Remembering the 'Maggies'

It is hard for people of my generation, or those younger than us, to imagine the terrible stigma which was attached to single motherhood in 20th century Ireland.

A beautiful ceremony in Bohermore yesterd

It’s only now we are waking up to what a terrible institution the Roman Catholic Church was and the awful, disgusting, inhumane ways in which some religious orders and individuals treated some of the most vulnerable members in our society.

There was no joy, no sense of fun or adventure, in post-colonisation Ireland. Beautiful people were locked up for decades because the most natural thing imaginable, having sex, was turned into a dirty, rotten crime.

The children of single mothers were branded as “illegitimate” and “bastards”, leading to the kind of terrible attitudes which allowed 796 of them to be buried in a septic tank in a so-called ‘mother and baby’ home in Tuam.

They were seen as less than human, the devil’s spawn, and harsh treatment of them was seen as the norm.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, during my University days, I had quite a few friends who were single mums. I don’t think I – or even they – realised what amazing ground-breakers they were in terms of social change in Ireland. Had they been born a decade earlier, they might have been incarcerated for life by nuns.

How guilty were Irish families – and all of Irish society in general – for allowing young women to be stolen from them, locked up for life while their children somehow ‘disappeared’?

Well, we remembered those women in Galway yesterday.

How strangely appropriate – and deeply poignant – that an event had been organized to honour the women of the Magdalen Laundry in Galway yesterday of all Sundays.

The event took on a whole new significance following the shock revelations about the discovery of the bodies of 796 babies in a decommissioned septic tank less than an hour up the road, in Tuam.

About 100 people took part in the moving ceremony in which the names of each of the women buried in Bohermore Cemetery were called out before flowers were placed on their shared graves.

The Flowers for Magdalenes event was planned weeks in advance to give a dignity in death which had been denied in life to the Galway women who had been imprisoned in the city centre laundry.

Until the closure of the laundry in 1984, ‘fallen’ women who became pregnant outside marriage were locked up and forced to work in the premises in the heart of Galway City.

The Magdalen Asylum, as it was known, was run by the Sisters of Mercy from 1845 until its closure. There were 41 such institutions across Ireland in the late 1800s.

Placing flowers on the shared graves of the Magdalene women

Women who became pregnant outside marriage were taken away from their families and placed in the laundries, along with their “illegitimate” children.

They were separated from the children, many of whom were moved to another institution across the city, called St Anne’s. If they were not given up for adoption, they were allowed to see their children once a year.

The inmates, known as ‘Maggies’, had to wear ‘penitence caps’, large boots, and heavy skirts down to their ankles. They worked in the laundry and slept in dormitories. They were never allowed out of the Forster Street premises.

The last resident died in the laundry in 1995, just one year prior to its closure, and Sunday’s remembrance ceremony was attended by women and adult children who had been confined to the home.

It was really moving to hear graveside testimonials from a former Magdalene Laundry resident, a woman who worked there as a teenager, and a man who had been sent there with his single mother.

The sixth annual 'Flowers for Magdalenes' event
took place at a Galway graveyard yesterday

One 70-year old lady, who left a comment on my Facebook page, summed up the heartbreak we experienced as we listened to the stories being shared by former residents and their adult children.

“I cried today for those women. I thought about the time after your baby is born,” wrote Mary Lyons.

“I thought about how you wanted to be treated as the most precious woman in the world as you had carried and produced this other little human being.

“You wanted warm baths, comfortable clothes, plenty of sanitary stuff and loads of praise.

“But not in the Magdalene Laundry. No, you had to swelter in the heat of a laundry where you washed and ironed the clothes of the rich and the linen from the local hotels.

“Why? Because the Catholic Church had such a hold on everyone, they fostered the idea that sex outside marriage was worse than if you committed murder.”

As Mary pointed out, there was a huge irony in young women being locked up and made to feel guilty by religious people who participated in, or covered up, the terrible abuse of Irish children.

