The Good Shepherd

June 06, 2019

The Good Shepherd

This is what happens when you carefully make lodging arrangements in a country where you’ve never been…you end up taking a train to one town, then a bus to the next, then you have to take a different bus to the next, and a taxi to your B&B which, as it turns out, is the homestead of a young Netherlands couple, out in the middle of the Irish countryside, miles from everything. So while it’s peaceful and the cattle are actually lowing, I’m going to miss out on the laundry site at New Ross, because I'm moving again.

This morning, my gracious B&B host brought me into town, and I checked into a hotel for two blessed nights because (a) I’ll spend the same amount on taxis and busses getting to the city and back as I will on the hotel, and (b) I love the IDEA of futons and buckwheat pillows, but I’m too old to enjoy them, or to sit crosslegged on the floor and work on my laptop (no desk or table here), and (c) the B & B has no B, which means a taxi or bus to the nearest town whenever I need food.

I met up today with Dr. Jennifer O’Mahoney https://www.waterfordmemories.com/home to talk about her work on the Waterford Memories Project, oral histories by survivors of the Waterford Good Shepherd laundry (some of whom were also in other institutions run by the sisters). The Good Shepherd sisters ran the four largest laundries in Ireland. Jennifer’s office is IN the former laundry building. Waterford Institute of Technology now owns the buildings—the former laundry/convent, the church, and the industrial school. The old coal smokestack on the property is the ONLY thing that must be protected from demolition for historical preservation. Like all the other laundries, this one will probably be torn down eventually.

One of Jennifer’s areas of interest is the academic response to the laundries, and academic activism, especially among women academics (whose activism is often frowned on more than for men), especially regarding the laundries. I like how Jennifer put it—male academics are activists, female academics are “whinging women.”

So I sat down with her for a quick interview for that arm of her research, answering questions about my project. Interestingly, the questions and answers brought me to the point of tears several times, something that hasn’t happened even as I work on the poems. I’m not sure if it was talking about the project IN a former laundry (we were in a classroom that used to be nuns’ bedrooms), or if Jennifer was just really good at making me think hard about WHY I’m doing this, or probably both.

Then, Jennifer gave me a tour. She is from the area and comes from a family who, like many local Irish people, all knew about the laundry. She says that most local people claim not to have known about abuses at “the Good Shepherd,” as locals called it, although she points out that telling naughty kids they’d be dropped off at the industrial school was a traditional threat, so they must have known it wasn’t a great place for kids.

A few interesting things about the Good Shepherd—any windows the laundry girls would have passed on a regular basis were pebbled or stained glass. The girls couldn’t see out, couldn’t stain others with their “sins,” and no one could see in. The entire property was encircled with a wall far too high to see over. Some girls had younger siblings in the adjoining industrial school, but they weren’t allowed any contact. Sometimes a girl might catch a glimpse of a sibling as they came or went to chapel via different routes from within the buildings. There were partitions in the chapel, which one couldn’t see through, to separate the laundry girls in one section, the nuns in a middle section, and the kids from the industrial school in another section. Some girls might eventually see a sibling if she was moved from the school into the laundry. The girls were not given an education beyond domestic skills—embroidery, sewing, baking, etc.

Most girls never had visitors. Their mail and parcels, if they got any, were screened and inspected by the sisters, and the girls weren’t allowed to leave the property except once a year, when local families could do their Christian duty and take a girl in for a day. There was a tunnel under a road between the laundry/convent building and a small farm owned by the sisters, where girls might be sent to collect produce from a farm hand. There is a small locked, walled “nun’s garden,” the only part of the campus NOT included in the deed to the land. WIT must get permission from the Good Shepherd sisters to go into the garden, as they did once for a commemorative day honoring the Magdalen women. Of course, I wondered what might be buried there.

Although there have been many changes to the buildings, much is original—tiles, wood furnishings and paneling, fixtures, a giant crucifix in the hallway, statues, etc., as if everything was simply left behind by the sisters. The chapel has been unconsecrated and is now used for graduation ceremonies, but still looks as it would have looked to the girls.

I cannot begin to speak for the Magdalene women. I can only imagine. But you can hear about the laundries in the surviving women’s own words here, by clicking on “The Survivors”: https://www.waterfordmemories.com/recordings