Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
I tried to get out of the [Magdalene laundry] for 14 years – now you won’t let me in.
Mary Merritt was sent to a Magdalene laundry on Sean McDermott Street after refusing to work at High Park laundry, Drumcondra. On the day she arrived, she still refused to work, and was sent to another laundry in Donnybrook. She refused to work again and was sent back to the first laundry.
In total, she spent 14 years in High Park. When she was released at the age of 31, she had to have all her teeth taken out and she discovered she was blind in one eye.
“I’d never seen a toothbrush,” she said. During her time there, she says she had no access to proper healthcare, doctors, education, or basic life skills – let alone her right to freedom.
Today, she and other survivors gathered outside the last Magdalene laundry to be closed on Sean McDermott Street in Dublin city, to share their stories and ask the government to include the last survivors’ opinions on what should be done with the institutions that represent a tragic failure in our State’s short history.
While the survivors walked towards the front of the building, a metal gate next to the entrance opened to let a car through and some survivors got a glimpse of the heart of the institution that incarcerated them years before. It’s a part of the building that cannot be seen from the street, and a part that many of the survivors wouldn’t have seen in a long, long time.
After a while, a builder asks them to move on from the private property, located between the laundry and the neighbouring building.
We should tell them why we’re here, someone suggests.
Three women, many stories
“When I was a young teen, I was asked by a doctor did I want a break away from home, to a place with girls my own age and carry on with my schooling away from my own problems they were experiencing at home,” Magdalene survivor Lindsay Ryan told the crowd gathered today.
“Well I jumped at it, imagining visions of a St Trinian’s type place – and landing myself in High Park.”
“I went from living at home to barred windows, heavy work, inadequate meals, little medical intervention and no lessons and life skills.
I lived with the ever-present fear of being sent here, to Sean McDermott Street, and never getting out – as one nun used to tell me almost every single night.
“My [institutionalisation] was my downfall,” Mary Merritt says. She was 17 when she first entered the laundries in 1947.
“We got little or no food, we were praying all the time, we never knew when it was our birthdays, we never knew when it was Christmas, we weren’t allowed speak to one another, to make friends.
If you did anything wrong you were put into The Hole, and you got your hair cut to the bone. I had mine done because I was very much a rebel.
“We had no bathrooms, we had nothing in those laundries. How we survived today, I don’t know.”
A daughter of a Magdalene victim, Angie, told the story of how she was brought to meet her mother by her grandmother when she was 16 years old.
“I didn’t know I was coming to see my mother.”
“She came down the steps, she just sat down, my mother never spoke. I didn’t know it was my mother until I came back out round the buildings and I said to my gran: ‘Who’s that woman?’
And she said ‘That was your mother’.
And all my mother was doing was crying… She was like a zombie, she never spoke, she looked just unbelievable. I was so scared.
She found her mother later after trawling through the laundries’ paperwork, matching dates and names (her mother was called Regina in the Magdalene paperwork, even though her Christian name was Mary).
Her mother, who was first put into the laundry in 1951 and remained there for 14 years, died aged 60 of a lung tumour that doctors said was caused by repeated exposure to chemicals used in the laundries.
At the moment, the towering three-story building once run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity is owned by Dublin City Council and is up for sale.
But as former survivors of the laundries pass away, there’s a feeling that their contribution to what should be done with the former houses of abuse should be documented before it’s too late.
Lindsay says that she thinks places like the Sean McDermott laundry should be turned into a type of garden, but at the same time, she’d hope that some of the building would be preserved to remind people of what happened there.
“Bear in mind, a person who was adopted might want to return to the place where their mother was kept.”
Why not set a national date aside in the calendar to remember those who have died, and those who are still bearing the scars, both physically and mentally?
A history of neglect
A woman in Direct Provision, Ellie, also spoke about the care the Irish State has provided for her, and asked if these types of institutions were simply “in the State’s blood”.
“If we don’t act now,” she told a crowd of survivors, families, and activists, “there will be another institution” in another few years.
Lindsay wonders if the Irish State has learned at all from the disastrous reputation it has with State care: “You only have to look at Tusla. You only have to look at Direct Provision”.
