INJUSTICE
‘Where Are All The Men?’
Poignant ceremony honours the ‘fallen’ women in Ireland
When the late Pope John Paul II visited my home city of Galway in 1979, hundreds upon hundreds of young families walked right past what was essentially a city centre prison without a thought about the innocent women who were shamefully locked away inside.
When the pope famously said “Young people of Ireland, I love you!” to a huge crowd of 250,000 people, he presumably was not referring to the women and girls who were imprisoned in the city’s Magdalene Laundry.
The parents of Galway were told to leave their cars at home if they intended to attend a gigantic Youth Mass at the city’s racecourse on the eastern edge of the city that day — the result was a mass movement on foot as families made their way across the city to the racecourse, with picnic tables and chairs, packed lunches and rugs for what was set to be a long but exciting day.
Unseen slaves
As they made their way along Foster Street, just a few hundred metres from the heart of the city, few seemed to notice the building where women were locked up and forced to work long hours for nothing, in the city’s busiest laundry, for years on end.
It would be another five years before the Magdalene Asylum, as it was called, would close its doors and 12 years before the building would be demolished.
Those women were erased from the consciousness of Irish people in the 1970s. As children, we had no idea that there were women imprisoned in the laundry just metres from Eyre Square, where President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had addressed thousands of Galwegians at another mass rally in 1963.
Mass graves
Many of those women were buried in mass graves in Bohermore Cemetery, where I attended a dignified but poignant ceremony last weekend. Others were buried in the grounds of the laundry itself.
Family members of women who were incarcerated in the laundry, and a couple of women who worked there, were among those who led a dignified ceremony to honour and commemorate the women and the girls who had been hidden away behind those convent walls for decades.
It is now 11 years since the Irish State issued an apology to the survivors of the Magdalene Laundries and their families, but their battle for justice goes on as politicians still wrangle over who is entitled to redress and the Irish Government puts time limits on the incarceration periods required for compensation.
The ‘crime’ of being raped
Most of the women who were locked up, often for the “crime” of getting pregnant through rape by a respected (but unknown) member of the community, have passed on now and the beautiful “Flowers for the Magdalenes” ceremony is an opportunity for their children, now elderly themselves, to meet up and tell their stories.
Peter Mulryan, whose mother died in the Magdalene Laundry in Galway, led this year’s commemoration in Galway from the entrance to the graveyard. Holding a candle, he led the group of mostly women to the mass graves which are hidden away in one corner of the graveyard overlooking Galway Bay.
More than 80 of the women from the laundries are buried in cemeteries in Galway, with headstones marking their names. Nobody knows how many more are buried in unmarked graves.
Unpaid prisoners
On Sunday, postdoctoral researcher Lorraine Grimes recalled that the women who were imprisoned in Galway received no pay for their labour. Lorraine interviewed a woman who worked as a clerk there from 1956 to 1959.
“They wore a heavy skirt with long sleeves and a white penance cap,” the woman told Lorraine, as part of her research. “They had to wear that all day. If they didn’t wear the hat, their heads were shaved. The heavy skirts would tear their legs.”
She recalled physical abuse in the Galway laundry. One woman had her hair cut as punishment by the nuns.
“The Bishop of Galway got all the money . . . The Bishop of Galway got every halfpenny of their slavery,” the woman told Lorraine.
It was a simple ceremony. People laid flowers on the graves, giving the women a quiet dignity in death which was denied to them in life. Singer Sharon Murphy sang a beautiful and poignant song, after recalling her own childhood in an industrial school.
Afterwards, attendees were invited to say a few words.
Societal changes
“It is unbelievable how the world has changed,” said Peter on Sunday. “People are showing us respect now.”
For many of the survivors, the terrible stigma attached to the laundries has dominated much of their lives. Peter was one of the “lucky” ones who managed to track down his mother before his own wedding in the 1970s.
He and his wife Kathleen would visit her regularly in the laundry, before the nuns told them to stop calling so often as it was upsetting her. Peter and Kathleen didn’t want to kick up a fuss or for the nuns to prevent them from visiting altogether.
Together with the other inmates, Peter’s mother washed and cleaned the clothes of “the great and the good” around Galway city and county. For years, she never ventured outside the laundry walls even though she was just minutes from the heart of the city. She wasn’t allowed.
