‘I don’t have all the time in the world to wait for an apology’

Kathleen Legge has lung cancer. She is 77.

Last week, as the Taoiseach stood in the Dáil avoiding making an apology for State involvement in the Magdalene laundries, the former pupil of St Mary’s Training School at Stanhorpe St was undergoing a radiotherapy session in the UK.

She was too sick to return home to Ireland.

“I caught a bit on BBC News. How can anyone suggest that those places were a refuge? I nearly starved there. Working all day long using red hot machines that if you didn’t go fast enough, your fingers could go into? Working all day every day for three years for nothing and my mother thought I was getting an education?” she said.

The Magdalene survivors’ advocacy groups have long emphasised the urgent need for an apology as the survivors are ageing. Nobody better illustrates that point than Kathleen.

“I remember saying to Steven [O’Riordan of Magdalene Survivors Together] that all I wanted was to live long enough to see everything come out, to see them say sorry and compensate us for what happened to us,” she said.

Kathleen feels the Magdalene women are being “cheated” by Taoiseach Enda Kenny. St Mary’s Training School wasn’t included in the McAleese report as, on paper, it wasn’t a laundry.

When her mother brought her to her new Dublin school, she thought she was signing her daughter up for an education.

“I remember when the nuns interviewed me with my mother, they asked ‘Do you sing? You will be very pleased to hear we have a choir’. Yet, when I went in the doors, within 10 or 15 minutes, they put me to work on a burning hot steam roller, pushing through sheets to be pressed. They sent reports and everything to my mother. They said I was getting very high marks in my studies. I was too scared to tell my mother the truth when I’d see her once a year,” she said.

The Taoiseach will meet with survivors of the laundries next week. Meanwhile, Fianna Fáil, which denied State involvement in the laundries during its time in power but apologised for this failure this week, is to use its Dáil time to hold a two-day debate on the need for an apology and redress.

But Justice for Magdalenes has warned the Government that many survivors will only meet the Taoiseach and Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore if they are assured of confidentiality.

Picture: Peter Willows