The Magdalene Laundries

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1:18Elizabeth Coppin was 14 years old when she was put in a cab and taken to a place called Peacock Lane in County Cork, Ireland. It was March 1964. Oh, Peacock Lane. It was a very imposing building. It was creepy and eerie. Elizabeth had heard of Peacock Lane before, from a nun who worked at her school. I knew it was a horrible place because when we were young, she used to send a lot of the girls there she didn't like. And she used to say, do you want to go where so-and-so, you'll be going where she went. But they never told us where this place was. It could have been hell. Peacock Lane was managed by an order of nuns called the Sisters of Charity.

2:07Elizabeth says there were bars on some of the windows. She didn't know why she had come to this place, only that she'd been sent there to work. It was a laundry business connected to a convent. My job was in the wet part of the laundries. The floor was constantly in a puddle. It was always wet. And we had these big, massive industrial washing machines that you open up from the front. They were kind of circular, but they were standing up high, and you had to fill up these with the dirty clothes. Elizabeth says she worked six days a week and was told she would be paid, but she said she never got any money.

2:53This wasn't the first time that she was kept in an institution. When she was two years old, a court senator lived in an industrial school, run by the Sisters of Mercy, because her stepfather had been abusive. Elizabeth was raised in the school and rarely saw her mother. She remembers she was often kept from her sixth grade classes to scrub the floors, chop wood, or peel potatoes. That year, she missed about 70 days of school. Once she got to Peacock Lane, Elizabeth didn't go to school at all. We had cells, and we didn't have toilets. We had pots, and we were locked in from the outside. There was a big, strong bolt on the outside, and every night the nun had to lock that, and you couldn't leave it till the next morning until the bell went.

3:47She rang a bell in one hand and opened the, slid the doors back on the other. I met the girl I befriended there. Her cell was next to me. Her name was Patricia. And like me, she came from an industrial school as well. And we were the same age. And she was sent there, trafficked there as well by the nuns in her place. And we used to stand up in the window at night. And you could only open your window maybe an inch or two. and we used to stand up there when the lights were out. The lights used to go, and we were in pitch dark. We'd be standing up there chatting to each other about nothing. We were just talking rubbish.

4:28Elizabeth says sometimes they talked about what they'd like to do when they got out, but Elizabeth didn't know if she ever would. She said she saw women working at Peacock Lane who looked much older than her. It seemed that they'd lived their entire lives inside the laundry. There was two cells away. She was next door to Patricia, actually. And there was this old, old lady. And I'm not saying she was old because I was a young girl, not quite 15. But this lady was really, really old. Her name was Bridie. And she used to cry out every night. My baby, my baby, where's my baby? They took my baby from me.

5:13And I heard this every night. And I didn't understand. It's only affected me so bad when I've had children of my own. Once, Elizabeth tried to escape from Peacock Lane. Saturday was the day you were allowed to go upstairs to wash your hair or have a bath if you wanted to. So I pretended I was going upstairs to wash my hair. But instead, Elizabeth went to a cell where she knew there was a window without bars and jumped. She said she hurt her ankle in the fall, but she was still able to walk across town to a hospital. She planned to ask for a job there. Elizabeth remembers talking to the nun in charge at the hospital.

5:59She said she told the nun that she'd just run away from the peacock-lean laundry. And I walked into her office, the parlor And there she was with two people dressed in, I thought they were police And she just waved her hand and said, go with them But she wasn't going back to Peacock Lane I'm Phoebe Judge, this is Criminal

6:36So traditionally, convents operated laundries as respites for women who were living on the streets to come in, work for their keep, and they could leave again. So there were these kind of places of asylum and refuge. Catherine O'Donnell is a professor at University College Dublin. In 1897, a magazine called The Lady of the House published an article called The Sisterhood of Sorrow. It was about something called the Magdalene Laundries. The author wrote, There is no branch of state service for which religious communities are more fitted than in the rescue of fallen women. These women were often felt to be girls and women who were at risk of falling into sexual sin.

