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	A Refugee of Evil Irish Past By Kevin Cullen Boston Globe June 18, 2009 http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/06/18/a_refugee_of_evil_irish_past/?s_campaign=8315 She lives in a city north of Boston but grew up in Ireland, when it wasn't green as much as it was black and white. When she was 7, her mother died, and the father she knew as warm and kind grew cold and mean. When she was 14, her father put her on his bicycle and pedaled 25 miles, to a convent. "The nuns were nice until my father left," she said. "I don't remember saying goodbye to my father." The nuns ran a school for orphans and the unwanted and a laundry peopled by older castoffs. They took her in and took her name. They gave her the name of a saint. On your saint's feast day, you got a hard boiled egg. Or a tooth brush. You didn't get both, and you didn't decide. The laundry was like a prison, she recalls. You couldn't talk at work, and you worked six days a week. The rougher, meaner girls were like trustees, and they curried favor with the nuns by enforcing a brutal code. Every Sunday, the head nun, the Reverend Mother, sat before the laundry girls in a huge chair and read out the week's transgressions. One day the Reverend Mother read her out, saying she had been talking at work. She called the Reverend Mother a liar, and two girls held her down while the Reverend Mother used scissors to cut off her hair. Once, a nun accused her of having a dirty uniform. She looked down and said, "There's no stain there, sister." And all at once her face was burning, because the nun smacked her with an open hand. She reacted, pulling off the nun's habit. As punishment, she was placed in a small room for 48 hours. There was no food, no water, no window, no bed, no toilet. She held her bladder until it was bursting, and when she finally peed on the floor she felt like nothing. When she was 18, she was called to the Reverend Mother's office and told she would take a train to Dublin, to work in a hospital. Two nuns escorted her to the station. No words were spoken. They handed her a one-way ticket. She cleaned the nurses' quarters and soon decided to start over in London. In England, she became a nurse and decided to start over again, this time in Boston, because that's where a lot of the Irish went back then. She never married, and when one of the two boyfriends she ever had mentioned marriage, she ran away. She never made much money and spent a lot of what she made on therapists. Today, at 74, she is hesitant to speak publicly, by name, about her past; some people close to her know nothing of it, and she wants to keep it that way. Ten years ago, the Irish government set up a program that was supposed to bring a measure of justice to people abused by schools run by religious orders. They've paid out more than a billion dollars. Irish lawyers came to Boston and she hired one of them. Years passed. She was supposed to get either some compensation or a chance to tell her story before an official board. She got neither. James Smith, a Boston College professor who wrote a book about women like her, got a call from her one day, out of the blue. She told him she had read his book, 10 pages at a time, each night, because that's all she could handle. "She's in legal limbo," he said. "At 14, she should have been put into the school. But the nuns needed a body for the laundry, so because of that quirk of fate, she is outside what they call the terms of reference. She has been officially ignored. It's scandalous." And it eats away at her. "The lawyer sent me a letter saying there was nothing he could do, but that if I ever get something on my own, he expects his cut," she said. She has made her peace with her God and her church, and she sits there, night after night, still looking for answers to questions no one should have to ask. Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com
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