What God Did We Offend?

"I have wonderful happy memories of those women. As a child, I visited my aunt with my mother and brothers and sisters every Sunday. Those women who had no one belonging to them, befriended us and looked forward to us coming. They were the kindest, most gentle women you could ever care to meet.
My fondest memory was to go down to the laundry where the women would be working hard. But if there were no nuns about, they would stop work and play with us. They would put us in the laundry baskets and run around the place with us. They got great pleasure from our laughter. God help them, they had little more to look forward to.… It brought tears to my eyes to read all about those bodies. They were so gentle and kind.
We still have one old lady who still keeps in touch with us. She is eighty -two years old now. My sister brought her to visit me about a year and a half ago. I was delighted to see her. All she wanted to do was talk about old times in High Park."
(Extract from a letter sent to the Magdalen Memorial Committee.)

In Memory Of Our Sisters
We had souls and hearts and minds
We cried at night for our mothers
Whose faces we never saw
Whose voices we never heard
We could never place them
Our babies never knew the love
We could have given them
Could we have touched them, kissed them
Held them close just once
Such a memory would have seen us through
But someone took them away
A life of prayer, repentance and hard work
What God did we offend?
What God found our sins so grievous?
Our lives were taken over before they began
No grave stone marked the spot where we were buried
With no names
- Sally Mulready, who worked in one of the Magdalen laundries.

Bury My Heart At . . .
Carmel Flood was nervous and emotional as she told the story of her grandmother. Her voice began to break and she paused to regain her composure. Someone asked her what were her feelings, what did she think of the way the nuns had dealt with the whole affair? "I'd love to strangle them," was her reply, before bursting into tears.
Later, her sister, Margaret, retold the story: "We got the paper from me aunt. Me aunt heard it from a sister-in-law a hers. She rang us to go up to her. And when we went up to her she showed us the paper. That was the first thing we heard about it. From there on we went straight up to High Park Convent. We called a nun out and we asked her: What's after happening to the graves? Why has this been happening and we didn't get notified? She said she was sorry the way the paper put it out.
"But we asked her about our Granny's body. Where was it? And she said it was still in the graveyard and that it would take about five or six weeks before the grave diggers gets to hers. So, we said that when they get the body out, we'd like to bury her ourselves, on top of her daughter; that was me mother.
"So, we got a phone call then from Sister Anne Marie. And she was saying that she was sorry over what had happened. So, we were still led to believe that it would take about five or six weeks for us to get our Granny's body. We got a phone call then Saturday, to say that her body was up in Glasnevin and that they were waiting on a coroner's cert or something.
"So, then we get another phone call Monday to say that we could go ahead with the burying on the Wednesday. It was a kinda done too fast, too quick. We didn't know whether we were kinda coming or going. We were lead to believe that it would have taken five or six weeks. And it was all done in less than a week."
The Magdalen Memorial Committee met in the Ormond Hotel on September 12th. Relative after relative made one point clear: nobody had been in touch with them. Nobody had informed them that the women were going to be dug up, cremated and re-buried in a mass grave. However, Sister Angela, from the Sisters Of Charity, had stated on RTE radio that relatives were informed, or that attempts had been made to inform them. Jim Cantwell of the Catholic Press Office is also quoted as saying that anyone who knew the women would have been informed.
Blathnaid Ní Chinneide, a founder member of the Magdalen Memorial Committee responded to such assertions: "The relatives were informed? Well, our experience was that when they phoned the convent asking for information about the timing of the re-burial even, that they were told nothing, or they were actually told misleading things.
I asked Margaret Flood what sort of reaction they got when they arrived at High Park Convent. "I think they nearly died. That when we went up about me Granny . . . Like if we wouldn't a went up, we wouldn't a known. She would have been with the other people that would have been getting cremated. They didn't get in contact with us. They knew where we lived. They could have got in contact with us but they didn't."
In previous generations, Catholics were told that cremation was a mortal sin. Until 1983, Canon Law stated that anyone who chose cremation should be denied funeral rights, as cremation ran contrary to Church teaching in relation to the resurrection. The prayer for the blessing of the grave, goes: "Lord Jesus Christ/By your own three days in the tomb/You made holy the graves of all who believe in you/And by so doing you strengthened the hope of resurrection/In those whose bodies are subject to decay . . ."
Margaret Flood: "I think cremation is very sad. When me Granny died ten and a half years ago we asked: Could we bury her? And we weren't allowed. It wasn't allowed for us to bury her. And I don't know why they wouldn't allow us to bury her. They just said that that was her home and that was her life."

