government from local representatives to provide a third-level institute in Castlebar and this group sought a Regional Technical College (RTC) in the town.  That campaign continued right through the 1990s with the group running a candidate in the 1992 General Election on the RTC ticket polling  6,275 votes.  Then, in October 1994, over 100 students arrived and started three national certificate courses in computers, construction, and business studies at the Galway RTC, Castlebar campus.  The campus is now known as Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, Mayo Campus, and has a student population of approximately 1000 offering courses in business, engineering, humanities, nursing, and technology.  The GMIT has retained much of the original architecture in a modern environment.

It is one of the finest examples of "repurposing" a building while retaining its historic features and integrity.

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