By Bridgette P. LaVictoire
Lez Get Real
August 4, 2010
http://lezgetreal.com/2010/08/galway-city-council-seeks-to-take-down-statue-dedicated-to-victims-of-the-magdalene-laundries/
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“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 Erin,” 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 Bothar. 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
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