IRELAND
Irish Independent
Simon Brouder
March 11 2017
There has been a call for the bodies of women formerly incarcerated in Tralee’s Magdalene laundry to be exhumed and re-interred in a public cemetery.
The Magdalene Asylum operated in Tralee from 1856 until 1910, with hundreds of young Kerry women passing through the facility in that time.
An unknown number of these women died while in the Asylum and they are buried in a single plot in a small walled off cemetery on the old Mercy Convent site in Balloonagh.
At Monday’s meeting of the Tralee Municipal District council, Cllr Toireasa Ferris called for these women to be exhumed and re-interred in a public graveyard as was the case with the boys who died while imprisoned at the CBS-run St Joseph’s Industrial School.
Cllr Ferris said re-interring the women – many of whom remain unidentified to this day – was the right thing to do.
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