Clare woman lifted lid on scandal after following true vocation

‘The Mother Superior opens another heavy double-locked door. A deafening noise hits us. We’re in a room with huge machines from which steam is hissing. Prison bar patterns the roof-windows.
The greasy walls are sweating. There is a stench of soiled clothing. Bleach fumes sting my throat, I gasp for air. Gradually I see that the room is full of women: elderly women, middle-aged women and young girls all seem to merge with the gray of the womb-like washing machines.’
‘With Grykes and Turloughs’, 2014

IT’S NOT that Patricia Burke-Brogan needed the Freedom of Galway City that she was recently awarded as some kind of vindication.

However, this recognition was long overdue and its importance to her and the movement for change she represented cannot be understated, as it came with the acceptance in the corridors of power that she had been right all along.

Right to walk away from her convent in Galway in the mid-1950s when she was a young novitiate, who once thought she had a vocation; right to start writing and talking about it over a forty-year period that helped expose this part of hidden Ireland she saw at first hand; right to fight to ensure that people listened to her story, as told through her short stories, her play ‘Eclipsed’ and her memoir ‘With Grykes and Turloughs’.

It was through these that people in power were finally held to account; that they were force-fed the true narrative of what went on behind closed and locked doors, and which eventually culminated in the status of the Freedom of Galway City being hers.

Freedom of Galway City, because she was one of the first people to shine a light on the plight of generations of Irish women who were incarcerated in the same city, by being forced to serve in the Magdalene Laundry system.

A system that was still extant not too long ago, as the last laundry in the Sisters of Mercy chain around the country only closed just over 25 years ago, in 1996.

For Patricia Burke-Brogan this journey started nearly 70 years ago, when she thought she had a vocation and joined the Sisters of Mercy order. She was just 21 and moved to a convent in Galway.

“I qualified as a primary teacher in Carysfort College (Dublin) and went into the nuns,” she recalled.

“I was a Novice and in the summer the year after the Marian Year (1954), I was sent to replace some nun in the Magdalene Laundry – she was either sick or on holidays.

“The laundry was on Foster Street in the city and was one of 42 around the country. I was there for one week.”

That’s all it took for Ms Burke-Brogan, who had just reached voting age, to vote with her feet and leave the Sisters of Mercy, because a week was enough for her to realise her true vocation — instead of being a nun it was eventually to expose what some nuns were doing in the name of their religion.

“The noise of the machines, the sweating walls, chemical smells and so many women – young, middle-aged and old,” she recalled.

“I was shocked. I was shocked that inside these laundries, these women were gone, erased, just disappeared.”

“You give up a lot when you go into a convent. You give up your will and you have to be obedient and toe the line, be almost a saint and say nothing.

“I knew the Magdalene Laundry was there but I didn’t know what was going on there. I was as blind as the people who were sent into the laundry.

“There could have been 100 people there. There were machines and women, machines and women. There was one particular woman, I remember, who showed it was a dumping ground for women that families and the State didn’t want.

“The woman was Down Syndrome and obviously she was put in there because they didn’t want her at home. The others had different degrees of sorrow attached to them.

“Then I started to ask: ‘how is it that all these women had babies?’ I just had the courage to ask: ‘how long are they going to be here? Are they going to be here all the time or are they going to be let out?’ The answer I got was, ‘Sure if we let them out they’ll be back again in no time pregnant’.

“That was the attitude of the superiors, this thing that it was in the blood for seven generations.

“Some were the children of women who were born out of wedlock and it would happen to them – their mothers were fallen women, they would be fallen women. It was awful. It was disgusting.

“These were Catholic people who did this – so-called Christians. They were getting rid of them because there was the thing that having a baby outside of marriage was a desperate sin. The fact that they stole away their lives didn’t seem to be a sin at all. I just couldn’t understand it. It was like Dante’s inferno, that’s how I describe it.”

In time, Ms Burke-Brogan would write about Dante’s inferno, but 1950s, ’60s and ‘70s Ireland wasn’t the time — even 1980s Ireland did not want to hear her story, but by then she couldn’t stay silent any longer.

“The way I put it was that I thought I had a vocation to work for the poor, but I had a crisis of faith and a crisis of vocation as a result of that,” she said.

“My vocation was, as I look at it now, to highlight what was happening. My vocation was to open up the doors on this room and show what was going on.

“It took time for me to do it, because it wasn’t something I felt comfortable doing, but I had to do it. It was my vocation.

“I feel that’s maybe why I had to go into the nuns, experience what I did and then come out and write about it. It was finding the courage to do it.”

This courage came dropping slow — initially, it took the form of a short story called ‘Sun Flowers’, with the inspiration for the title of her narrative coming, she said, “because sunflowers love looking at the sun and these women weren’t able – they were out of the sun, locked away, like slaves working”.

What eventually became her play, ‘Eclipsed’, was nearly ten years in the making, having started it in the early 1980s.

Afterwards came the next chapter of a project that ultimately helped throw open the doors of every Magdalene Laundry in the country — that was to get the play onto the stage.

“I sent the script all over the place,” she revealed. “Druid, the local company, sent it back — I don’t think they even read it. I sent it to Red Kettle and they wrote back saying: ‘Do you realise what you’re saying’. They asked to change this and that, but I wouldn’t.

“I sent it to Field Day in Derry. They were doing terrific work and I got a letter to say they were interested in doing a second reading. I waited for nine months and then discovered they had broken up. That was a pity. The Abbey said they didn’t like Mother Victoria — in other words, they were afraid,” she added.

Punchbag were the first company not to shy away from the topic — in November 1991 the Galway-based group had a reading of the play in public, while three months later ‘Eclipsed’ finally got onto the stage in a small converted garage on Quay Lane near the Spanish Arch in the city.

“The opening night was on 14 February 1992 and people were horrified,” she recalled, “but the setting was very appropriate.

“There were holy water hens as I call them – they were organising a protest, but it fell through. I got this envelope one morning that was posted from Blackpool. I opened it and there was my photo with horns and witch written on it. I was in an awful state – this thing came out of nowhere.”

“I got strange phone calls. There was the odd letter to the paper that ‘them women were a lot better off in the Magdalene Laundry than on the street’ — as much to say they were prostitutes, which they were not.

“I’m sure there are still people who say that – they just don’t want to know the truth,” she added.

Patricia Burke-Brogan’s truth then travelled around the world, winning acclaim at that year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival by winning a Fringe First Award, while the Connacht Tribune said she
“opened a can of worms to the outside world”.

In September 1992 Punchbag Theatre Group was given a civic reception to mark its courage and achievement in staging the play and winning a Fringe First award.

Thirty years on Ms Burke-Brogan was given Freedom of the City — along with the late Ena McEntee, who was posthumously granted this recognition for her work in helping scores of women escape from the Foster Street laundry — at a special meeting of Galway City Council in the Hardiman Hotel last Friday.

A plaque in honour of both women was also unveiled on College Road, with City Mayor, Cllr Colette Connolly saying, “These women offered a small glimmer of hope to those who were otherwise possessed of none at the time. They stood for women’s rights and we are extremely proud of them”.

The whole country is proud of them.