IRELAND
Irish Times
Carol Hunt
“Dear Ellen, I see where you are looking for some information about the Magdalene laundry. I was in the Magdalene laundry for a good many years and I live out in the country now. But I never will forget it to my dying day. The cruelty we got. Slaved like blacks. Some of the girls were dragged by the hair of their heads and more, their hair was cut off simply if they gave the least back answer or were too slow at their work.”
I’m listening to Julian Vignoles RTÉ radio documentary which first aired in 1992.
He explains; “A letter with no name and no address. It was written last summer in response to a newspaper advertisement. For nearly 100 years single women who became pregnant, women who weren’t wanted, were banished, by their families, to the Mary Magdalene Home Laundry in Galway City. It was one of many such institutions in Ireland. Their detention was legally dubious. Some women spent the rest of their lives there. This year, a play and a song brought the memory back in Galway . . .”
The play Vignoles talks about is called Eclipsed. Written by a former postulant nun, Patricia Burke Brogan, the first I heard of it was in December 1991 when a friend of mine told me a fledgling theatre company in Galway, Punchbag, was auditioning for a new play set in a Magdalene laundry. I had just finished a two-year acting course and was willing to try out for it. It was my first audition and I landed the part of Mandy, described in the script as one of the “penitent women” signed into a fictional Magdalene laundry for the sin of getting pregnant “outside marriage”. There were eight of us in the cast. Eight women! A record number in what was, and still is, a male-dominated theatre world.
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