Madam,
Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe’s suggestion that the inmates of the Roman Catholic Magdalen laundries were “employees” is grotesque.
They were slaves to religious and social prejudice.
Patsy McGarry noted in, “No redress for residents of Magdalen laundries” (September 18th), that there is a “dispute” as to whether the “Protestant-run” Bethany House was a “Magdalen Asylum”. Who disputes it? Jim Smith noted in his excellent Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (2007) that women convicted of birth concealment and infanticide were referred there by the courts during the 1920s. The Irish Times and Irish Independent reported in 1931 that a court sent Mary Elizabeth Walker to Bethany after conviction for obtaining goods by deception. In the 1960s The Irish Times reported the matron as stating that prisoners on remand were kept there.
As a former resident I spoke later to some who attempted to escape from this notional mothers’ and babies’ home.
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