State should preserve Magdalene laundry as a permanent memorial

It’s been said that the country that forgets its history is doomed to repeat it. I hope the State will consider that advice when deciding whether to acquire the former Magdalene laundry at Donnybrook, Dublin.

I have just signed an online petition initiated by playwright/politician Mannix Flynn who experienced first-hand the savagery of our industrial school system, calling on the State to intervene and rescue this grotesque but uniquely historic edifice from oblivion.

It’s more than just a building. It’s a surviving example of one of the virtual slave camps where thousands of women were incarcerated in that “Other Ireland”… the one to which Taoiseach Enda Kenny alluded when he apologised to the women who were wrongly detained, exploited, brutalised, and stigmatised in those Hibernian Gulags.

The building was sold by the order of nuns who once managed it, but the buyers have yet to decide its ultimate fate. This is where the State can do itself some service. It can, on behalf of all of us, and to atone for its role in the horrific injustice inflicted on the Magdalenes, secure the building and preserve it as a permanent memorial to an era that we cannot afford to forget.

Many of those terrible places have been demolished, airbrushed out of our lives, most recently the Magdalene laundry at New Ross in Co Wexford which was bulldozed into rubble.

The significance of the Donnybrook building is that it has been, up to now, preserved virtually intact with all of the grim paraphernalia linked to those theocratic punishment centres — the bleak and fearsome dormitories where women cried themselves to sleep or dreamt of freedom, the steam irons that the inmates pressed onto the laundry from morning till night, the giant back-breaking baskets they carried clothes in, the sinks they washed and slaved at, and the assortment of religious statues and carvings they were forced to kneel before and pray to every day and night of their undeserved incarceration.

The estimated cost to the State of acquiring the Donnybrook Magdalene laundry is up to €3 million. A small price, I suggest, for a facility that could keep alive the memory of what happened in this supposedly democratic “free” country of ours when theocratic forces dominated and powerful people looked the other way.

Parts of the venue could also be used, as some commentators have suggested, by community and various non-political or voluntary groups.

The building would serve as a precious educational resource to inform future generations what those women endured once upon a time in Ireland.

John Fitzgerald

Callan

Co Kilkenny