Death of an inspirational Magdalene survivor

Building reportedly used as a Magdelene Laundry on Seán McDermott Street: many levels of Irish society, including the State, failed women who were kept in such places. Photograph: Eric Luke

I have told her story in the past but even in death she would want to remain anonymous. She leaves an important legacy. Her childhood was sad. Her mother died when she was seven. Her father later remarried. The children of the first marriage were neglected, stigmatised and unwelcome.

At 14, her father left her at the Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry in New Ross, Co.Wexford. Barely a teenager, she worked for nearly five years cleaning society’s dirty laundry. She was denied her right to an education. She was punished for insolence and her hair forcibly cut.

She was sent at 19 to work in a Dublin hospital, also run by nuns. She fled to England. But London was not far enough away. She travelled to Boston, where she worked for most of her life. She never married.

Having rekindled her faith in the Catholic Church, she still demurred when the Good Shepherd congregation offered to meet her in 2010. She keenly felt the stigma attached to her past. She protected her family’s reputation at all cost.

Earlier, in October 2008, I answered my office phone to her, her voice halting as she introduced herself. She had read my book Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containments. She was shocked someone knew her story. She asked for help.

Denied redress

Some time earlier she had applied to the Residential Institutions Redress Board for help, but Magdalen Laundries were not covered by it. Friends appealed the decision. Again, she was denied.

In 2010, we applied for a pension on her behalf. She received no wages in the laundry and no “stamps” were paid for her. She fell below the full pension threshold. After bankers’ fees, she received $7.11 a week.

The State apology by Taoiseach Enda Kenny in February 2013 transformed her life. A cloud evaporated, a shadow disappeared. She applied to the Magdalene restorative justice scheme.

She took immense pleasure from her monthly pension thereafter – financially independent for the first time in her life, she enjoyed doing small things for others, no longer living a constrained existence. Unfortunately, her health was already in decline. Enjoyment was short-lived.

With her compensation lump sum, she visited Ireland September 2014. She travelled first-class due to her deteriorating back – a singular indulgence. Pain was now constant but she “offered it up for poor souls less fortunate”.

She toured Leinster House and lunched in the Dáil restaurant, guest of her indefatigable advocate Maureen O’Sullivan, TD. She was thrilled!

She also visited her mother’s grave. The balance of her lump sum was set aside to pay for cremation and the repatriation of her ashes to that same grave – she often worried about being able to pay for a “decent and respectable” burial.

Final resting place

In hindsight, I now appreciate this concern was about being buried with her mother.

She refused to be defined by her years in the laundry. Loving people surrounded her and she loved them in return – as friend, aunt, grand-mother by proxy. One family, in particular, stepped up in 2010 when unexpectedly she faced homelessness. They moved her from Boston to the mid-west; they paid for an apartment, utilities and more.

For all the ways family, nuns and the State had failed her, and Irish society colluded in that failure, the flipside of her story speaks to the love, friendship and generosity she enjoyed in later life. 

Justice for Magdalen research (JFMR) also mourns her passing. Colleagues acknowledge her as “the heart behind so much of our work” and “the spark that set off the political campaign”. Of course, she would never make such claims for herself.

And yet, the apology finally came. Approximately 500 women now benefit from the redress scheme. If JFMR contributed to bringing these events to pass, this woman inspired our involvement. That too is part of her legacy.

Her final months were marked by illness. She was entitled to healthcare benefits as part of the restorative justice scheme. She waived her legal rights, expecting those entitlements would be forthcoming. She identified a supplementary health insurance policy to bridge out-of-pocket expenses under the US Medicare system.

A number of civil servants made this happen for US-based survivors. In the end, she ran out of time. The Health Service Executive contacted the family on February 15th, four days short of the three-year anniversary of An Taoiseach’s apology. She died on March 3rd last. 

By James M Smith who is associate professor in the English department at Boston College. Author of Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (2007), he is a member of JFM Research

ISME chief criticises ‘over the odds’ Garda pensions

Gardaí are retiring with average lump sums of €100,000 on top of their pensions, which shows taxpayers are paying “over the odds” to fund generous packages.

That’s the view of the chief executive of ISME, Mark Fielding, after it emerged that last year 238 retiring members of the force shared a pension bonanza of €24.1m, or an average of €101,654 each.

The total payout is €1.8m down from 2014 when 249 members retired. The figures show the top 20 retirees from the force shared €2.878m last year, an average of €143,924.

The top payment made in 2014 was €262,000, but the gardaí’s freedom of information unit declined to reveal the rank and county of the top 20 recipients as it may lead to the identity of the individuals concerned.

The 238 members who retired last year included one assistant commissioner, four chief superintendents, 11 superintendents, 13 inspectors, 78 sergeants, and 131 rank-and-file gardaí.

