Search Results for 'Magdalene asylum'

I have been talking a lot recently about public or collective memory. The series of commemorations that began two years ago illustrates that while we may have different interpretations of the events that gave rise to the birth of our nation, it is clear that the happenings of 1919-1923 are firmly embedded in the collective conscience. We will never agree on the finer detail of the roles played by the principal protagonists involved in the Treaty negotiations of 1921.

Modh Eile House, the new home of COPE Galway’s domestic abuse services for women and children in Galway, has secured an Irish Council for Social Housing Allianz Community Housing award for 2021.

COPE Galway this week launched a booklet to Remember, Respect and Record stories of the women who lived and worked in the Magdalen Laundry in Galway. The local charity sees the booklet as a way of acknowledging this painful history while also looking to a new use for the convent building associated with the laundry – a state-of-the-art centre for women and children who experience domestic abuse in Galway.

‘No one wants these women. We protect them from their passions. We give them food, shelter and clothing. We look after their spiritual needs.’ And that was all that was believed to be required for the inmates of the Magdalene Laundry, in Forster Street, Galway. It is true that no one wanted ‘these women’, because of the twisted sense of morality of the time. Girls who gave birth to a child outside marriage were ostracised by society. If the pregnancy and birth could not be kept hidden (some families kept their pregnant daughter locked away in an upstairs bedroom, or sent to a relative in England); people feared local gossip, and judgment to such an extent that parents turned against their own daughters. They brought their daughters to the nuns, and walked away. The problem was out of sight, and, they probably believed, gone away.

Most families, most adults, and most communities have secrets; past indiscretions they would rather forget about, and usually not very serious. But  some of them can be very painful, and are kept hidden, in a sort of a Secrets Box,  long after they need to be.

IT IS difficult for an increasing section of the Irish population to visualise the utter power wielded by the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland prior to the mid-sixties. The law of the State was dictated, not by the taoiseach and ministers in Dáil Éireann, but by the bishops and priests from the pulpit.

A statutory inquiry into all mother and baby homes must have “full powers” to compel witnesses and secure documentary evidence, particularly against religious orders, that is according to Justice for the Tuam Babies.

Funding of more than €1 million has been secured for a new women’s refuge in Forster Street on the site of a former Magdalene Laundry.

GALWAY THEATREGOERS are in for a treat next week with a new staging of Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed from Mephisto Theatre Company.