Records of Galway's Magdalen Laundry ‘limited’

Galway Independent
February 6, 2013

http://galwayindependent.com/stories/item/5885/2013-6/Records-of-Galway%27s-Magdalen-Laundry-%E2%80%98limited%E2%80%99


Galway writer and artist Patricia Burke Brogan has expressed her disappointment that the report on the Magdalen Laundries has softened the reality of life in the laundries.

Ms Burke Brogan spent a short time in the laundry on Forster Street in Galway City as a young novice and was interviewed by report author and former Senator Martin McAleese, the independent chairperson of the inter-Departmental Committee charged with establishing the facts of the State's involvement with the laundries.

Commenting on the report’s publication yesterday, Ms Burke Brogan, whose play ‘Eclipsed’ highlights the plight of women in the Magdalen Laundries, told The Galway Independent her initial reaction to the report was one of “disappointment”.

“It didn’t show how awful it was to put women away in laundries,” she said.

The controversial report found that there was direct State involvement in all areas of running the laundries, but contains “limited” records of the Galway laundry, spanning just 15 years.

The report found that 10,012 women spent time in Magdalen Laundries from the establishment of the State, however this figure does not include those women who spent time in the two laundries run by the Sisters of Mercy, in Galway and Dun Laoghaire.

According to the report, “full records of entries to the Magdalen Laundry operated in Galway by the Sisters of Mercy do not survive and it is not possible to determine the overall number of entries to this institution from 1922 until its closure in 1984”.

The only record pertaining to the Galway Laundry was a solitary soft-back notebook, which covers the period from 1944 to 1959. However, the notebook contains no entries between November 1949 and June 1954. Only 132 entries were recorded.

To supplement the lack of records, the committee relied on a number of other methods to attempt to determine the numbers of girls and women in the Forster Street laundry including Galway Diocesan financial accounts, censuses, photographs, local accounts and the book ‘Irish Journey’ by Halliday Sutherland.

According to these rough estimates, the number of people in the Galway laundry peaked at 110 in 1951, declining to 18 by the time the laundry closed in 1984.

The report did reveal that the routes of entry are known for 120 women after 1922, with 39 admissions coming from the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, 20 from the Legion of Mary in Limerick, 17 from convents and 15 from members of the clergy.

However the report found that this samples of routes of entry into the laundry was too small to be representative of an overall trend.

In a statement released yesterday, the Sisters of Mercy said the order fully acknowledged and was saddened by “the limitations of care which could be provided in these homes” in Galway and Dun Laoghaire.

“Their institutional setting was far removed from the response considered appropriate to such needs today. We wish that we could have done more and that it could have been different. It is regrettable that the Magdalen Homes had to exist at all,” read the statement.