“We went in to see his mother before we got married,” said Kathleen on Sunday. “I don’t think she knew how to react. We used to go in once a month. Then we were told we should not go in so often, as we were upsetting her. We were told she’d go looking for us after we left.
“She died in 1989. It is awful to think that we were told to stop coming in to see her. They told us that we couldn’t do that, that she was institutionalised. We would try to bring her out for a day. But the idea that we would even bring her to our house for a weekend — that was impossible! But at least, unlike other families, we know that she is buried here.”
One smile
Peter remembered that the first time he ever saw his mother smile was when she held her first grandchild in her hands, after they brought her in to the Magdalene Laundry.
Peter and Kathleen’s lives were turned upside down in 2014, when historian Catherine Corless contacted Peter to say that he had a sister who nobody had ever told him about. She had traced her back to the same rural townland where he was born.
Peter’s younger sister is one of the 796 “Tuam Babies” buried in an unmarked grave in a septic tank in Tuam, Co. Galway.
It was because she had given birth to a second child that Peter’s mother had been transferred from the Tuam Mother and Baby Home to the Magdalene Laundry in Galway.
The Bohermore Cemetery is about a 30-minute drive from the former Tuam Mother and Baby Home, where 796 children are believed to be buried after dying between 1925 and 1961. That “home” was run by the Bon Secours order of nuns.
The lost sister
Until the site is exhumed, Peter will never know what happened to his younger sister. For all he knows she could have been adopted, her death certificate falsified, and his sister could be alive and living in North America. The families, elderly now, are still waiting for a full investigation to be carried out at the site in Tuam.
Peter has spoken movingly about giving a voice to the voiceless and the need to heal the hurt caused to generations of Irish women and their “illegitimate” children. After a documentary was made about the “Tuam Babies,” he even went to New York and Boston to talk to Irish Americans about his search for the truth about his younger sister six years ago.
Among those present at the simple but beautiful ceremony at Bohermore Cemetery on Sunday was a member of parliament for Galway, Catherine Connolly TD (Independent). She said it was time for the Irish State to face up to its own shame, for the shame it had inflicted on these women and girls, and their families.
Shame
“There should be shame on all of us,” she said. “We had a society that allowed Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, and Industrial Schools. The shame was on them, not on Irish society.”
She said it was appalling that the Irish State was still arguing over a redress scheme for the survivors and their families. A time limit of six months was placed on those who were entitled to compensation, which meant that a woman who spent five and a half months in a Magdalene Laundry was not entitled to any compensation from the state at all.
Catherine talked about the appalling language used around the incarcerated women. For the “first offence” of getting pregnant, a woman was sent to a Mother and Baby Home. If she committed a “second offence,” she ended up working as a slave for long hours in a Magdalene Laundry.
Whereas some of the women were victims of rape, not all of them had been pregnant or had babies when they were sent to the Magdalene Laundries. Lorraine was told of women with intellectual disabilities who ended up being locked up at Forster Street in Galway.
In one case, a 14-year-old girl was banished to the laundry by her parish priest. Her parents had died and the priest did not believe that she should live with her two uncles. Nobody questioned the priest’s authority in 20th century Ireland.
The Magdalene Laundry in Galway opened in 1824. It was taken over by a religious order, the Sisters of Mercy, just after the Great Famine in 1854.
It is estimated there were 10,000 of these women locked up in institutions throughout Ireland right up until the 1980s. Many, but not all, were single mothers who were taken away from their families to hide their “shame.”
The fate of the poor
Virtually all of the women came from poor or lower socio-economic background. They included unmarried mothers, victims of physical and sexual abuse, or young girls who were the children of unmarried mothers and had nowhere else to go in a society which branded anyone born outside marriage as “illegitimate.”
As the simple ceremony concluded, Catherine Connolly said that, for all the talk about the identities of the women and girls, nobody had ever seen or heard from the fathers, neighbours, priests, boyfriends, or relatives of the girls who ended up being imprisoned in the heart of Galway, often until the end of their days.
“Where are all the men?” asked veteran activist Margaretta D’arcy, as the people made their way out of the graveyard on a cloudy but beautiful afternoon in a Galway graveyard.
“Where are all the men?”
Unlike the Irish State, the organisers of this event had given dignity to the women who had been kept out of sight and out of mind, while doing the dirty laundry of the city’s leading families and businesses, for far too long.
Their campaign for justice goes on.
— * A digital journalist and Irish language planner based in Galway, Ireland, Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award. Find him on or here.
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