7:31So they were the most poor and the most destitute of girls and women. And the theology was that they would atone for sins, theirs, their mothers, their communities, and by doing the commercial laundry would kind of wash away the stain of sin. And what happened by the end of the 19th century and at the time that Ireland was getting its freedom from the British Empire was that the 10 Magdalene laundries and what became the Republic of Ireland became these very carceral places. And part of the move towards political independence was to keep proving to the British Empire that Ireland now had, if you like, a white enough, Anglo enough middle class that could actually do home rule.

8:24that we could contain, corral, coercively confine these women and their children so that they would not be a stain or a blight on the progress that Ireland was making. In 1922, at the time of independence, there were ten Magdalene laundries across Ireland. Women and girls were referred to the laundries by industrial and reformatory schools, social workers, and sometimes psychiatric hospitals. There's also another group of young girls and young women who were being sexually abused in their communities or homes, and rather than the perpetrators being prosecuted and dealt with, the girls found themselves in these Magdalene laundries.

9:13The women did the laundry for all kinds of local businesses, including the Royal Dublin Hotel, the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, and the French, Argentinian and Canadian embassies. They wash sheets for hospitals. Catherine O'Donnell says the uniforms the women wore made it easy to spot them if they tried to leave. And one of the things we know for certain is that the Irish police force, the Gardaí Shakana, were instructed to go after and arrest, detain any girl or woman seen in the vicinity who was wearing a uniform from one of those institutions. Were they connected to the laundries in any other way?

10:01I mean, they knew what was going on inside. Yes, I think they certainly knew what was going on. Some police say that when they got a call that there was an inmate escaped from a magdalen laundry, that the older sergeant in the barracks would say, just put on the kettle there and we'll have a cup of tea and see if the poor girl can make it to the boat. So yes, it does seem that at least some of the police knew very well what kind of institutions these were, while middle-class Ireland, for the most part, remained kind of blithely ignorant, presuming that the nuns that had given them very good convent education were also being as kind to the charges under their care in these other kinds of institutions.

10:50And there's a lot to say that Irish people really didn't know the full extent of the torture.

11:02My name is Declan McEntee. I'm in Gawdraith, the west of Ireland. I'm 69 years of age. I was about 10 years of age when this whole Magdalene scenario took part. Tell me about your parents, your mother and your father. My parents were two working class people. We never had an awful lot, but I mean in the 60s in Ireland, that was the same for every household. There was no such thing as more than enough. But both of them had to work because that's the way it was. Because my dad's wage wasn't enough to keep the family going. And that's how my mum got the job in the Magdalene Laundry. Declan is the youngest of three brothers.

11:54The Galway Magdalene Laundry employed outsiders who were allowed to come and go and were paid for their work. Declan's mother got a job in the linen room. Here's Hugo. his middle brother. When we were coming from school in the evenings, we used to pass this magnet in the laundry walking home because at the time it was before buses. Now, when we'd be passing the laundry, we'd be able to see our mother through a window, which was on the side of the street. Now, this window had four bars on it, as in jail-type bars, but she could open the window and we often stopped talking to her. And over a period of time, we started to talk to the girls also that she worked with in the linen room.

12:39Now, the reputation at the time was if they had babies, they were thrown into this place, right? It was mainly based on, oh, if they had babies. Here's Andy, the oldest brother. He was around 12 at the time. I know of a case where one young girl was put in there because she was caught stealing a loaf because her family had nothing on the table at home and that was the end of her. The brothers got to know the girls and women who worked with their mother. They used to make little things out of the shredded cloth they had from the linen and there were scapulars, religious crosses, things. I'm sorry we didn't keep them, but at the age we were, we weren't the slightest bit interested in them.

13:24Sometimes the brothers would sneak into the laundry to visit. So there was one friendly van driver used to put us into linen baskets individually, lock the linen basket into the back of the van, reverse into the linen room, take us out, and we'd be put into the linen room. The brothers noticed that any time a door was opened or closed, it had to be unlocked and locked by a nun. They noticed other things about how the women and girls were treated. Well, I myself saw the marks on the ladies where they were beaten by the nuns. I happen to know that in one, two cases, the rosary beads that the nuns would wear around their waist, which were made of wood, would have been used as an implement with which to chastise somebody and leave marks or cuts.