The figures also show that 222 retirements were voluntary, with 14 compulsory and two labelled as “cost-neutral”.

The pension lump sum payments are significantly down on the payments made in 2012 and 2011 when there was a much larger number of members retiring — in 2012, 462 gardaí who retired received a total of €41.94m, with 480 retiring Gardaí in 2011 receiving a total of €46.81m in pension lump sums.

As members of higher ranks made up 45% of those to retire last year, the average retirement lump sum for rank-and-file Gardaí would be well short of the average €101,654 payment.

Gardaí can retire as young as 50 as long as they have accrued 30 years service, while members must retire on reaching the age of 60.

Pay scales go from €25,745 to €45,793 for a garda; €46,229 to €53,119 for a sergeant; €53,404 to €59,178 for an inspector; and €72,841 to €84,909 for a superintendent with chief superintendents enjoying a salary range of €87,259 to €104,457. Assistant commissioners enjoy a salary of €144,213; deputy commissioners receive a salary of €163,365; with the commissioner paid €204,386.

Members who retire on full service receive an annual pension of 50% of their final salary and a one-off gratuity of 150% of their final salary.

Mr Fielding said: “When we hear that our Gardaí can retire at 50 and we see the average lump-sums of €100,000 to the 238 retirees in 2015, on top of their pensions, it does seem that we, the taxpayers, are paying over the odds.”

A spokeswoman for the Garda Representative Association (GRA) said the association could not comment on the figures as they don’t establish how much in lump sum payments were received by rank and file Garda.

Gordon Deegan

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Letterfrack Industrial Institution: We should not replace one form of forgetting with another

The former Christian Brothers industrial school at Letterfrack, Co Galway, where Peter Tyrrell was taken in 1924. 

Is it bad manners, in this week of commemoration, to think about a kid born in Ireland in 1916, a real child of the nation? I can’t help thinking of one particular nobody.

He was so much a nobody that when he set himself on fire on Hampstead Heath in London the year after the vainglorious 50th anniversary commemorations of the Rising, there was nobody to claim his body.

He was eventually identified only by a scrap of a postcard addressed to one of the few people in Ireland who ever listened to his story, the dissident senator Owen Sheehy Skeffington.

Peter Tyrell was one of the 1 per cent, which is to say the one child out of every hundred, who ended up in an Irish industrial school. He was born in 1916 on a small farm near Ahascragh, Co Galway.

There were 10 children and they lived in abject poverty in a windowless shack. In January 1924, the infant Irish State took an interest in the family’s plight. The new Garda Siochana came and took away six of the children. Peter and his three older brothers were sent to the notorious industrial school in Letterfrack.

Though the school was run by the Christian Brothers, it is important to remember that Peter was a child of the State. It was the State that used its new independence to send him to hell.

In the letters he sent to Sheehy Skeffington in the 1950s, later edited by Diarmaid Whelan and published as Founded on Fear, Tyrrell recalled his arrival at Letterfrack: “All at once a Christian Brother comes running out, he is chasing the young children with a very long stick and beating them on the backs of the legs. We can now hear the screams of the little boys, some of them are only six years old.”

What struck Tyrrell was how aged the kids looked: “Most of the children are terribly pale, and their faces are drawn and haggard . . .The children of Letterfrack are like old men, most of their eyes are sunk in their heads and are red from crying. Their cheekbones are sticking out.”

In those vivid letters, Tyrrell tried to convey to the authorities of church and State what he had seen and experienced: the constant, routinely savage beatings and floggings for offences such as waking up too early (“It is a crime to be awake before we are called”); the screams of children being assaulted; the Brothers’ habit of grooming some boys as “pets”; the Brother who takes “boys to his room at night to commit improper offences”; the bitter cold in winter; the “disgusting” food.

Tyrrell joined the British army during the second World War and was captured by the Germans. He writes: “Life here in Stalag 11B Fallingsbostel during the last months of the war is hard and unpleasant. Yet it is heaven on Earth compared to my life” at Letterfrack.

Awkward truth

It is comforting to think that none of this would have happened if the idealists who staged the Rising had gone on to run the State. But the awkward truth is that those who ran the State were veterans of the Rising.

In July 1955, when Sheehy Skeffington (whose own father was murdered by a British army officer during Easter Week) raised the question of the vicious beating of children in schools, the minister of education, Richard Murphy, dismissed such concerns as a “disgusting proceeding . . . by people who are not of this country or its traditions . . . people reared in an alien and completely unIrish atmosphere”. Mulcahy, of course, had fought (very effectively) in 1916.

Peter Tyrrell was no more typical of the children of 1916 than were those who grew up with love and security and opportunity. But he was no more untypical either.

