The NMH at St. Vincents

mrsmags16 wrote: »

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/sisters-of-charity-to-be-given-new-national-maternity-hospital-1.3052079

Is this a joke?!

Campaigner Mary Merritt, 83, who was 'in the care' of the nuns for 14 years before escaping, spoke out in September, 2014, about her ordeal.
She was born in 1931 to a single mother in a workhouse and went on to an orphanage, run by an order of nuns called the Sisters of Mercy where, she says, the children were made to work and were beaten if they refused.
Mary, who now lives in Tunbridge Wells, said that at the age of 11, she was so hungry that she took apples from the convent orchard and as punishment was sent to work in a Magdalene laundry at High Park in Dublin run by another order, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity.
'They told me that I would stay in the laundry until I learned to stop stealing. Fourteen years they kept me there. You get less for murder these days.'
Mary, whose story featured on Our World: Hidden Bodies, Hidden Secrets on the BBC News Channel in September, recalled how the women were made to rise at six o'clock for mass and then after breakfast went straight down to the laundry to start work.
You can't underestimate the sense of the stigma and the sense of shame attached to having been in one of these laundries
Maeve O'Rourke
She said: 'The laundry was heavy, heavy work and the heat was terrible and you didn't break until 12 o'clock when you broke for your dinner, such as it was - potatoes and cabbage and fish - and then after you went straight back to the laundry again to work and you worked in the laundry until at six o'clock.
Most shocking of all, Mary claims that after running away she was raped by a priest, but despite this terrible violation she was ignored by police and then shamed by the nuns.
Mary said: 'When the police took me back to the laundry, they didn't believe I had been raped but shaved my head, made me apologise for running away and put me in the punishment cell.'
But when Mary became pregnant as a result of the rape and gave birth to a daughter, in a stunning act of cruelty, the nuns took the baby against Mary's will and gave her away for adoption.

At roughly the age of 16, Margaret was sent to the Magdalene Laundry at Gloucester Street. The exact time and circumstances of her move there are not clear because Samantha and her sister are still waiting on full records to be supplied to them on their mother’s past.
She became pregnant – twice – with Samantha and her twin sister Etta, and later with another daughter, while officially under the care of the Gloucester Street nuns. The circumstances of these conceptions are again shrouded in mystery but Samantha says her conversations in later life with her mother when they were reunited led her to believe that Margaret had been the victim of sexual abuse and predators several times.
There was no education, no education and I, you know, I honestly believe for a long time she didn’t know how she got pregnant, she just knew that somebody hurt her once and then she had babies. I really believe that. She didn’t make that connection, I know that for sure. She was no, she didn’t have a boyfriend, let’s put it that way. And that’s the politest way that I can say that.
Some of the more harrowing details of Samantha’s testimony recount how her mother was denied society, education, wages and other basic rights for most of her life. This extract recalls Samantha and Etta’s first meeting with Margaret in the Gresham Hotel when they were 23 and had traced her as their biological mother. (Samantha and Etta were adopted by a loving couple in Dublin and later moved to Sligo in childhood.)
Margaret was only 42 at the time but looked much older. She was carrying a handbag but it was completely empty, because she didn’t own anything nor did she have any money. Samantha recalls:
And, she was just lovely, and she was asking extremely innocent questions like, she, it was the first time she ever had coffee and it was very exciting for her to have coffee and she hadn’t seen brown sugar before either and obviously in the Gresham there was brown and white sugar cubes on the table and it was all very fancy to her. And she was just overjoyed to be there and absolutely wowed by everything.
She looked, she looked like a pensioner. I couldn’t believe she was forty-two, I kept looking, I kept looking into her face to find a forty-two year old and I couldn’t, because she had the face of hard work, that face that you see in so many women that have just had to work too hard and have never had a rest and have never had anyone to take care of them or tell them to put their feet up, and who have just, just worked too hard. Because, as I said on the radio a few years ago, this was slavery and I don’t use that term lightly and I’m not an emotive person but slavery is a form of work for which you get no pay and you can’t leave and these were the white slaves of Ireland and they were never emancipated. And nobody stood up for them until now, until you guys (Justice for Magdalenes) did.

The former Donnybrook laundry compound in Dublin 4 (top) is currently up for sale (centre) and is expected to sell for around €3million.

The Sisters of Charity ran the laundry from 1883 until 1992 when the order sold it to a private owner who, in turn, ran it as a commercial laundry until 2006.

A former resident, who didn’t wish to disclose her name, spoke to RTÉ journalist Brian O’Connell about the year she spent in the former Donnybrook magdalene laundry in the 1970s. Independent Dublin City Councillor Mannix Flynn was also interview.

"In the orphanage it was very bad, very bad. We were starving and we never got proper food to eat, not proper clothes. I never had proper jumpers, I used to darn all the jumpers.

“And my hair used to be shaved to the scalp. We used to rob the orchards, do you see, you know? And if you were caught robbing in the nun’s orchard, your hair would be shaved. I was locked into a press for three or four days without a bit to eat. That’s the truth, I wouldn’t tell you a lie.”
The woman was locked in the press because she robbed apples out of hunger.

She then described what life was like in the Donnybrook laundry.

“[It was] torture, torture. The work in there, we were so tired at night going to bed, do you know what I mean? And then up at six or half six in the morning to scrub the floors… and then marched in to church for prayers. And then down to work again. You might get bread and dripping or bread and Stork margarine or a cup of cocoa for breakfast in the morning….They ruined our lives. On my deathbed I’ll be thinking about it. I’ll never forgive them [the orders].”

“We were never allowed to talk to each other, even in the dorms at night, we were never allowed to talk. We had no education, they took away my childhood, I was just traumatised. I got electric shock [treatment], I went to commit suicide when I came out, over the convents. I took an overdose of tablets and everything. Thinking back on all this, what had happened me: why my mother left me?”

The woman is still looking for her mother.

Mr.Wemmick wrote: »

It's big business, pure and simple. The corperate RCC, power and money.. money received from years of working slaves and the selling of Irish babies.

Just lovely.

HONKEY TONK wrote: »

I find it funny that people are shaking their fists at the RCC being involved yet more the 90% of the parents who's kids are born there will go running to the church 6 months later to get their baby baptised.

Sam Kade wrote: »

What country would that be?