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.