Saved from oblivion
The 'Magdalen' women had no choice, in life or in death. They were the flotsam that had to be swept under the carpet of a country which had lulled itself into the belief that what was out of sight was out of society. These women - some of them destitute, some of them pregnant and unmarried, some of them prostitutes, some of them 'simple', some of them merely so-called 'troublemakers' - these wild women, who were deemed a danger to the morals of Irish manhood, never had a choice in the land of the parish priest, the squinting windows, the clinking keys and the rumble of industrial washing machines.
They were gaoled, often for life. They were sentenced to hard labour, and their only crime was that they were outside the narrow, rigid structures of a Catholic Ireland which thrived on cold-hearted brutality towards the weak.
The Magdalen laundries - taking their name from the New Testament figure, Mary Magdalen, a 'fallen' woman who dried Jesus' feet with her hair - were set up in the last century, to deal with women 'who were not fit to be in decent society.' There were some twenty such laundries at the turn of the century. Some still exist today.
The laundries were run as commercial enterprises, earning a substantial income for the particular Order of nuns who ran them. Because the 'penitents' - the name given to the women working in them - were not paid, the laundries were very competitive, and it is highly likely that they helped ensure a low wage structure for workers in other commercial laundries. As historian, Maria Luddy, points out, "During the [1940s] laundry workers strike, the convents undercut the commercial laundries and took on military and other contracts."
Life for 'penitents' in the laundries was not very different to that detailed in Solzhenitsyn's Russian Gulag concentration camp diaries, or for the Californian plantation fruit workers of Steinbeck's, The Grapes of Wrath. Work in the steamy laundries was often from dawn to dusk.
"The food was terrible," Rita Parascandello, who was in a Limerick Magdalen laundry in 1965 and now lives in London, told a Sunday Tribune interviewer, recently. "There was something called blood hash. It was made of chickens' blood and bread-crumbs. Disgusting. I used to complain all the time about it, and once I was made to stand up at the penance table in front of the whole refectory and everyone was told not to talk to me, because I would 'corrupt a barrack of soldiers'."
DeValera's Ireland gave very little justice to those women who did not obey its severe moral dictats. Some would say that the Church and its institutions were merely reflecting the moral climate within society. Sister Angela, on the RTE Radio One, This Week programme (Sunday 12th September), claimed that the nuns "showed love, compassion and affection" to the 'penitents'.
Similarly, in a letter to the Irish Times (Thursday 16th September), C. T. Greenan, O.P., claimed that in relation to the re-burial of the High Park women, the nuns had saved, "from oblivion the names of these women (whom they befriended in life and in death when no one else would) . . ." But the facts scarcely bear this out: Some of the nameplates on the urns re-buried in Glasnevin cemetery had only numbers on them; others had names such as Magdalen of St Alphonsus, Magdalen of St John.
Not everyone does believe that the Church was a victim of the prevailing moral climate. Kathleen Marr - former child "Inmate No 96" of the Institution of the French Sisters of Charity, Stillorgan - is one of them. "The Catholic Church fostered the attitudes," she points out. "They labelled these women 'bad', 'evil'. There's a saying that if you say a thing enough times, people will believe it. And society did. We believed what the Catholic Church said. And we said, we don't want them.
"The parish priest would have had a big influence on what went on. For all sorts of reasons during the 40s and 50s, women found themselves pregnant outside marriage. These women were marginalised and their families were ostracised. In order not to be disgraced, they had to leave their communities and find other places to go. And the only places that were there were these institutions."
One particular parish priest was to have a dramatic influence on the life of a relation of Patricia MacDonnell. "He believed that she was in moral danger because she had started to stay out at night until nine and half nine," she recalls. Since her mother had died, the priest decided that she'd be far better off in a living-in job in Dublin. "The family were quite happy at the idea of her living in a secure environment. So they let her go," she says.
The girl was institutionalised for nineteen years, for ten of which the family had been trying to get her back out. "For five years the nuns denied having her, and it took another couple of years to allow the family to see her." When the family finally did get her out, she weighed four stone. "She was lice ridden, she was infested with tape-worms and she had a mouthful of stumps for teeth," Patricia says. "She went in at sixteen with a perfectly good set of teeth. You see, the nuns and the clergy have always tried to give the impression that the people who went into these places were destitute, poor or whatever. She came from what was, by the standards of the day, a well-to-do family."
The woman was well-trained by the Sisters of Mercy. "For three or four years after she came out, she would still insist - no matter how much they coaxed her - on calling her uncle and aunt Sir and Madam. She would automatically stand up when somebody entered the room and literally stand to attention. It took a long time to get her to walk straight because she inevitably walked with her eyes downcast."