After the speeches, Angie takes Mary by the arm, and they walk along the road together.
“She’s like my mother,” Angie says. “Whatever she wants done with the Magdalene building, that’s what I want.”
So what does Mary want?
“Burn it to the ground,” she says, fired up from the speech she gave earlier.
Her husband of 50 years, Bill, reminds her that one idea caught her eye on what should be done.
“When Mary gave a three-hour speech to the UN in Geneva about what happened to her, there was a beautiful garden which pumped water around – you could have that here. You could have a statue of an ordinary woman, no church, at the front,” he says.
When asked what he makes of the stories he’s heard from his wife over the years, he says:
“They were like prisoners of war.”
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Retrofitting is only available to the people with plenty of cash . Same as most other benefits .
All I read in the above article is that we need to lower our living standards drastically. I do not trust anyone who tells me we need to eat less meat and then replace it with processed crap.
@An Drew Bearla: Yes, all that came out of the big meeting in Davos is that we must stop eating meat and dairy or the world will starve, and we must share our cars or cycle or walk, all the mullarkey Ryan is spouting and all from a bunch that then sat down to a four course meat laden lunch after flying in on 1500 private jets. The narrative to blame the ordinary consumer and deflect away from their lavish carbon laden lifestyles is ridiculous. Animal farm springs to mind
Will do this, will improve that. All talk and no action. The government has no motivation to implement any of these policies. Still using diesel commuter trains ffs.
@Tomo: We are making progress faster than ever before. I would live to speed it up too, but denial of what’s happening is nor helpful.
Bottom line is what comes out of our chimneys and out of the vehicle tailpipes isn’t good for us and has resulted in worse health for our population and more deaths. Even if you think climate change isn’t real (it is) then only a fool would continue to not tackle us poisoning ourselves.
@Barry Somers: a few more new taxes will sort everything.
That’s the problem, the greens solution is to tax the problem with no alternative. Of course, people are turning against it
@Jim Buckley Barrett: Not true.
@Nicholas McMurry: Yes it is true. Tax tax tax from a fella that knows about as much about climate change as my 8yr old. All the solutions Eamo is pushing for at present are financially or infrastructurally unviable like hydrogen which is inhibitively expensive to make or offshore wind which we have no way due to planning restrictions and lack of infrastructure make, but which are the chief objectives of E3G which ol Eamo is/was a senior associate of, as usual the self serving bull we have gotten used to in Irish politics. Any man that signs off on tax incentives for fuel for private jets and the writing off of carbon footprint for such is not green. No viable alternatives for anything, no reduction in our carbon footprint despite all the waffle, lying about our agricultural footprint throwing our farmers and food producers under a bus because they are a soft target while letting big corporations off the hook by giving them all our carbon credits from our grasslands, hedgegrows and forestry. Ireland is not one of the worst polluters as we are so often told to justify taxing the life out of us we just fall foul of the carbon credit rules that the large industrial countries set up to make themselves look far better than they really are, America, Germany France etc
@Nicholas McMurry: of course its true, if the government and greens in particular wanted to actually do something that wasn’t a punitive tax measure, it would be a shock.
Insulation is the most effective measure, yet they persist in making the retrofitting policy, part of the convoluted seai scheme which requires “trained” certified installers, when homeowners could, depending on their current skills learn to install it just as effectively themselves, by watching a few instructional videos, just like the “trained” installers did…
Subsidising insulation for domestic projects with a zero vat rate, would encourage more people to retrofit insulation to their homes themselves, reducing the amount of heating from all sources, along with particulate and carbon emissions across the board.
Better put the old age pension up. Where will all the food come from? More homes will be needed.
Anyone find those TRVs (main image) a complete waste of time?
I find that after a year the da*n thing is stuck on full heat. (I’ve checked the pin underneath and it seems to move freely) Was this just another way for the plumbers to make a few bucks :) ?
So, if we live in England or Wales and insulate our homes we could live for 836,000 years. I don’t want to live that long.
Why does an article in an Irish publication write about a foreign country without stipulating that it is a study done in that foreign country?
have your say