St. Davnet's Hospital

The hospital, which was designed by John McCurdy, was opened as the Cavan and Monaghan District Lunatic Asylum in 1869.^[1][2] Two chapels were built, one for Catholic patients and the other for Protestant patients, and these were renovated by William Alphonsus Scott in 1910.^[3]

The Irish republican, Peadar O'Donnell, was regarded as the first Irish person to use the term "occupation" in relation to the occupation of a workplace, when he and the staff of the hospital occupied the site in 1919. "The occupation was, in fact, the first action in Ireland to describe itself as a soviet, and the Red Flag was raised above the hospital."^[4] It became Monaghan Mental Hospital in the late 1920s and St. Davnet's Hospital in the 1950s.^[5]

After the introduction of deinstitutionalisation in the late 1980s the hospital went into a period of decline^[6][7] and activities became focused on Blackwater House.^[8]