Restaurant economics

THE western end of Cork City suburb Sunday’s Well once hosted a prison, a Good Shepherd Convent Magdalen Asylum, and two pubs.

Now just one of those institutions is open for business and it’s morphed into a gastro pub.

The second, neighbouring pub has become a corner shop — available to let — and the Magdalen laundry closed in the 1970s. Unlike the inmates of the prison, the women held in this institution had committed no crime, rather they had offended the strictures of the day. They were described in the 1911 census as “ex pupils residing, plain workers, laundresses, binders or needle workers”. But they were prisoners, too, and, unlike the criminals just over the wall, they had to work for more or less nothing. The grimness of their lot, and the social fetishes that judged them, puts scratching a few paragraphs about a meal shared with a loved one into a context that provokes wonder at fate’s cruel randomness.