NORTHERN IRELAND
Huffington Post
Patrick Corrigan
Today, it is our generation’s and our governments’ reputation for honour, not that of the Magdalene women, which is at stake.
The Church of the Good Shepherd on Belfast’s Ormeau Road is a gorgeous bit of red-brick Victorian splendour.
I was married there. But, on that joyful day, little did I realise the desperate, tragic stories which cling through history to its bricks.
For it was here that one of Northern Ireland’s own ‘Magdalene Laundry’ institutions was to be found, where thousands of girls and women, from the 1850s right through to the 1970s, lived lives scarred by shame, family separation and servitude.
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