DUBLIN (IRELAND)
The New York Times
June 6, 2018
By Ed O’Loughlin
They are a haunting sight in the aftermath of wars and natural disasters: the notice boards that spring up outside Red Cross tents and hospitals, covered in notes from desperate people searching for loved ones lost in the chaos.
As 220 survivors of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene Laundries convened for a state-sponsored meeting in Dublin on Tuesday, strikingly similar pleas for the lost went up at their hotel.
Orders of Roman Catholic nuns ran the laundries for profit, and women and girls were put to work there, supposedly as a form of penance. The laundries were filled not only with “fallen women” — prostitutes, women who became pregnant out of marriage or as a result of sexual abuse and those who simply failed to conform — but also orphans and deserted or abused children.
“Their names were changed in the laundries, and it was often hard to talk, and they didn’t get the chance to really know each other there,” said Maeve O’Rourke, legal adviser for the Justice for Magdalenes Research project. “So they’ve put up a notice board in the hotel, for people to put messages on, to try and trace people they knew in the laundries.”
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