High Park Convent & Lands
High Park Convent, Drumcondra, has a very substantial area of land contained within its high walls. The land complex is bounded on the north by Collins Avenue, the south by Griffith Avenue, the west by the Swords Road and the east by Grace Park Road. As you view the convent from the Grace Park Road entrance, you will see a statue of an open-armed Jesus welcoming you. However, beside him is a sign: PRIVATE PROPERTY.
Nailed to the actual entrance itself is the sign: WARNING. GUARD DOGS ON PATROL WITH SECURICOR. There were two graveyards in High Park. One for the nuns and one for the Magdalens.
The 'Magdalen' women's graves were exhumed because their graveyard was located in the 12 acre plot of land which the Sisters have recently sold to developers - to repay, the nuns say, major debts incurred as a result of them building a new centre for women in need, and also to meet running costs for present activities.
Jim Cantwell, of the Catholic Press office, has stated that permission was given for the exhumation of the 133 women because, "It was a case that the remains of those past would be helping the women there today. The Dublin Diocese deemed it fitting and gave permission." Further permission for the exhumation was given by the Minister for the Environment under the local Government Sanitary Services Act of 1948.
There may have been other reasons for the sale of the land. Perhaps it had something to do with recent losses for the Sisters of Charity on the stock market, as Fintan O'Toole suggested in an Irish Times opinion piece. A listing in the Guinness Peat Aviation (GPA) shares register goes, "Sr Kathleen Hanly, Convent of Our Lady of Charity, High Park, Drumcondra, Dublin, (joint account holders). 5,200 shares."
These shares, bought in 1991, would have cost in the region of $110,000. Because of the GPA crash, they would now have little or no value. Or perhaps it had something to do with losses which occurred during currency trading? A Hot Press employee, in a bank manager's office during the January monetary crisis, overheard the bank manager asking a colleague to trade £100,000 of "Sisters" money. Of course, there are many "Sisters" in Ireland, and he may well not have been referring to the Sisters of Charity. All the same, it is interesting to note that our religious institutions are also stock traders and currency speculators.
Sr Angela, of the Sisters of Charity, has refused to disclose how much the 12 acre section of the convent's grounds was sold for, or who it was sold to. However, a property dealer told the The Sunday Business Post that they received £1.2 million for it. Before the sale of these 12 acres, the Sisters of High Park had land rated in the Valuation Office books of approximately 53 acres. Assuming a similar market value for the land they still own, that would mean that their 41 remaining acres would have an approximate value of £4 million.
The original acreage of land owned by the Sisters at High Park was much higher. Hot Press has found out that in 1971 they sold nine acres, which was to become 'Grace Park Estate'. A brand new estate - 'High Park' - near the junction of Collins Avenue and Grace Park Road, is on land which was almost certainly owned by the Sisters. At today's prices these properties would have netted the Sisters well in excess of £1 million.
The re-burial of the 132 women from their High Park Convent graves took place in Glasnevin Cemetery on Saturday 11th of September. The ceremony was attended by a number of the Sister of Charity nuns, their chaplain and some lay people. At the Ormond Hotel meeting, the following night - which was attended by about 70 people - the relatives who spoke stated that they had neither been informed of, let alone invited to, the re-burial.
Nor were the 40 women still in the care of the Sisters at High Park invited. A spokeswoman representing the nuns, claimed that the women did not attend the re-burial because the nuns were afraid that the women would be "abused by the media." When pressed as to whether the women were actually given a choice in the matter of whether they wanted to attend or not, she finally replied, no, that they were not consulted.
The Magdalen Memorial Committee sent a letter to Archbishop Desmond Connell, on the 7th September, requesting the following: "1.That your Grace organise a public funeral to commemorate these women. 2.That the burial site may not be built on, but that a flower garden or shrubbery be erected theron. 3.That the Church make a substantial contribution towards the erection of a public memorial at a prominent place in Dublin as a permanent reminder of past injustices."
The Archbishop has, as of yet, not replied to the letter. However, a spokesperson for the Catholic Church - Jim Cantwell, in a radio debate with Patricia MacDonnell - has already refused the three requests.

