The Ballinspittle Moving Statue and Ireland's 1985 Moving-Statue Wave

The grotto at Ballinspittle sits about 20 feet up a hillside on the edge of the village, some four miles from Kinsale on the road to Kilbrittain. It was built for the Marian Year of 1954. Its statue of Our Lady is life-size and made of concrete, the work of Maurice O'Donnell. A halo of 11 electric lights surrounds her.

It was already a strange year. In February, schoolchildren at Asdee in County Kerry said statues in their church had moved.

Monday 22 July 1985. The feast of St Mary Magdalene. Catherine O'Mahony, one of the grotto's volunteer caretakers, stopped on her nightly walk to pray with her daughters Helen and Claire. Christopher and Pat Daly were there too, with their sons John and Michael.

As they prayed, the statue changed. "It seemed at first as if she was breathing," Catherine O'Mahony said, "then slight motions of the head and the hands." About 30 more people said they saw movement later that same evening.

Two days later the village's Garda sergeant came to look. Sergeant Murray was sceptical. He checked the statue and found "no wires or trickery there at all." Then he watched. "I saw the concrete statue of Our Lady floating in mid-air," he said. "Not rocking to and fro, but floating."

A police officer's word carried weight. By 25 July hundreds were praying at the roadside. Within ten days, Cork newspapers estimated 10,000 people a night. On the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August, police counted about 15,000. Other estimates ran past 20,000. Coaches blocked the village roads. Chip vans sold "Grotto Burgers". By October the press estimated 600,000 visitors in total.

They reported more than movement. The face changed expression. The eyes opened and closed. Other holy faces appeared over hers, and one person said they saw the Pope's face. Some saw tears. Frances O'Riordan, a Cork housewife, said her hearing was restored. John Daly lined the statue up against a pillar and watched it pass behind the line and in front of it, "literally disappearing and coming back into my line of vision."

On 31 July Bishop Michael Murphy of Cork and Ross said "common sense would demand that we approach the claims...with prudence and caution." Psychologists T. Ryan and Jurek Kirakowski of University College Cork recorded 31 sites that year. They explained the movement as an optical illusion, the result of staring at a lit statue in the evening twilight. The phenomena did not register on film or motion sensors. Anthropologist Peter Mulholland later linked the wave to anxiety over unemployment, emigration and the Cold War, and to the Air India Flight 182 disaster of June 1985.

31 October 1985. In front of onlookers, attackers went over the fence and struck the statue with an axe and a hammer. The face was destroyed. They were led by Robert Draper, a preacher with the Christian Faith Centre of Ireland, whose group sought "the elimination of all false idols from Ireland." Draper later said the statue only moved once. When he hit it. Maurice O'Donnell reassembled the face, and the statue was put back on 8 November. In March 1986 a judge at Portlaoise dismissed the case against three men.

Similar moving statues were reported at about 30 Irish sites that year, from Mount Melleray to Sligo. In 1997 the Ballinspittle statue was again reported "swaying and tilting". Books, a Granta essay and an RTÉ documentary in 2019 have returned to that summer since.