Clare Author in Fight for Magdalen Justice, by Andy Seamus Hamilton, Clare People, August 7, 2010

Clare Author in Fight for Magdalen Justice

By Andy Seamus Hamilton
Clare People
August 7, 2010

http://www.clarepeople.com/201008072084/Clare-author-in-fight-for-Magdalen-justice.html

Clare author Patricia Burke Brogan has vowed to fight to prevent a monument dedicated to the women who were house in the Magdalen Laundries being torn down.

The 78-year-old Kildysart woman, who one served for a trainee nun at the Magdalen Laundry in Galway, said removing the monument would be a final insult to the thousands of women who were made into virtual slaves by the state and religious orders.

Burke Brogan was one of the first people in Ireland to highlight the plight of the women in the Magdalen Laundries when her play Eclipsed was first produced in 1992. She was part of a group who, in consultations with Galway City Council, erected the statue in March of last year.

The local authority now play to tare down the statue to make way for a new bus corridor in the city.

“It was after a lot of trouble that we were able to get a memorial erected to the Magdalen women, as they were called. I wanted to make visible something that would show that this happened,” she said.

“A lot of people describe me as an ex-nun, but I was never a nun. I was a novice, I never went the full way. I was sent to supervise there [at the Magdalen laundry] and I had never realised that such a place existed. These women had lost their freedom. No matter what Batt O’Keaffe says they were not employees, they were bond-women or slaves. They worked for nothing under extreme conditions, they washed the dirty laundry of society.”