Missing Persons - Missing Histories
Margo Kelly is one of the founder members of the Magdalen Memorial Committee. She is one of the many women and men in Ireland who does not know who her mother or father was. "I cannot be sure where my mother ended up," she says. "There's no birth certificate for her. Neither is there a death certificate. Now, if she's alive, she's in her eighties. If she's dead, there's no record of her ever having lived. And that is a very sad story. That a woman lived, had three children and a life and there is no official record of her.
"She has no history. That's why it was very important to me to find out where I came from, what my roots were. Because otherwise, my two daughters would have been the latest in a long line of rootless women."
She also has a sister whom she has tried to trace. "I have traced her up until she was about eleven and she was certainly in the orphanage at that time. There is no record of her having left the orphanage. I have seen the book of records from Ballaghadereen and there's no record of her having left. At that age, there was no way she was going to be fostered, and I can only assume that she could very easily have stayed within the system."
Mary Brown [not her real name] spent her childhood in an orphanage, while her mother worked in one of the Magdalen laundries. The laundry which her mother worked in had an orphanage attached to it, yet the nuns sent Mary to one one hundred miles away. Mary knew her mother's name and spent years searching for her. When she finally did locate the institution that she was in, she was told that her mother's name was not Anna anymore. "Her name is Dolores," she was told. "We give them new names."
Anton Sweeney, a founder member of Adoption Action, a group open to both adoptees and to their 'birth' parents, is searching for his birth mother. In late 1991 he began by going to the Office of the General Registar for Births, Deaths and Marriages in Joyce House, in Lombard Street East, in Dublin. He was told there that because he was adopted, he couldn't get his original birth cert. The Adoption Board told him that although they had no objection to people tracing their parents, they couldn't provide identifying information.
He went to an Adult Adoptees meeting and found out that you can trace people yourself, using public records. He was able to find his original birth cert. and moved forward from there. By now he knows his mother's name and the year she was born, and has narrowed the search down to two possible women of the same name. "The next step for me will be to try and get their baptismal certs to find out if they married before I was born, which would rule them out. Hopefully, that will only leave me with one."
Anton tried to gain his baptismal cert from the Church - which would have speeded up his search considerably. However, he was refused. The reply to his request stated that he could not get the cert without the prior consent of his birth mother.
Anton mentioned that recently a man brought a case to the High Court, saying that it was unlawful for him to be denied access to his original birth records. "The Adoption Board defended the case but they lost and costs were awarded against them," he says. "As far as I'm aware, the judgement hasn't been published in full. We'll be keeping a close eye on it." Adoption Action are presently researching the possibility of challenging the Church in relation to access to baptismal information on a constitutional right to know basis.
"Since adoption was introduced on a legal basis in 1952, there's been approximately 40,000 adoptions," Anton states. "There would be far more as well that weren't legal, such as de facto adoptions that didn't go through the books."
Those of us who know our birth mothers and fathers, know our history. You only realise how important having a history is, when it has been denied you. There is great pain suffered, a pain that Margo Kelly has had to live with.
"I'm talking about the deep empty space that hasn't been filled yet," she explains. "People are out there and they're not complete. They're not whole because of this space somewhere in their heart. And it's to fill it and to get answers that I think that it's important that we continue what we've started now. And I think what we've started now won't be finished until it is well and truly spoken about."

