Mayo’s special Lourdes connection

TALK to anyone that has volunteered with the Irish Pilgrimage Trust (IPT) and they will all tell you the same thing. “You just can’t explain it.”
On the surface, the concept is quite simple - a group of volunteers from every walk of life accompanying people with special needs for a week of fun in Lourdes. The actual experience is far more difficult to sum up.
Pat McGovern, a veteran of several pilgrimages, has a go at explaining it.
“You go there for a week and all you witness is joy, love, goodness, colour, vitality, music, song, dance. I would describe it as spirituality in a different guise,” he says.
“The minute you walk out the hotel room there’s pure like joy in the streets,” chimes Erika Flynn, who’s just back from her second pilgrimage.
Pat and Erika both hail from a quiet, rural area that has sent numerous volunteers to Lourdes from the Tuam diocese. It is no surprise that Robeen is so well represented on this pilgrimage.
Despite boasting no more than a church, a school, a crèche, a parochial house and a scattering of houses, Robeen is one of the finest communities in all of Mayo.
When there’s a wedding in the village, they honour the old Irish tradition of standing out along the roads with bonfires ablaze. They waited around the clock at the deathbed of their late Parish Priest Fr Paddy Sheridan. They stood foursquare behind local girl Grace O’Malley in her battle to obtain lifesaving Spinraza medication.
In 2018, when four people nearly perished in a road accident at the village crossroads they demanded immediate action - and they got it. Robeen crossroads is no more. In its place now lies a safe, properly designed hilltop junction.
Local man Vinnie Keane felt his daughter Edina was in good hands when she took her first trip to Lourdes. “It was hard for Edina, but I suppose when you’ve half of Robeen it’s a great help,” chuckles Vinnie. We ask Edina what her favourite thing about Lourdes is. Her one-word answer was unequivocal: “Everything”.

FUN
FR Mike Murphy, Parish Priest of Roundfort, Robeen and Carras, is chaplain of the local IPT group and a driving force behind the annual pilgrimage.
When The Mayo News first reached out Fr Murphy to do a piece on the IPT, we expected to chat to himself and a handful of local volunteers.
When we meet on a wet Thursday evening in Robeen, there are no less than eleven people gathered around the table in the place christened ‘Fr Paddy’s House’.
We spent a full hour in their company. They were probably there for another hour after we left.
From the minute we walk in, the kitchen is filled with the melody of laughter and joyous reminiscing.
Our conversation is punctuated with smiles, giggles, and even a faint glimmer of tears at one point.
It is abundantly clear that they have been deeply moved by their experience in Lourdes.
Fr Murphy has been a passionate advocate for the pilgrimage since his first trip nearly 20 years ago after ‘five years saying ‘no’'.
Since coming to preach in South Mayo in 2009, Fr Murphy has spread the gospel of care and compassion to the four corners of the three parishes now under his care.
The experienced Gaelic football mentor he reaches for a sporting metaphor when asked why he has kept going back to Lourdes.
He takes us back to 2007, when he was preparing St Joseph’s Secondary School for an All-Ireland final.
“The girls were asking me at the time, ‘What’s Lourdes like?’ I said, ‘You know how much fun we’re having with the All-Ireland, what that feeling is like? Lourdes is even better than that,’” he recounts.
“They couldn’t understand me at all until some of them went on it and then they came back to me and said, ‘Now we know what you’re talking about.’”

VOLUNTEERS
THE Irish Pilgrimage Trust was founded in 1971. It made its maiden trip to Lourdes the following year with 14 young people with special needs and their carers.
In 2023, 800 people travelled from across, including 268 guests. They were joined by 520 carers, nine doctors, 32 nurses and 27 priest – all volunteers. The cost of bringing a group to Lourdes costs over €20,000.
Because the Irish Pilgrimage Trusts receives no government funding, every single cent is fundraised by the volunteers. Carers get to know their guests many months in advance of the week-long Easter trip, which is filled with activities from beginning to end.
There is Mass, but there are also day tours, music sessions, trips to the zoo, and all manners of mischief and merriment. A typical day begins at 7.30am and can end at literally any time.
“There’s no sleep. It doesn’t exist. With the carers there’s two people up all throughout the night,” says Mary Ruane from Milltown.
In any case, the concept of time pretty much goes out the window during the trip.
“You don’t care what day of the week it is, you don’t know what time it is, and you do not care,” says Pat McGovern’s wife, Teresa.
Caring for people with a range of mental and physical disabilities is a demanding task. But, as any of these volunteers will tell you, it is also immensely rewarding.
“It is a privilege to be with all these amazing people for the week,” says Ballyglass native Therése Morley, who has just returned from her first pilgrimage with her niece, Michaela.
“We had some non-verbal [guests] but it’s amazing how they can communicate, and you know what they want and you get to understand them.”

SPIRITUAL
WHILE the experience is deeply enriching for carers and guests alike, it also much valued service for families of people with special needs. In the west of Ireland, even one day’s respite can be as rare as an All-Ireland medal in Leitrim.
Getting a full week’s repose from their relentless – and often thankless – caring duties is simply unheard of.
Before being brought to Lourdes this year, many of the younger guests had not had a single day of respite in their lives.
As the world’s biggest Marian shrine, Lourdes itself is a deeply religious place - “Knock, but on a bigger scale,” as Michaela Morley puts it.
But for the devout and non-believers alike, the IPT trip to Lourdes is a deeply spiritual one.
These pilgrims go not in search of magic cures, but in search of fun, friendship and unforgettable memories in the majestic foothills of rural France. The carers will all tell you that they get as much, if not more, out of it as the guests do.
For Trish Gallagher from Ballindine, spending a week with a person with special needs represents ‘the best example of our [Christian] faith in action’.
“If you want to go all religious about it, you say the Our Father ‘Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…thy kingdom come thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’. And this is as close as I can see to heaven being replicated on earth, in the sense of God’s Kingdom being lived out on Earth through love and acceptance and just taking people as they are, as all being children of God.”
Fr Murphy says having more volunteers will mean that more people with special needs will be able to join this magical pilgrimage in the coming years.
“You don’t have to have any special skills or anything. It’s all about loving and caring for somebody. That’s really what it’s about,” he says.
“I will guarantee anybody that goes that they will have a fantastic week. I’ve brought hundreds and hundreds of young people out. Never once have I had a young person come back to me and say, ‘That was terrible’, or ‘I didn’t enjoy that.’”

MORE
If you would like to volunteer with the Irish Pilgrimage Trust, you can visit www.irishpilgrimagetrust.com, or email info@irishpilgrimagetrust.com or phone 091 796622.