by Cathal Liam
Oh hi ya. Can’t sleep. I should be relaxing on this festival-free weekend, but the old mind is racing away. So it’s out of the bed and over to the keyboard. Sure I’m on my own for a few days as my wife is in Seattle with her daughter and grandson.
Homesick already. Thoughts of May Richardson’s grand bacon and cabbage and Noeleen Daly’s lovely roasted chicken and veg conjure up memories of two wonderful families and my recent holiday visit with them. Sure I’ll be hard pressed to find their equal this side of the Atlantic, besides my culinary skills are sadly lacking.
Yesterday, I spent time leafing through some unread issues of The Irish Echo… newspapers have a way to stacking up when you’re away from home, don’t they? There, buried on page nine of one was the headline: “McAleese to head Magdalene probe.”
The short piece mentioned that Senator Martin McAleese, husband of our current Irish president Mary McAleese, is planning to lead an investigation into the Irish state’s role in the ill-famed 20th-century Magdalene laundry abuses.
It wasn’t until writer/director Peter Mullan’s 2002 film, The Magdalene Sisters, hit the big screen that most Americans became aware of the cruel injustices of these recent Dickensian workhouses. [As an aside, many in Ireland were unaware as well, or was it that people simply refused to believe the rumours? So if you haven’t seen the film, I urge you to, but be cautioned, it’s not for children or the faint of heart. The story follows the lives of three ‘fallen’ young women who are forced by family and The Church to become ‘inmates’ in a Magdalene ‘asylum.’]
Ireland alone didn’t share in the shame of maintaining these female ‘penal’ institutions. During the 19th and 20th centuries, throughout Britain, Europe, Canada and even the United States, these heinous establishments housed often pregnant, unwed girls/women or others of ‘questionable’ character who’d been sent there for a variety of vague and specious reasons. Many of their newborns were sent to orphanages while their mothers remained behind to labour on.
These asylums sprang from the 19th-century Evangelical rescue movement in the UK, whose intent was to reform (punish?) prostitutes. In Ireland, they were renamed for St. Mary Magdalene and labelled laundries as the women were forced to wash and/or mend bed-clothing and sundry wearing apparel. They were compelled to endure long hours of work, prayer and silence. Some women did leave after years, but many lived on to old age, dying in their institutionalised ‘homes.’
The first Irish ‘laundry’ began in 1767 for Protestant girls, but after Catholic emancipation in 1829, they became almost exclusively the dominion of The Church. [Ah, such cruel irony!] The last Irish asylum closed in the autumn of 1996.
Why, you ask, did I choose to write about such a ‘dark’ page in our history? Before going over this last time, I remember reading the lead article in the Galway Advertiser, dated 16 June 2011, urging a prompt and speedy resolution for Galway’s Magdalene victims. I also recalled a town council controversy over a newly installed memorial to these ill-treated women.
Dedicated in March, 2009 at the bottom of Forester Street, just across from Galway’s newish Visitor Information Centre, I found Mick Wilkin’s statue. Haunting, stark and strangely eerie, a middle-aged woman, standing on a plinth, is dressed in simple institutional attire. A bed-sheet, held aloft in both hands, is draped behind her. The top of the sheet touches the back of her head. On first inspection, I wasn’t sure if she was freeing herself from the folds of bed-linen or was about to pull it over her head, thus remaining trapped forever.
On the polished, stone base are the words of local poet Patricia Burke Brogan: Make visible the Tree; its branches ragged with washed out linens of a bleached shroud.
The interpretation of Boston College Professor James M. Smith adds meaning to Wilkin’s work and Brogan’s inscription. He feels “the bed-sheet signifies the woman’s work, the endless hours of forced labour….” He thinks the sheet works on a symbolic level too. “The woman has emerged as if from beneath a shroud. She steps into the public arena. The statue announces an identity long held secret by Irish society.”
Fifteen months after its dedication, Galway City leaders wanted to move the monument. Unexpectedly, they claimed the street needed widening, but Patricia Brogan protested most strongly. She even threatened to chain herself to the statue, if necessary.
You see, objections had been raised. A local priest, whose church, St. Patrick’s, was but a few steps from the painful symbol queried, “Is it necessary to remind church-goers of Ireland’s days gone by?”
As it so happens, the reflected image of the memorial can be seen in Discover Ireland/Áras Fáilte windows across the street. It’s surely not the kind of reminder those wishing to promote a positive Irish identity wanted to portray.
But it IS in the perfect spot. Situated directly in front of the gates of a earlier Sisters of Mercy Convent, home to a former Magdalene laundry, it’s there for all to see and reflect upon so. As Ms. Brogan once said, “Make[ing] (our past) visible… that’s what it’s all about.”
Today, I’m happy to report, the Magdalene memorial still stands at the bottom of Forester Street. Yes, it was moved, but only a few feet to accommodate a new bus lane. After you visit, stopping to admire Wilkin’s art and Brogan’s words, walk the few steps to the left through the old stone archway. There on a wee bit of grass are six black marble headstones, each with twelve women’s names, all inscribed in gold letters from the late 1800’s to more contemporary times. But tucked from view as the burial markers are, their symbolic sister stands out front, just a few paces away, proudly lifting the veil of shame and secrecy so long endured.
God be good to them all and you too. Keep well and ‘til next time… Is Mise, Cathal
*Cathal is a freelance writer and the author of Consumed in Freedom’s Flame, Forever Green, and Blood on the Shamrock. His new book, Fear Not the Storm, was just released in March. www.cathalliam.com.
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