In the Garden of the Good Shepherd

June 13, 2019

In the Garden of the Good Shepherd

View from my window. River Abbey & roundabout.

Today was another of those days when I was blessed with a human helper. I took the bus this morning to the Limerick School of Art and Design. I had gotten the first name only of Paul, a caretaker at LSAD, from Evelyn Gwynn in Galway, who I contacted after finding my way to her website http://www.magdalenelaundrylimerick.com/ and reading oral histories there. (This project has been part research, part sleuthing.)

At LSAD, after passing me off from reception to security to caretaking, someone finally found Paul. As soon as I met him and told him Evelyn had given me his name, we were off and running, and he was talking faster than I could think. He’d stop briefly here and there and say, “Will you want a picture of that now?” and I knew to take a picture. ;)

The Good Shepherd Convent (with laundry and orphanage) closed in 1982. It was run as a commercial laundry for a few years after that, and LSAD bought the property in 1994. Paul has been there since the beginning. Although they’ve done extensive renovations, mainly interiors, much of the original structures remain, along with statuary and furnishings. It was less spooky than Waterford, because LSAD has opened up spaces, connected buildings that were all separate in the GS days (or connected only by tunnels), and filled the place with art and studios.

The Good Shepherd property in Limerick probably had one of the biggest laundries of them all. It was the novitiate for all of Ireland in its early days, and Paul took me upstairs to show me where the original attic had been. He said the nuns always said the attic was just storage, but they found toilets and beds up there, so he thinks that’s where the novices stayed. Paul showed me where the laundry was (it was massive and incorporated two buildings), where the nuns’ quarters were, the girls’ dorms, the old dining hall, the old smokestack (another smokestack under a preservation order, so the buildings can all go someday, but the chimneys have to be preserved—I can’t quite fathom that), the original orphanage building, and the old church.

Paul said the laundry women’s babies went to the orphanage, and the sisters took in other orphans as well. He said (a familiar story now) the girls didn’t see their babies, except accidentally sometimes coming or going to church. Their babies were adopted (many are now saying sold) out of the orphanage, often to families in America.

He took me back upstairs, where I could get a view of the small cottage development next door, where the remaining old nuns live. He told me some of the old women who lived all their lives in the laundry live there with the nuns, too, and the nuns care for them. He said, “They probably won’t want to talk to you about all this.” Paul said more than once, “This was like a prison.”

It was a long, thorough tour. I was so grateful that Paul had graciously taken a big chunk out of his work day for me. And I may get to meet with Evelyn in Galway, if the stars align.

Next I went to Mount St. Lawrence Cemetery. Justice for Magdalenes Research, http://jfmresearch.com/home/preserving-magdalene-history/about-the-magdalene-laundries/, has recorded the deaths of 284 women who died at the Limerick laundry. Thanks to Paul’s directions, I easily found the plot of the Magdalene girls. Again, I was not prepared. I counted 261 names engraved on 11 markers in the Good Shepherd plot. An inscription on the cross at the head of the plot read, “The burial place of the residents of the Good Shepherd convent. R.I.P.” Originally, only the cross was here. The markers with the women’s names were added more recently, after researchers started identifying the women who died in the laundries (they aren't finished). Behind the cross were two stone kittens, so moss-covered and softened through the years that you could only tell what they were up close. There were tiny statues and an oversized rosary, and I left behind a blessing bag with holy basil and bergamot (thanks to Sarah Sorenson), with my thanks to the women for their lives, and my apologies for their suffering.

I was back in my lovely hotel room by 1 p.m., where I can stare out my window at passing rowers and swans on the River Abbey. It all looks so idyllic from up here. I’m learning that I need to hide out and give myself some processing time after the laundry outings. Tonight, I’m contemplating “otherism”: one group always seems compelled to try and subjugate another, whom they’ve labeled as other. We have so many excuses for it. The enslavement and abuses of the Magdalene women are too familiar; think of Indian boarding schools, Japanese internment camps, the Holocaust, our southern border containment camps. The list goes on. It won’t change until we can stop seeing THEM and US, and I’m not sure how much faith I have left in that possibility.