Search Results for 'Patricia Burke Brogan'

Three leading figures in literature, music, education, and the arts have received honorary degrees from NUI Galway this week in recognition of their contribution to the arts in Galway.

Patricia Burke Brogan joined the noviciate of the Mercy Sisters at the convent of St Vincent, Newtownsmith, Galway  at the end of the 1950s.  It was before the reforms of Vatican II had relaxed rule of the heavy medieval habit, the shorn hair, and a constant reminder ‘to keep custody of the eyes’. What was called ‘discipline’, which was nothing less than outrageous bullying, was meted out on the novices by some of the older nuns, in a cutting and wounding way. The nuns were hard on each other.

‘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.

AFTER ITS critically acclaimed production of Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed last year, Mephisto Theatre Company returns to the Town Hall Theatre with one of the most controversial plays of the last decade – Blackbird, by Scottish playwright David Harrower.

A mother and daughter from Claregalway will face off in a battle of the shows this weekend in the city when both take lead roles in two excellent productions being staged in two different theatres.

The finest amateur drama talent in the country will head to Claregalway from tonight (Thursday) March 13 when the Claregalway Drama Festival gets under way at the local leisure centre.

THE 32ND Claregalway Festival of Drama opens on Thursday March 13 and runs until Friday 21, and will include works of Irish and international theatre.

SO THE curtain comes down on another 12 months of theatre-going and there was no shortage of exciting shows to hold and captivate audiences’ imaginations throughout 2013.