UNITED STATES
Irish Times
James Smith in Boston
Earlier this year, I wrote for The Irish Times about the passing of a Magdalene survivor who lived here in the United States. She suffered ill health in her final years. Friends had lobbied on her behalf for health care entitlements offered through the State’s Magdalene restorative justice scheme. Unfortunately, those benefits never materialised.
But, in her last months she appreciated the help received from a social worker affiliated with an Irish immigration centre in the mid-west. I had reached out to Boston’s Consul General, who in turn contacted her colleague in Chicago, who in turn reached out to that city’s Irish Immigrant Support group, who made the social worker available, despite the fact that the she lived out of state.
He helped the survivor to identify a supplementary health insurance policy. And, that insurance policy proved crucial in covering significant end-of-life medical expenses and protecting her modest nest-egg-the balance of the lump-sum redress payment she had received from the Irish State, and ear-marked to pay for the repatriation of her ashes for burial in her mother’s grave back home.
Not long after she passed, I was invited to speak about the Magdalen Laundries to the Coalition of Irish Immigration Centers’ (CIIC) social services subcommittee, comprised of social workers with vast experience serving Irish immigrant communities in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and New York. Two facts stand out from that conversation.
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