Date of Birth: 2nd February 1949

Place of Birth: Meilgarrow, Clonroche, Co. Wexford

Date Interviewed: 10th June 2011

Summary: One of Anne Walsh’s earliest memories is of her stay in the Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin at the age of five. An operation to remove an ulcer failed to improve her sight but when the doctors wanted to give her a glass eye her mother refused. She attended Poulpeasty school and “hated every day of it”. The teacher beat her so severely one day that she went home with blood running down her arm. Her mother went to the teacher and put a stop to these beatings. When she left school she went to work as a domestic in the Ursuline Convent in Waterford for ten shillings a week. Anne talks of the work involved and how lonely and homesick she was. At seventeen she got a job in the New Ross Fever Hospital. She worked there for the next thirty-four years until she retired. Anne talks of her duties and of the heartbreak of seeing little children die. She describes the changes that took place over the years and the transition of the hospital to being “like a hotel today”, catering for the needs of the elderly.