Plans to turn the State’s last Magdalene laundry into a national memorial and research centre have been branded “a vanity project for academics and historians” by prominent institutional abuse survivors.
Catherine Coffey O’Brien (54) and Sheila O’Byrne (68) protested outside the site of the former Sean MacDermott Street laundry, which closed in the 1990s, in Dublin on Wednesday.
With banners stating: “Institutional Survivors Say No” and “Not in our name”, they said they represented “many more” survivors in opposing plans to turn the Victorian redbrick into a museum, records repository and “site of conscience”.
Ms Coffey O’Brien fled Bessborough mother and baby home in 1989, heavily pregnant, having also been incarcerated in St Joseph’s industrial school Tralee as a child.
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Ms O’Byrne was placed in St Patrick’s mother and baby home on the Navan Road, Dublin, in 1976, aged 19. Her infant son was taken from her.
They said survivors like them were not “properly consulted” about plans for the imposing north inner city building.
“We were just told, ‘Here are the plans. This is what’s happening. This is the situation. Take it or leave it’,” said Ms Coffey O’Brien, referring to an information meeting for survivors she attended in Dublin in October, hosted by the Department of Children.
It was the first of four “engagement sessions” to consult survivors of Magdalene laundries, mother and baby and county homes, reformatories, industrial schools and related institutions on plans for the former laundry.
Further sessions were held in Cork and Galway, with a fourth planned in London next month.
The National Centre for Research and Remembrance, which will include public reading rooms, social and older people’s housing and a memorial garden, is being developed by the Office of Public Works (OPW).
This follows transfer of ownership of the site from Dublin City Council in July 2022. It had been transferred to the council after the 1996 closure of the laundry.
“I was sitting there in [the October session] in complete confusion,” said Ms Coffey O’Brien. “We have been informed there was no funding for psychiatric services, no access to social housing, no money to properly help the institutional survivors.
“How can we justify a vanity project for academics and historians when our communities are in destitution, and in an area of huge social deprivation?”
Sarah Kelleher, community activist in the north-inner city attended the October engagement session. “Survivors did not feel they were being heard. We want the survivors to be heard. They are the most important in this.”
A memorial monument dedicated to survivors of institutional abuse was recommended in several reports following inquiries into abuse, and was committed to by then taoiseach, Micheál Martin, in 2021.
The Department of Children has been asked for a response.
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