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Galway City Council Seeks To Take Down Statue Dedicated To Victims Of The Magdalene Laundries

08/04/10-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
“Most girls come here pregnant/some by their own fathers/Bridget got that belly from her parish priest.”- Joni Mitchell “Magdalene Laundries”

They want to forget, but it is in the music, and the Irish should remember what it means for the bards to sing about the atrocities. Stone wears down, but songs live on. “I speak for Érin,” Amergain once said. It is said that once, the husband of Macha boasted to Rhi Connor Mac Nessa, the son of the mortal woman Nessa and the Goddess Nessa, that Macha could out run the Rhi’s fastest horse. She was pregnant and begged her husband not to force her to run, but he had boasted and would lose face. So, she ran, and beat Rhi Connor’s horse. Upon completion of the race, she gave birth to her daughter and son. Before departing for the Otherworld, Macha cursed the men of Ulster that they would feel the pains of birth for seven days and seven nights should their nation ever be threatened.

The Galway City Council wants to forget the atrocities of the past. They want to remove the statue dedicated to the victims of the Sisters of Mercy Magdalene laundry that once stood at the corner of Forster Street and Bothár. They, themselves, commissioned the statue known as the Mick Wilkins statue, and now they want it removed. They want the simple statue of a woman dressed in drab institutional garb and holding a bed-sheet aloft behind her to go away because it reminds people of the women who were literally worked to death in those laundries.

These women were often sent to the laundries for their “sins”. Some were sent there just to get them away from the public because they embarrassed their father or their parish priest who had gotten them with child. At the base of the statue are the words of Patricia Burke Brogan, and they say:

Make visible the Tree

its branches ragged

with washed out lines

of a bleached shroud

Professor James M. Smith wrote

“It would stand a mere stone’s throw from the entrance to the local church. Was it really necessary for Mass-goers to be reminded of days gone by?

It would stand in the shadow of the new Discover Ireland/Aras Failte building. Tourists visiting the glass-adorned information centre would be confronted with the statue’s reflection, mirrored back at them as they looked to uncover the real Ireland of thatched cottages and traditional pub scenes on display in the same windows.

Diagonally across from the tourist office stands the building that replaced the Magdalene laundry. The nuns sold the site in the early 1990s. The buildings were demolished. And today the local Anglo-Irish Bank branch stands in its stead. Not much has changed really. Gross exploitation and immoral business practices predate the Celtic Tiger boom. . .

“These seventy-two women were the ‘Consecrated Magdalenes,’ women who, after a probationary period, undertook a religious vow to remain in the institution for life. They chose to forego liberty and material possessions and accepted a life of prayer and servitude. Their earthly reward was the promise of burial on convent grounds.

Galway’s ordinary “penitent” women, it should be noted, were buried in what amounts to a mass grave at Bohermore cemetery in the city.

When the laundry buildings were demolished the ‘consecrated’ graves were in the way of the new development. And so the bodies were exhumed and re-interred at their present location.

Galway’s City Council this week decided that the Magdalene memorial statue is also in the way of a proposed new ‘bus lane.’ Now it is the statue that impedes progress.

There is talk of relocating the statue, although the treatment meted out to the Padraic O’Conaire statue, formerly at Eyre Square, does not augur well in this regard. City councilors might well decide on an out of the way side street, off the beaten track, away from the glare of mass-goers, tourists, and the city’s financial gurus.”

At the old post office in Dublin stands a statue of Cu Chulainn. It was because of him that the curse of Macha was lifted. The Ulsterman was the son of Lugh, and was immune to the curse. The statue stands there because on that spot the Easter Rebellion occurred. It is easy to memorialize the atrocities committed against one’s own people, but it is easy to forget those that were committed by one’s own people. They seek to forget what they did to those women.

St. Brigid, whose holy day has always been more important to the Irish than St. Patrick’s, would be ashamed of how this city of Galway seeks to treat the women it was complicit in killing.

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((The story of Macha is recited from memory. I am a student of Women’s History specializing in Celtic Women’s history and myth. I come from a long line of bardic, druidic ans shamanistic women.- Bridgette P. LaVictoire ní Loynaz))