Nuns ‘should not have been looking after children’
GOOD SHEPHERD SURVIVOR ITA REVEALS INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL’S VIOLENT AND ABUSIVE CULTURE
SIXTY YEARS on from when she attended the industrial school at the Good Shepherd Convent in New Ross, Ita Gallagher is still haunted by her experiences of abuse and physical violence there.
Ita spent three years at St Aidan’s industrial school from when she was 30 months until she was five and a half years old.
Her time there, along with the time her three sisters spent there, came as a result of personal tragedy within her family; the illness of her mother who had to be hospitalised with TB shortly after Ita was born in 1953.
‘I honestly believe nuns shouldn’t have been looking after us children. We got no medical care, We got no emotional care and we defintely got no affection,’ said Ita.
SITTING in her Ballykelly home, Ita Gallagher holds up a bundle of papers and shakes her head in disbelief. The Freedom of Information papers and files catalogue her story, much of which has been redacted using thick strokes of a marker.
The hammered typewriter print leaps from the pages, the truncated sentences hinting at the horror of life in St Aidan’s industrial school beside the Good Shepherd Magdalene laundry in the Irishtown. Names of nuns of all rankings preface horrors untold, some redacted from history.
Ita takes her vaper in her other hand and outlines her story.
Ita spent three years at the industrial school from when she was 30 months until she was five-and-a-half.
Her time there, along with the time her three sisters spent there, came as a result of personal tragedy within her family; the illness of her mother who had to be hospitalised with TB shortly after Ita was born in 1953. She was to get no reprieve from the viccissitudes of life at the school in New Ross.
Ita’s mother Margaret Lennon was diagnosed with TB and was taken to Brownswood Hospital in Enniscorthy where she would spend the final five years of her life.
This was the mid-1950s and Margaret in 1955, having been told her illness was terminal and under the advice of nuns at the hospital, requested for her four daughters to be cared for at St Aidan’s.
At this time there was a perception that girls should only be cared for by women and this was impressed upon Margaret.
‘She had been having some tests and six weeks after I was born she was told she had TB. On her death certificate it states that she had it for years. We used to go, my four sisters and two brothers, to visit her but the two youngest weren’t allowed to go in so we sat in the car and she would come to the balcony and wave to us and throw down the baskets that she weaved from cigarette packets.’
Some time later a social worker arrived at the family home beside the River Barrow, a house which was shortly afterwards vacated by the family on health grounds.
Her brothers were left in the care of their father and a new era began with the family’s disintegration.
‘My sisters thought it (going to St Aidan’s school) was an adventure. The social worker drove us to the Central Garage in New Ross and bought us an ice cream and then we were taken to St Aidan’s.’
From the start her father Richard tried to get the four sisters back but as his wife had made the request he was powerless.
Shaking her head as she reads through the pages, she stops on a page which describes how her father was asked to pay 10 shillings a week to the nuns for caring for his daughters.
‘He would send money when he had it but being a casual farm labourer money was not always easy to come by,’ Ita says.
Other pages feature written statements to the health board from her sister describing how Ita was beaten for wetting the bed, for not eating all of the food on her plate and of how she suffered from styes in both her eyes which were never treated by a doctor.
Words like depression, long term damage and low self esteem cry out from the pages.