For a very significant part of the population, Irish freedom meant the freedom to emigrate, usually to England. For others, of whom Tyrrell was one, it meant the freedom to be locked up in an industrial school, a Magdalene laundry, a mother-and-baby home or a mental hospital.

Free Ireland sustained a vast infrastructure of enslavement for those of its unwanted people who could not or would not do the decent thing and leave.

Noble aspects

And to remember Peter Tyrrell is not to forget the noble aspects of those who staged the Rising: Patrick Pearse’s innovative passion for child-centred education or James Connolly’s war on the poverty that lay behind Tyrrell’s nightmare.

It is just to say that we should not replace one form of forgetting with another. We are, rightly, shrugging off amnesia about the Rising and accepting it is a fact of our history. But we should not do so at the cost of amnesia about the terrible failure of its ideals.

“Free” Ireland was a terrible place for many of the citizens who most needed a real revolution. And an Ireland that has almost doubled consistent child poverty has no right to forget how horribly mocked were the promises of the first Dáil that the physical and spiritual welfare of children would be the first duty of the Republic.

Fintan O' Toole

Easter Rising: it is time to apologise to the Irish

One hundred years ago, the Irish people fought for independence from the British. But now bygones are bygones: we have too much in common to quarrel

Irish rebels are executed after the uprising 

All nations make catastrophic mistakes, and one of Britain’s was in its relations with Ireland and the handling of the Easter Rising a century ago. 

The extent of the damage can be gauged by the fact that it has only been in the last five years, with the Queen's visit to Ireland and President Higgin's reciprocal visit here, that anything approaching normal relations has been achieved.

The tragedy of this is that our two countries are interwoven by ties of culture, language, history and, above all, family; and for us to have spent most of the 20th century in deep estrangement when it is clear how much the British and Irish people have in common with each other has harmed us both.

There is nothing more contemptible than politicians seeking approval by apologising for wrongs committed by previous generations: but the wrongs the British did Ireland, and their consequences, require an apology, and the centenary of the Rising is the time to make it.

The Irish are said to have a long memory for grudges: but in my experience of that country over the last 30 years this applies only to a few disaffected bigots.

Like us, most Irish are forward-looking, ambitious and determined. Like us – and this is the great change in recent years – they are an increasingly secular people, having shaken off the domination of the Catholic church, as they proved last year in legalising same-sex marriage.

Irish rebels lying in wait on a roof getting ready to fire during the Easter Rising, 1916

Sadly, too many in Ireland today had their lives and outlooks shaped by the mythology of the Rising, used in the repressive era of de Valera to indoctrinate those not born at the time. Ireland is putting that in perspective, a process for which it deserves the highest respect and congratulation: but we all need to remember the Easter Rising, why it happened, who was to blame, and how we interpret its influence.

A distinguished Irishman said to me not long ago that if we choose to leave the EU, so Ireland would have to, given the volume of trade between us.

Gladstone saw in 1886 that Ireland’s demand for Home Rule was legitimate and unanswerable. That year, and in 1893, Parliament threw the demand out.

There had only been a Union since 1801; but in that period the British Empire had expanded, and the proposal that Ireland might rule itself (though not in foreign or defence policy) was regarded as undermining that project. In 1912 Asquith brought in a third Home Rule Bill: and because the House of Lords had lost its veto, it was certain to pass.

However, its implementation was postponed when the Great War broke out in 1914.

This was not lightly done: but Ulster was on the verge of civil war, since it did not believe assurances that the rights of the Protestant minority would be guaranteed under Home Rule, and the government did not want to fight on two fronts. Also, many Catholic nationalists readily joined the British Army to fight the Kaiser.

Children collect firewood from the ruined buildings damaged in the Easter Rising  Photo: Getty

However a minority, led by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, saw an opportunity to overthrow British rule while the war was on. They were further provoked by the threat of conscription as the war became worse for Britain. Despite some of those in on the secret urging restraint, the rebellion started at Easter 1916, in Dublin and elsewhere.

Loathing of Britain, fostered before independence by the Black and Tans, reached the point in 1945 where de Valera could sign a book of condolence on Hitler’s death and still not outrage his followers.

The war on the Western Front was not going well, and the British were in no mood to treat rebels with leniency when the nation was in peril. Artillery attacked rebel positions, notably in the General Post Office, with ferocity. That much was understandable, but the aftermath was disastrous.

The leaders were tried by court-martial and 14 of them executed by firing squad in early May; another, Sir Roger Casement, was tried for treason and hanged. 

Britain was well aware of the pressure it was under from the war: but it made no allowances for Irish rage at 30 years of being treated like naughty, incompetent children. With hindsight, locking up the rebel leaders and releasing them within 18 months – which is what happened to the rank and file – would have calmed the situation.

