Galway’s top honour for Magdalen heroines

From this week’s Galway City Tribune – Two women pivotal in helping the women and girls who endured inhumane conditions at the Magdalen Laundry on Forster Street are to be awarded the Freedom of the City.

The announcement that Patricia Burke Brogan and the late Ena McEntee are to be given Galway’s highest honour was made to mark International Women’s Day by Mayor Colette Connolly, who had put forward the motion a special meeting of Galway City Council.

She initially brought the proposal to the Policy and Procedures committee meeting after being approached about how both women could be acknowledged officially by the McEntee family and Breda Murphy, spokesperson for the Tuam Mother and Baby Home Alliance. The matter was discussed privately by councillors before reaching unanimous agreement.

The Mayor described Patricia Burke Brogan as an activist, humanitarian, poet, artist and playwright while Ena McEntee was a “woman of courage, an innovator, a caring soul, kind and considerate, mother, friend and rescuer to women in the Magdalen Laundry.”

A young novice nun with the Order of the Mercy Sisters, Patricia Burke Brogan emerged as one of the first people in Ireland to expose the conditions endured by young women incarcerated in these institutions.

Teaching school children during term, in school holidays she was sent to the Laundry on Forster Street to supervise the women at work and was immediately shocked at the sight of them dressed in drab, ill-fitting hard clothing, young women who appeared to blend with the machinery, slaving in shocking conditions without payment or pension.

As the oppressive smoke, heat and damp conditions mingled, she was moved to describe the scene as ‘Dante’s Inferno’.

After being forced to pay a sum of £50 to Bishop Michael Browne to leave the Order, once outside she put pen to paper to document her experiences. She later wrote a three-act play called ‘Eclipsed’, which depicted the daily lives of five ‘inmates’ inside a Magdalen Laundry in 1963 who dreamt of life outside.

Rather than being celebrated for speaking out, Patricia was ostracised for a time. She struggled to get her work published as it depicted the nuns in a poor light.

Ena McEntee, originally from New Road and who later moved to McHugh Avenue in Mervue, became a friend to the Magdalen women when she began working alongside them in the laundry.

In the 1960s Ena managed to help more than 15 women escape the laundry, with the support of her husband Hugh and three sons, Hugo, Andy and Declan, along with neighbours.

After picking them up and hiding them in a van, the girls would be taken to their home in Mervue where they would stay for weeks at a time.

Despite being of very modest means, Ena gave the women enough money to purchase a train ticket to Dublin and to travel to England. She also ensured that the women would depart from Woodlawn or Athenry rail station to avoid the Gardaí, who often returned ‘escapees’ trying to board a train at Ceannt Station in the city centre back to the laundry.

This is a shortened preview version of this article. To read more on the Patricia and Ena, see this week’s Galway City Tribune. You can buy a digital edition HERE.