
On 2 July 1883, fifteen-year-old Bridget Carroll arrived at the Spark’s Lake reformatory in Monaghan to serve the remainder of a sentence that had been imposed on her four years earlier. She had been tried at Loughrea petty sessions in September 1879 on a charge that she ‘Did threaten to stab Anne Flynn’. She was found guilty and sentenced to a short term of imprisonment, followed by five years in a reformatory in Ballinasloe. This reformatory, which had been her home for nearly four years, was now closing, and she had made the long journey to Monaghan to serve out her sentence under the supervision of the St Louis sisters.