Yesterday, former resident Peter Mulryan broke down in tears as he recalled his difficult childhood in a home and how he used to look up at the stars and dream of another life as a youngster.                                                          

Mr Mulryan has taken a High Court action in order to obtain information about a baby sister he never knew from Tusla, the Irish child and family agency.

"It's an insult the way these women are buried in on top of each other,” he said, as he surveyed the shared graves at Bohermore.

Mr Mulryan said he had never been able to trace his little sister. For years, he didn’t know if she had been buried in the mass grave in Tuam, as he believed she had been confined there, or whether she had managed to escape and make a new life in the United States. 

He has since found out the truth.

“My sister was buried in that so-called grave, that septic tank, in Tuam," he said. “She was only nine months old."

He was given a huge round of applause for his bravery, as was a former Magdalene Laundry resident who described how harsh life was for the women in the Galway facility.

“I knew many of these women here,” she said, with tears in her eyes, looking out over the graves.                                                                            

It was the biggest attendance yet at this annual event

Another lady, who worked there as a 13-year old, said she wanted to re-assure family members present that the lay staff who worked there – apart from the nuns – had treated the women well.

Flowers were laid on each of the graves and afterwards poet Sarah Clancy and singer Caroline Stanley dedicated a poem and a song to the Magdalenes.

Sarah read an angry poem, ‘A Prayer to St Bridget’. You can view Sarah's poem here.

One of the organisers, Ann Irwin, said she was taken aback by the numbers who attended the sixth annual Flowers for Magdalenes event at the graveyard. Only three women attended in the first year.

“What happened on Friday was totally coincidental, but it was important that we provided an opportunity for people to congregate and to tell their incredibly poignant stories,” she said.

“The stories that people told this year were nothing but heart-breaking, really. People have told their stories before, but not to such an extent. They were so beautiful and so brave to tell their tragic stories.”

She said it was important to call out the names of each of the women out loud, to give them a dignity which had been denied them in life.                 

It was a poignant, emotional ceremony in Galway

“It was important that everybody said their names together. It was important to hear the testimonials of survivors and that these things are said,” she added.

Ms Irwin said it was important not to forget how women and children had been treated when they were confined to the Magdalene laundries all across Ireland.

“It’s a very, very recent history, but it’s a history we have swept under the carpet to such an extent. If it wasn’t for events such as today, people would turn a blind eye. It’s so important to keep it on the agenda and not to forget these women.”

Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and digital storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. You can check out his Facebook page here

To hire a journalist, blogger, and content writer, see also http://ciarantierney.com/

The vilest smear of all

When I was a young reporter on a provincial newspaper in the 1990s, rumours began to circulate about a local politician among journalists, political representatives, and Gardai across the West of Ireland.

The whispers would surface occasionally at local authority meetings, press launches, or court hearings, spreading quickly from one media outlet to another in the small bubble which was the local media at the time.                                                                                

Brave whistleblower Maurice McCabe

The rumours were of a sexual nature and involved underage victims.

If they weren’t true, they were appalling slurs against a man who had a high profile in both sport and politics in the West of Ireland.

Until the day he died, I never heard any concrete evidence of wrong-doing against the man.

As far as I was aware, he was never questioned or charged in relation to the activities which were so well-known among journalists and politicians in one part of Ireland.

In those days, my role as a newspaper journalist involved regular phone contact with virtually every politician across the region.

I had no way of knowing whether the rumours about this particular man were true or not, but I heard them repeated so often that they clearly coloured my dealings with him.

I’d call him whenever I had to, I’d exchange pleasantries with him on the phone, but the unfounded allegations I had heard – with absolutely no substance to back them up – would hover in the back of my mind.

After his death, one of his party colleagues spoke to me with disarming honesty. He said that his friend was aware of the rumours for many years and that they had driven him to alcohol abuse and a very lonely life in his latter years.

So, in recent weeks, it was hard to imagine the kind of anguish the family of Garda whistleblower Sgt Maurice McCabe was going through. This was a man whose only ‘crime’ was to be an honest policeman.

When he discovered that colleagues were bending the rules, abusing the Pulse system to allow high-profile people such as journalists to evade penalty points, he did what could only be described as the right thing.

