THE NAMES of 253 women who lived and died behind the walls of the Good Shepherd Convent in Limerick echoed across a snowy Mount St Lawrence cemetery last Sunday.
In what was the sixth year of the remembrance ceremony, people gathered to share poems, to lay flowers and to bear witness to the memory of the women buried in a mass grave.
Camilla O’Donoghue, one of the event organisers, quoted the lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s ‘The Magdalene Laundries’.
“Peg O’Connell died today, she was a cheeky girl, a flirt. They just stuffed her in a hole. Surely to God, you’d think at least some bells should ring.
“One day I’m going to die here too and they will plant me in the dirt, like some lame bulb that never blooms come any spring. Not any spring.”
Ms O’Donoghue said this was for “all the Peg O’Connells” buried in Magdalene graves around the country.
“We’re so sorry we didn’t listen, and nobody heard, and may your souls rest in peace.”
She thanked Cllr John Gilligan whom she said “played a huge part” in having the names inscribed on the monument.
As the snowfall intensified, Cllr Gilligan said it was good to see people attend on a cold and wet day because “these people came from a very cold place”.
“We can only hope in our hearts that some place along the line, maybe some little ray of sunshine entered into their lives.
“The idea of having their names inscribed here was very important to me. When you take a look around, all these gravestones are not to mark the fact a person died. They are to mark the fact that a person lived; they had a name. This is now a sacred place.
“They are here, we remember every single one of them, we remember what they went through. They are now part and parcel of us. This is no longer a burial pit, this is a sacred place and we should always remember that.”
After the names of the Limerick Magdalenes were read out, Marian O’Rourke recited one of her poems from her collection about the Magdalene Laundries.
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