14:21So nobody had to sell us the idea about what was going on. I could see it for myself. They were imprisoned. and without exception, every single lady in there was under the impression that they were imprisoned. Well, my mum was in the midst of it and saw it every day. It affected her. It upset her. And she brought the stories home. One night, their mother came home more upset than usual. Well, it was a conversation around the table and she was talking about something happened, one of the girls and one of the nurses, she saw her giving her a slap for nothing, you know, and she just came home and she was fuming at the total un-Christian treatment they were receiving.

15:10And at this stage, myself and Andy had discussed and said, Jesus, there's something wrong here. These girls did nothing wrong. They did nothing illegal to anybody. Why are they in there? I think it's down to me. No, I'm not 100 % sure. might have been my brother Hugo, I'm not quite sure. But one of us suggested, why don't we see, can we do something about getting them out? And straight away both peered and says, don't be thinking like that, that's crazy. We'd all get arrested. The feeling was generally these people were prisoners and the laundry was managed by the local bishop, who, being the boss of the Catholic Church in Galway, would have had sway over the local police force also at that time.

16:03So people were very scared of the bishop and they were very scared of the police. You know, even thinking about it was the wrong thing to do. Their mother kept going into work and the brothers kept bringing it up. The more we discussed it, the more it seemed we might be able to pull it off.

16:27We'll be right back.

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18:23It was around 1963 when the McEntee brothers had the idea to help women escape from the Galway Magdalene laundry. They were around 10, 11, and 12 years old. After talking more about the idea every night at dinner, the family came up with a plan. My mother, at 6pm every evening, she could get the keys of the back gate while the old lady went for her tea. The Galway Laundry was in the middle of town, which meant you wouldn't have to run very far out the back gate to get to a nearby road. A plan just seemed to come together. Like, my dad had a van from the company he was with, J.R. Porter and Sons, and a plan was put into position, and we all had a role to play.

19:08It became a bit, I suppose for someone like me, it became a bit of an exciting escapade. It was winter, it was dark, and that was the plan, that it be dark. It actually was raining, which helped. Their mother got the keys, as planned, and helped the women slip out the back gate with their bags. My mum locked the door after them, from the inside. I was outside the gate to meet them, and I brought them to the gate of the church. where Hugo, my brother, was. He ran like hell with the four women to the gates of St. Patrick's Church, where I was waiting. I took two, he took two, and we ran up a lane behind the church up to another section of the city, which was only about 50 yards, the longest run of our lives, because we were terrified at this stage, terrified we might meet a priest or a policeman.

20:04The girls were terrified. They were holding on to their hands. No talk. Just running. My father was waiting at the top, opened the doors. My other brother, Dexan, was ready with the doors open. We jumped in on the ground, shut the doors, gone. It was just a 10 or 15 minute drive back to their house. But they had to go past the very front of the Magdalene Laundry. And silence until we actually had to pass the Magdalene Laundry going home in the van. And what was it like when you got the girls, the women inside the door of your house safe? What did you all do? Well, we all started laughing because we'd pulled it off We knew that there could be repercussions We knew or thought that we'd broken the law and we assumed that by morning the police would be out looking everywhere for these girls but that didn't happen Their mother went back to work the next day, as usual.

21:31The girls are now safe in our house. We're all up in the bedrooms because we had to all sleep in the one room because there were so many of us. And we talked all night. We talked about why they were in there. They told us a lot of their stories. They told us about the sadness, about their wishes in life that they'd ever had the chance to do. Declan remembers that the women hoped to leave Ireland altogether and go to England. They started trying to make connections with relatives or friends there. Did your neighbours know what was going on at your house, what you were doing? Yes, some of them did.