Laying The Blame To Rest
We are in a type of 'open season' on the Catholic Church right now, and although I personally have little sympathy for them, I have been surprised by the lack of enmity women like Margo Kelly have for the institutions who treated her, her mother and family, so cruelly. She sees a wider picture.
"I think it's important not just to take this particular incident and just bring it all to High Park, and sort of blame the nuns there and leave it at that," she points out. "It's very, very important to look at the whole regime that was operating at that period of time and to look at how the state colluded with the Church. It wasn't just the nuns. What they were doing really, was carrying out the wishes of the Fathers of the Church, the hierarchy. And the hierarchy and the State at that time would have been made up mostly of men. The men were making the rules.
"They were punishing these women and the nuns were policing them. These nuns were girls who would have gone into the convents themselves at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Would have taken their vows of humility and chastity. Taken on names of pious things. Given up their own identity. And devoted their lives to prayer and atonement. And what they were doing was passing this on to these women.
"So what we have to look at really is what kind of a society we had, that would make those nuns feel that they had to impose this life of repentance and prayer on these women, and making them atone for the rest of their lives for their sins. I mean, the greatest crime was being unmarried and having a baby."
Kathleen Marr also believes that it is not enough simply to blame the nuns. "What happened in the past is that women, if they got into prostitution, or if they were considered vagrants, or if they broke the law, would have been referred to these sorts of institutions and there would have been some sort of a court order put on them. I'm not sure if these institutions interpreted these court orders as being life-long court orders and whether it was made clear that these women were to be institutionalised for the rest of their lives.
"That's one question that needs to be looked at, even today. Because there are still women in these institutions who may have been referred by the courts on an order at the age of sixteen."
There may well be a case in law to answer, as far as Tom Cooney, of the Irish Council Of Civil Liberties (ICCL) is concerned. "I think that quite definitely the women who believe they've suffered at the hands of such institutions should look closely at the question of whether it's possible now to sue those institutions in order to obtain compensation," he states. He goes on to point out that, "In 1965, the Irish Supreme Court approved the proposition that every individual has a right of bodily integrity. And if any women was put into one of these institutions through a legal process or other process, and the result was that they ended up experiencing a violation of their psychological and bodily integrity, then a serious question arises as to whether they should now sue those who did them wrong."

It Is Still Happening
The past is alive and well and operating in laundries at Gloucester St Laundry in Lower Seán MacDermott Street and in Donnybrook. "In the last few days we're hearing stories that I wouldn't have believed before this," says Margo Kelly. "Of laundries that are still functioning in the way they did then. The system is probably not quite as harsh, because I believe these women are allowed in and out of the laundry, which wouldn't have been the case before. And they actually get paid £10 a week now, which wouldn't have been heard of then, either. But in 1993 to think that women are still incarcerated in institutions like this…
"These women would be so institutionalised now, there'd be no question of them being able to leave it. So they are in as much of a prison now as they were then. And for anybody to work for £10 a week in 1993, it is still slave labour, and these places are still operating as sweatshops."

The Legacy For The Future
While compiling this article I asked everybody I knew - and many I didn't know - if they had any memories of 'Magdalen' women. Then one night, as I was about to fall asleep, a disturbing vision flashed briefly across my mind. I was in a large kitchen surrounded by women washing and cooking. Suddenly, I realised that I had spent five years in a boarding school where 'Magdalen' women prepared my food and washed my dishes.
I would have passed by some of them at least once a day during that period. Yet when I left college they became lost in my memory. We used to call them 'scivvies', I remember now, when we called them anything at all, because most of the time we ignored their existence. We passed them by, oblivious.
As I try and fix on those women who worked in the kitchen, a very vague, hazy face floats across my consciousness. Perhaps it is a part of all their faces pieced together, I don't know. But I do know now that I should not have called these women 'scivvies'. Perhaps some of them - many of them - were silently grieving mothers? Who knows? Who will ever know the history of these women sentenced by society to cook and scrub for it, to wash its dirty linen in private?
"So much of women's history is not documented," Margo Kelly tells me in a calm, assured voice, a voice that has achieved wisdom though hardship. "I mean, you read any history book - take J.J. Lee's history of Ireland, and that would be a highly acclaimed piece of work - you look in there and you'll root a long time to try and find any reference to that particular time, or even to women's role in general. They were always somebody's wife or somebody's mother. And this is a good opportunity, I think, to look at that social history."
It is a good time indeed. A great tragedy has an even greater lesson attached, for those brave and determined enough to learn it. For Kathleen Marr, and many more like her, the 'Magdalen' women's lives and deaths were not in vain. "The women who have died in these institutions leave a legacy for us," she points out. "They leave something for me to carry on, in terms of the rights of women. Not just in Ireland but through all kinds of repressive regimes. Even if they lived a life of silence, they certainly leave their mark for us, as a challenge to the Catholic Church and to any other organisation who oppresses or discriminates or creates the conditions for discrimination.
"We need to reclaim these women's spirits and bring them right into our journey here today, in order to show that they didn't die in vain."