Instead, execution made martyrs and encouraged violent republicanism. The brutality of Sinn Fein replaced Moderate Irish nationalism. Instead of Home Rule to keep Ireland within the United Kingdom, a Free State and then a Republic were set up, with Britain as a sworn enemy to many.

Extremists and moderates clashed in Ireland’s own civil war; the country was partitioned; the mood led to Protestants being driven almost out of the Free State, and Catholics being treated as second-class citizens in Ulster. Loathing of Britain, fostered before independence by the Black and Tans, reached the point in 1945 where de Valera could sign a book of condolence on Hitler’s death and still not outrage his followers.

If the idea persists anywhere in Ireland that the British feel happy about the way earlier generations of them patronised, infantilised and sought to control the Irish, then we must disabuse our cousins there of it once and for all.

One should not have to say that we see the Irish as our equals and our blood brothers, but one says it for the avoidance of doubt.

The rapprochement of the State visits might, perhaps, continue by Ireland acknowledging our shared heritage and joining the Commonwealth, like many nations for whom the Queen is not head of state, but with whom we share values. Bygones should be bygones: we have too much in common to quarrel.

Many Britons now can understand how the Irish felt a century ago. We, too, want to govern ourselves,and determine our own future without the controls a foreign power. A distinguished Irishman said to me not long ago that if we choose to leave the EU, so Ireland would have to, given the volume of trade between us.

I am not sure that follows: but what we have in common remains so powerful that, if we do leave, our first bilateral deal should be with our Irish cousins. Potentially, we have no better friend on earth: on this sombre centenary, let us recall that apparent paradox above all else.

Simon Heffer

The Gardaí, you either love them or struggle to understand them.

The Gardaí, you either love them or struggle to understand them. The latest gripe is pay, 

isn’t it always, except some new recruits who have joined the brave boys in blue lately are threatening to quit over it, but like any good Garda cover up, the skewed facts presented here are just that and all in the guise of a survey. 

Ciaran ó Neill, the Gardaí Representative Association (GRA) vice president asked the new recruits to fill in a survey on pay and conditions. Out of 24,000 applicants to the Garda last year, 685 were recruited plus there are 150 presently in training, and only 15 actually had a gripe, and this is where a few of them had a flair for the dramatic as well when they chorused loudly that they “were recruited into poverty.” Of course these fantasy stories are anonymous to protect the identities again of the gardaí. But why, oh why??

Are we to set aside the equally but very real and anonymous tens of thousands of people out of work who are forced into real poverty, back to work schemes that have no incentives, and no higher wages or education prospects for any of them to escape that cycle of poverty. Sorry, FETAC done not count for much. What planet is Ciaran on?

The starting pay for Garda is more than €23,000 after the first six months holiday, and that does not include expense allowances for boots, uniform, car mileage. Each year thereafter, the pay scale rapidly escalates leading to the gray age that delivers a fine pension not far below their last years’s pay scale.  And we all have to start somewhere.

One new recruit also said: “It is despicable that I would be better off on the dole. It is rewarding when you make a difference to some people’s lives. It’s just sad now that I will probably have to go back to working in Tesco near home, stacking shelves and making very little difference to anyone - and unfortunately I’d be better off too.” Is this guy quitting but does not actually have a job yet? Tesco would be better off without him in any case for he will make a difference to no-one. What are the chances though that he will quit? About zero. 

Anyway, just when I thought  the fantasist Ciaran ó Neill would go away and just give out parking tickets to people in wheelchairs instead, another actor a few days later from the same guild came on the radio, and this time it was supposed to be one of the new recruits that quit. Of course he wished to remain anonymous as well in order to protect himself from what we will never know. 

Straight off the bat in his interview with a supportive George Hook, this actor in dark clothes, sun glasses, fake beard and digitally altered voice (just kinda kidding at the last part  here) claims that he was speaking on behalf  of his colleagues (note: not former colleagues) who aren't allowed to speak out for themselves. Imagine that: all those boys in blue cannot speak for themselves; pick a fight with one of them and you will know better afterwards. Anyway, it took this guy 3 years to figure that he could not live on the wages of a Gardaí, which by then was a lot better in monetary terms and heading for green pastures. Whatever job he was supposed to return to, let us hope that he is not doing maths addition as someone will be in trouble.

If the Gardaí, like the rest of the nation, think that things are going to change anytime soon, then they would need to get out their investigative tools to search for the economic clues. In the meantime and collectively so, here are just some of those clues and the maths: Ireland is the second most indebted country in the world next to Japan; GDP is an indicator of economic output only and not debt owed; Ireland still borrows money on top of all that is borrowed already just to sustain present everyday running cost for this fair Isle. Happy Easter everyone!! 

Anonymously, Barry Clifford