A system of justice is discredited in the eyes of the people if justice is not served equally, but Sgt McCabe could hardly have imagined what was in store for him when he began to raise his concerns.

Maurice McCabe did Ireland a huge favour by stepping forward and daring to expose wrong-doing and the abuse of power.

As a result, he was falsely accused of raping a six year old child.

The accusations were not made public, but hidden away in a Tusla (child protection agency) file and spread as rumours among sections of the Gardai and media in Dublin.

Expressing solidarity with Sgt McCabe at
Shannon Airport last week

They were only unearthed after the wrong details were “copied and pasted” into the wrong Tusla file.

If that wasn’t malicious, it was a level of ineptitude which was unthinkable in a country which is still reeling from clerical sex abuse allegations which were covered up for decades.

Sgt McCabe was the subject of the worst smear anyone could face.

Those who instigated the smear knew full well that the rumours would spread when they shared them with Garda colleagues or crime correspondents in the media.

The implication was clear. How could you take the claims of a whistleblower seriously if you had heard the rumours?

Ireland is a small country and people love a bit of gossip, just as journalists and politicians thrived on the “inside information” we had – apparently without any substance – about our political friend in Galway in the 1990s.

For the ‘crime’ of telling the truth about corruption in our police force, Sgt McCabe was portrayed as a vile person who could not be trusted by some senior Gardai.

It is nothing short of frightening that a man whose only concern was bringing  the truth to light was vilified and branded as a sex abuser.

Former Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan, who subsequently resigned from his job, branded his allegations as “disgusting”.

Imagine how difficult it was for Sgt McCabe to carry out his duties when the head of his own police force showed such vehement opposition to his brave attempts to expose corruption.

And yet that was nothing compared to the allegations circulating in the background. He would have known nothing of them at the time.

You can imagine the informal briefings which are so central to Irish political life. “Did you hear the rumour about so-and-so?” “Don’t trust so-and-so. Sure, have you not heard about the file . . . “

Sgt Maurice McCabe: an honest whistleblower who
was the subject of malicious (and false) smears

All Maurice McCabe wanted was truth and justice – instead, he was the victim of a truly appalling smear by those who wield power in Irish society.

But for a mistake by a member of staff at the child protection agency, who contacted him in error about the “wrong” file, he might never have known about the vicious rumours circulating behind his back.

He was being punished for breaking the unwritten rules of Irish life.

This, after all, is the country in which you ring a politician in a bid to move up the lengthy waiting list for a local authority house.

It’s the land in which a TD or Senator will pressurise a surgeon to move you up the waiting list if you urgently need surgery and the waiting lists last for months or even years.

It’s the country where the right connections will allow you to evade penalty points if you know the right Garda and you are in a position of power.

Bending the rules is part of our heritage.

Perhaps it goes back to our colonial days. With a wink and a nudge, Irish people learned how to work their way around inconvenient or “tricky” laws. Sure, they weren’t our laws.

They were imposed by the British after all. We had a grudging admiration for law-breakers under the British Empire and we exported that rebellious spirit to the US and Australia.

But there’s a huge difference between opposing unjust laws and smearing a good policeman who only wanted to do his job.

Over a decade has passed since McCabe first raised concerns about corruption in the Gardai and it’s impossible to imagine the anguish he has gone through since then.

The realisation that some people – with the right connections –  have been able to act as they please while evading the consequences should make us all fearful for Irish democracy.

There are too many coincidences in the Maurice McCabe case to suggest anything other than a deliberate and malicious campaign to discredit and disgrace a good man.

If a Garda whose only crime is to expose corruption can be maliciously and falsely branded as a sex abuser, what does that say about power and democracy in 21st century Ireland?


Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and content writer, based in Galway, Ireland. You can check out his Facebook page here

Check out Ciaran's website: http://ciarantierney.com/

Find Ciaran on Twitter, @ciarantierney

A blog post about media ownership in Ireland, from July 2016  http://ciarantierney.blogspot.ie/2016/07/the-silence-is-deafening.html