22:10Some of them did because the girls wouldn't put their head out the door. But in the end, they used to be sitting out in the back garden. So the immediate neighbours knew what was going on and they helped. Like, I remember Willie Welch, who was a great gardener, when he knew we had the girls in the house, he dropped down some potatoes and some vegetables. and some of the girls were only in their 1920s, maybe mid-twenties. Some of them would be smoking and Sheila next door used to always bring in a couple of fags for them and the neighbours were very good like that, you know. The brothers say they were all in the house together for about five or six weeks and then the women and girls were ready to leave by train.

22:52We couldn't bring them down to the main train station in Galway because the guards were actually watching it. Low key, but they were watching it. So their father drove them outside of town to another train station. From there, they would be on their way to England. What did surprise me, I often wondered as I got older, and I never asked them actually, but I should have, we didn't have any money, and yet my dad was able to give them the money to go to England. And to this day, I don't know where he got it. There was no uproar. There was nothing on the news, there was nothing which made us to say, there's something awful wrong here.

23:31When we did what we have to do in getting four girls out and there's no word, there's nothing. That's what made us stronger. And then eventually we said to ma 'am, if that's the case, we'll do it again. So they did. We became a little bit more professional. I'd say we would have, the second crew, I'd say we would have had them three to four weeks because we were making contacts with family and friends and the girls that got out in the first run were making contacts in England for the other girls, hopefully that would be coming after them. The McEntee family orchestrated four different escapes for 15 women and girls.

24:15Now, after the fourth time, somebody reported man. Somebody, the usual betrayal, somewhere. They discovered that it was my mother, I don't know how they discovered this, that it was my mother who was responsible for organising the escape of the girls. And one day, I think a registered letter came to the house, and my mother opened the letter, and it was her wages. And a note saying that she wasn't required anymore. The whole family was home when the letter came, And the brothers remember that when their mother opened it, she laughed. At the time, it was the time when the tins came out with Guinness, right?

24:56The first tin of Guinness I ever saw. And they opened a tin of Guinness and I'll never forget, it destroyed the ceiling. You know, the gas. With all the laughing that were doing, they shook it. And when they opened it, the Guinness spouted straight up and hit the ceiling, which I thought was hilarious. It's funny, you and your brothers are all talking about how much you were laughing once the girls got in the house for the first time or once your mother got fired. What do you think that was about? So most people maybe wouldn't be laughing. I think it was just the comfort of knowing that we did what we said we were going to do.

25:32In other words, the whole thing was now finished. The ordeal was over. And that was that. And obviously they couldn't do anything to us. But, you know, it had its hard thing because that means my mother wasn't working. And financially, we were affected for a good while because of it. Why do you think your parents did this? I mean, they were putting you all at risk. They jeopardized your mother's job. I mean, why did they feel the need to get involved? Because they were good people. And they saw, like my mother was the type of person that if she saw something wrong, She wouldn't go launching a crusade.

26:16She'd just do what she could about it.

26:21Hugo says that after their mother was fired, more women and girls snuck out of the laundry on their own and showed up at their house. They'd heard it was a safe place. There were others who helped too. Catherine O'Donnell from University College Dublin told us that Galway was full of people who secretly kept women and girls in their houses. But still, the laundry stayed open until 1984. In 2022, Andy, Hugo and Declan found out that their mother, Ina McEntee, would be given the Freedom of Galway City Award, Galway's highest honour. We went down to City Hall in Galway and the mayor said, I'd just like to inform you we had a meeting at the City Council and we're going to honour your mother with the freedom of Galva City.

27:14And all I could do was start crying. I was so happy for my mother. Unfortunately, my mum and dad died 37, I think it was 37 years ago, within a week of each other. And it's a shame that they weren't here to receive the honour themselves. But it was the proudest moment of my life after my children remorn. And there's a plaque every day I pass it on the wall beside the Magdalene Laundry, which is there in honour of my mother. And I bless myself every time I won't pass it because, you know, I know she sees it and I know she's happy.

27:55We'll be right back.