The Cavan Orphanage fire occurred on the night of 23 February 1943 at St Joseph's Orphanage in Cavan, Ireland. 35 children and one adult employee died as a result. All of the lay teachers and nuns survived the fire. Much of the attention after the fire surrounded the role of the Poor Clares, the order of nuns who ran the orphanage, and the local fire service.
The Poor Clares, an enclosed contemplative order, founded a convent in Cavan in 1861 in a large premises on Main Street. In 1868 they opened an orphanage, designed by William Hague Jr. At that time young petty criminals could be educated and learn a trade in a reformatory; however, orphaned and abandoned children were not accorded the same opportunity. The Industrial Schools Act 1868 sought to address this by the establishment of the industrial school system. In 1869 a school, attached to the convent, was established and became known as the St. Joseph's Orphanage & Industrial School.
Smoke is detected and the alarm is raised
A fire started in the early morning hours of 24 February 1943 in the ground-floor laundry and was not noticed until about 2 a.m. The subsequent investigation attributed it to a faulty flue. The laundry was on the ground floor and had a door opening onto an internal stairwell with wooden stairs. This stairway gave access to the first and second floors. Our Lady's Dormitory was on the first floor and the Sacred Heart Dormitory & St. Clare's Dormitory were on the second floor. All the dormitories had doors leading directly onto the wooden stairway. On the second-floor landing there was an emergency exit leading to an iron stairway outside in an enclosed courtyard. There was also a second internal stairway accessible from Our Lady's Dormitory on the first floor down to the ground floor.
The Tribunal of Inquiry broke the event into three phases; the first phase was estimated to be six minutes and started when smoke was first detected on the second floor just after 2 a.m. The laundry door was left open and smoke made its way from the ground floor up the wooden stairs. The door to the Sacred Heart Dormitory on the second floor was left open. The children in that dormitory were the first to notice the smoke. The smoke was not a difficulty at this point. There were no lights or bell as the electrical circuits were turned off. The children called their teacher Miss O’Reilly who also slept in the dormitory. She brought the children downstairs to the first floor to Sister Felix's cell.
Around this time, Miss Harrington in Our Lady's Dormitory on the first floor heard the noise from the floor above. She led the children in her dormitory out to safety.
Miss O’Reilly went back upstairs to the second floor using the wooden stairs to St. Clare's Dormitory. Finding it relatively free of smoke she directed the children into it. St. Clare's was right next to the Sacred Heart Dormitory where Miss O’Reilly and the children had been sleeping before the fire. The subsequent Tribunal of Inquiry believed at this point the children of both dormitories on the second floor could have been saved by either exiting down the wooden stairs, or by taking the emergency exit leading to the iron stairs outside. Miss O'Reilly subsequently fled the dormitory to safety with most of the children remaining dying in the fire.
The sight of smoke coming out of the building alerted people on Main Street. They went to the front entrance and tried to gain entry. Six minutes after the fire was first detected the electrical circuit was switched on providing light and allowing the door bell to ring. A child, Rosemary Cafferty, opened to front doors and voluntary helpers entered the courtyard. At least two nuns arrived at the courtyard during this time. The Tribunal of Inquiry marked the entry of volunteers as beginning the second phase of the incident which they estimated lasted approximately ten minutes.
All of the girls were now in St Clare's Dormitory on the second floor. At this stage it would have been possible to evacuate all of the children but instead the nuns persuaded the local people to attempt to put out the fire. It has been widely claimed that the reason the orphans were not evacuated was that the nuns did not think it "decent" for the girls to be seen in public in their nightgowns. This is the claim of the RTE documentary "The Orphans That Never Were." The documentary includes an interview with Eileen Maloney who was the head of the Red Cross in Cavan at the time and witnessed the fire. She stated that the local people and the Red Cross wanted to save children in the building but "[w]e were being blocked by the nuns. They locked the doors and wouldn’t allow any – above all a man – didn’t get in. We could hear children crying, you know and you could hear voices. I remember hearing a voice saying 'Oh, you can’t go in there. You can’t go in there', you know that sort of thing." Eventually, local man John Kennedy, broke down the doors and got in. Another local man, Michael Holmes, stated "I have it from a reliable source that one of the reasons the children weren't taken out was because the nuns didn't want them to be seen in their nightgowns." Yet this source is never disclosed. Accounts from the orphans who survived the fire do not mention the nuns avoiding the public due to being in their nightgowns. One of the survivors, Catherine Graham, who was about fourteen years old at the time, remembered that she was "half dressed and we made our way down the stairs,” and that "[t]here was a fire escape at the top of the stairs, but we couldn’t use it because the nuns had the keys." The official tribunal and inquiry into the fire makes no mention of the nuns refusing to evacuate the children due to fear of the children being seen in their nightgowns.
The volunteers broke down the door of the refectory which was next to the laundry. The laundry door had been opened by a child who had been given keys by Sister Dymphna. The clothes drier in the laundry was on fire. Fire extinguishers were obtained, together with extinguishers from a nearby house. Two men (John Kennedy and John McNally) went down to the laundry to try to put the fire out. The flames were now too intense for this to be possible and McNally only survived by being carried out by Kennedy.
Some volunteers ran up the iron stairs in the courtyard to the second-floor emergency exit. Rosemary Cafferty had gone up the internal wooden stairs and had opened the emergency exit from the inside. The volunteers were separated from St Clare's Dormitory merely by the width of the internal landing i.e. 7 feet 6 inches (2.3 m). They did not enter onto the internal landing due to heavy smoke and having no knowledge of the internal structure of the building, or how to move in smoke. The volunteers returned down the iron stairs.
The Tribunal of Inquiry were satisfied that the volunteers genuinely believed that rescue work was impossible from that door. However, the Inquiry believed that rescue work would have been possible from that door if the volunteers had any fire-fighting knowledge. The reason being was that after the volunteers went down the outside iron stairs, a child, who had remained in the Sacred Heart Dormitory on the first floor, went down and exited using the inside wooden stairs by covering her face. Two further children who had come up the wooden staircase (including the one who opened the emergency exit from the inside) then left using the emergency iron stairs, again after volunteers had left. Around this time elder children in St Clare's Dormitory attempted to leave the dormitory but were deterred by smoke.
Miss Harrington deterred Sister Clare from going up the wooden stairs and when she instead went up the iron stairs, she met the volunteers returning. They told her that they were going to try to get the children out by Sullivan's yard. None of the volunteers remember this incident but based on the fact that they did directly go to Sullivan's yard the Inquiry accepted the nun's testimony.