HOW IRISH NURSES PLAYED VITAL ROLE KEEPING BRITAIN HEALTHY

A NOSTALGIC new documentary remembers the Emerald Nightingales - the Irish nurses who kept the NHS in the UK alive

- BY LYNNE KELLEHER

"Nurse, don't let anybody die alone... we didn't arrive in this world alone, and we shouldn't leave it alone.

This was the humane advice given to a young Irish nurse from Clonmel, Co Tipperary, by a senior sister after she crossed the Irish Sea in the 1950s to join the fledgling health service.

Mary Hazard is one of the Irish nurses featured in Emerald Nightingales, a new RTE documentary on the women who became the beating heart of the NHS in its early decades.

Bernie Naughton, who was born in the North in 1947, said half of the sisters where she worked were Irish.

She added: “They were the most caring, the most helpful, these ward sisters were knowledgeable. Today they'd be off at university, doing more advanced careers, but they were of great support. We aspired to them. They gave us confidence.”

Hazard, who migrated to London in 1952, vividly remembers the lifelike female training doll used as a teaching aid.

She said: “She had a zip from her neck to her pubic bone, and you opened her up and you took out her lungs, liver and you took out the yards of intestine. It was fascinating.”

She recalls the starch collars, pleated butterfly hats and aprons, and the insistence on immaculate presentation. But what lingers most are the moments of human tenderness, and even levity, in the toughest of times.

The film, which grew out of an oral history project at London Metropolitan University, features interviews conducted by Dr Tom McGorrian.

Rosanna Anderson, who started in the NHS in the late 60s, recalls caring for a dying young man.