What are you REALLY here for?

June 10, 2019

What are you REALLY here for?

Today, I took the 220X (express) into Cork (20 minutes). My goal was to find both laundries in Cork—Peacock Lane and Sundays Well, and to make it to St. Finn Barr’s cemetery, where I knew some of the Peacock Lane women are buried. As usual in Ireland, it didn’t turn out at all as I had planned, but it turned out just grand.

1. I got an espresso at Bean and Leaf, then headed for Cork’s big public library across the street. (Side note: One thing about Magdalene laundries is that there are no addresses. People my age and older know where they were, but there’s nothing in print that gives specific locations. Some resources will say things like, “Where St. Vincent’s is now,” but there are four St. Vincent’s, and you just have to know which one was built on the laundry site.) The reference section of the library is closed on Mondays (of course), so I asked at the front desk. There were a man and a women working the desk, and they both looked to be about my age. I told them I was visiting in Ireland doing research for a book of poems about the laundries, and did they know where the old sites were? The man shot me a look of complete horror and quickly ran away. The woman said, no, she didn’t know where, and could I come back Wednesday when the historian was there? When I said I’d be gone then, she went back to a counter and pulled out a map. The man was gone, so maybe she thought it was safe. Whispering, she drew directions to Sundays Well former convent and laundry on the map. Then she whispered for another ten minutes—did I know the buildings burned in 1982 and they’re just shells now? Did I know the property was for sale? Did I know many of the women were buried in St. Finn Barr’s? I thanked her for the map and her help and headed out to get a taxi.

2. Taxi driver 1: This young man from Ghana took me all over north Cork looking for Sundays Well. In the process, he drove me straight up to the door of the Presentation Brothers Monastery, where I asked a man outside about the laundry. He gave me directions—we were only a few blocks away. We passed the old City Gaol (jail), and Presentation man had said we could see the old convent church from the gaol. Nope. We stopped a woman my age walking her dog. She said, “Ah, Nellie’s buried in me own back yard, if ya can believe it,” and she said there was no way to walk in to the property. She yelled at another woman across the street, “Is the Magdalene convent gate locked then?” to get confirmation. Yep. We circled around to look again. We passed a much older man and stopped to ask him. He told us EXACTLY how to get right to the gate, then he said, “But you can’t get in there. They had a fire you know. It’s all locked up.”

We followed his directions, and finally, BEHIND the gaol, we found the gate. It was indeed locked, chained, and had warning signs. I read online later that they had to lock up the property after a number of "antisocial behaviors." A road led away on the other side of the gate, and a good distance up a hill, in a small forest of overgrown trees, I saw the shell of the Sundays Well church steeple. That’s as close as I would get without jumping the wall.

3. The Ghana guy dropped me off at St. Finn Barr’s cemetery. I went straight to the groundskeeper, told him what I was doing, and asked to see the Magdalene gravesite. I got that look of horror again, but then he said, “I’ll take you there.” He walked me to the middle of the cemetery and there it was, the gravesite and marker. He apologized to me for the long grass and said, “You see? We mowed on the other side today. We mow here tomorrow.” When I pulled out my phone to take a picture, he said, “It’s all good to take a picture, but you can’t put it in your book. It’s very, you know, sensitive.” This is the same word the man in the Glasnevin Cemetery used when he refused to show me the Magdalene gravesite.

I admit I had to sit a while at the gravesite. These were girls and women who’d died at Peacock Lane laundry (not all of the dead are here; 28 others are buried in St. Catherine's cemetery). Still, I was a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of names on the single marker (72 names, front and back), and by another, separate headstone on what is clearly the Magdalene plot, which reads in part (I couldn't make it all out): "In St. Vincent's Peacock Lane Cork from 1961 suffering a life of separation from her children until her death in...." I was also struck by the wildflowers and long grass (I know…they’ll mow it tomorrow) now gone to seed, which seemed so symbolic of how “forgotten” these women are.

4. I took another taxi (a non-talking, hurry-up guy) to the old Peacock Lane convent, which is still there and being used. There were two people standing outside, so I asked them if they could tell me where the old laundry was. They pointed to a newish housing development. They said the laundry building is gone, and the development is already almost ten years old. The sisters have an expression they've used for remains of laundry girls or women that couldn't be identified with death or burial records: not trace. The Peacock Lane laundry, too, is not trace.

5. I took another taxi back downtown to my bus stop. The driver asked what I was doing in Ireland, and I told him about the research. Again, the floodgate opened. He started by saying he’d had a priest in his taxi the week before. They’d passed a homeless guy. The priest made the sign of the cross, blessed the guy and said, “What more can we do?” The taxi driver, a 30-something man with a very thick Irish accent, said “I will drive around Cork free of charge and pick up all the homeless people I find. I’ll bring them to your church, and you can keep them warm for the night.” He said the priest didn’t answer. And that was only the beginning. He didn’t stop talking, very excited and animated, until he let me out. Like everyone I’ve talked to, he said the church has done some good, and they could have done great things, but their money and hypocrisy is their undoing. I thanked him for his honesty.

6. Next I took the 220, not the express, back to Owen’s. I needed to decompress. I’m learning much more about Irish culture and attitudes toward the laundries than about the laundries themselves. I’ve been disappointed not to be able to find or visit all the old sites, but honestly? Maybe that was never really what I came here to discover.

Here is a 2008 video by Mark Davis of the derelict Sundays Well laundry and convent. One thing I always notice are the windows, which would have been too high for the girls to see out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbPyvF9fnhg