A nun fell on the floor screaming... The lo baby came out... We knew it was a priest I WAS ABUSED BY MY UNCLE BISHOP CASEY
SPECIAL INVESTIGATION BY ANNE SHERIDAN
‘That was a life I never should have had’
As reveAled last week, Bishop eamonn Casey made a settlement with a woman under the residential redress scheme for alleged sexual abuse. This week the Irish Mail on sunday can reveal a two-hour oral testimony from the woman, given in 2013. The official documents from an oral history project for the Justice for Magadalene research group, confirms the woman, then 72, has since died. The woman – who we have chosen not to name as we have been unable to contact her family – told researchers about her life in a number of institutions in the late Fifties and early sixties. In 2013, she was precluded by statute – under the residential Institutions redress Act 2002 – from giving details of her redress settlement or naming her abuser. At the age of 23, she escaped the Magdalene laundries after eight years. But the abuse she suffered never left her, and her harrowing testimony reveals priests with evil intentions and a nun giving birth. IN August 1955 a teenage girl was picked up by five nuns from an orphanage in the west of Ireland and placed in the back of a van.
She was transported to Limerick by the Good Shepherd Sisters. It was at this juncture in history that her life would change forever.
One by one, she and her siblings had been placed into the hands of nuns by her parents, who lived in poverty. But life in the west of Ireland was virtually idyllic in comparison to what she would endure in Limerick.
There was a time when she blissfully recalled seeing planes flying overhead, out across the Atlantic, and dreamed that one day she might become an air hostess. But it was a dream that never came to pass.
She remembered ‘the lovely smell of laundry’ whilst climbing trees and playing outside in the sunshine near the convent on the west coast.
The older girls would tell her that one day she would know exactly what life was like inside the laundry, but she said she never knew then what they meant.
But within a few short years she would be all-too-familiar with the brutal life inside Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries.
‘It was good days in the west of Ireland, but when you went to these other places, it was hell on earth,’ she said. ‘That was a life for me that I should never have had. I never did wrong to anybody. I was an innocent little girl. If someone came to the gate for me, I would be gone. But no one ever came for me. I just had to wait.’
The woman revealed her life story to an oral project for the group Justice for Magdalenes Research in 2013. She has since died.
The woman’s name and the majority of her biographical details are being protected by this newspaper.
In her young life, she was confined to a number of different laundries around the country, before she eventually managed to escape at the age of 23.
Aged 15, she was brought to St Mary’s, on the sprawling Good Shepherd grounds at the junction of Clare Street and the Pennywell Road in Limerick city.
It was situated a stone’s throw from St John’s Cathedral, where Fr Eamonn Casey was installed as curate that same year.
The site and buildings were later sold and underwent a series of refurbishments. They now house the Limerick School of Art & Design.
The past has been almost entirely erased save for a simple plaque – and the scars ingrained in so many who passed through its doors, with women leaving as vastly different human beings to those who entered as young girls – if they managed to leave at all. The Justice for Magdalenes Research Project recorded the names of 284 women and girls who died at this laundry.
It was around this time, in 1955-56, that she encountered Fr Eamonn Casey, who would later become Bishop of Galway and Kerry. Here, he had been curate at St John’s Cathedral, after being ordained for
the Diocese of Limerick in 1951.
The woman, who received a redress settlement for alleged sexual abuse, was never able to reveal her full story, such were the limits placed on more than 16,000 people who received compensation from the State and the religious orders, following the Ryan Report.
This woman was just one among a sea of survivors, spread across the world, who wanted to be heard, not silenced. ‘I got more beatings [in Limerick] than I ever got in my lifetime. I knew my childhood had changed and finished. I never got those beatings in the west of Ireland. You were like a dog, beaten on the floor, kicked into the stomach, everywhere.
‘After that, I didn’t know what it was to be kind. You got so immune to the beatings. We got beaten with the sweeping brush until the brush got broken, and they would still beat you with the broken pieces. I thought I was going to die there.’
But the abuse she suffered went beyond physical beatings.
‘We knew the priests and respected them, but I am sorry to say they didn’t respect us. But I said, “One day I will be able to tell my story,”’ she said.
She did not mention Bishop Casey, or any sexual abuse against her in that interview, nor could she under the stringent terms of the redress settlement which gagged the voices of survivors in speaking out against the perpetrators. But she did reveal that she and the other women feared rape from the priests, and spoke of how she witnessed a nun giving birth in the religious compound.
‘Oh, that convent, they slaved us, gave us no education. We were like animals to them. They had no respect for us. Just bring it out, let the public see for their own two eyes, how badly we were treated. If they had their own way the priests and all would rape us, but the nuns were there.
‘One day a nun fell on the floor and she was screaming. The next thing the baby came. We knew the priest must have done that. Of course, she couldn’t be left back to the convent again. They must have adopted the child, because she was put out of the convent. They probably took her baby and sent her to America. She was treated like dirt, and that’s why I don’t trust priests or nuns now.’
She told researchers after the abuse she suffered she believed nuns and priests to be ‘hypocrites’.
‘I had no religion in me from the time I was beaten so badly; religion just went out of me. I would say to myself, “Why would these people go to Church, hurt other people that never did wrong, and they’d still go to Communion?” To me, I call
them hypocrites. They have hurt so many people.’
Initially, she was placed in the reformatory school in Limerick, before moving on to the laundry. She was told by the nuns: “You’re here because you had a baby. You’re here for stealing.”
‘I didn’t know what those words were. I said I never did. I said I was sent here from the west of Ireland. They told me I was lying.’
She was slapped across the face, beaten; they shaved off all her ‘lovely hair’ and locked up her in a dark room, where they would throw buckets of water on her for ‘crimes’ or ‘offences’ she said never existed. Why, she wondered, could the public not hear her screams and come to help her?
‘It was a place where you learnt to bury the pain. Days and months didn’t bother me – I didn’t know what they were. I thought I was there forever.
‘We were slaves from one end of the day to the other,’ she said. ‘I had to stay alive.’
Years on, she would finally leave her life in the laundries and was let out into the world, with little support and no map to guide her way in life.
‘They gave me two half crowns, but said, “You’ll be back again. No one will want you. You are no good for nothing”. So, I wanted to get on.
‘After that, I was as free as a whistle. I thought maybe the gods are looking after me. Maybe I am staying out now. The day they opened the door, and left me out, and left me at the bus stop, though I had nowhere to go, I thought I am finally free.’
Even after she moved to London, where she would marry and have a child, she said her past continued to haunt her all her life.
While she was physically free, she said: ‘I used to look behind me to see if there were nuns following me. My husband used to say to me, “That’s the past, forget about the past.”
‘I still have nightmares. One night I woke up and I was screaming, and I used to cry in my sleep, thinking they were coming for me. They still torment you.’
The mental shadow of the Magdalene abuse would persist right up into her seventies, when she passed away.
Through a support group in the UK, she helped other survivors of abuse, and encouraged them to speak out, to tell their truth, and help free themselves from the chains of the past. She warned that internalising all those years of abuse would only destroy them, and their families.
‘You have to bring it out and don’t be one bit ashamed. There is nothing to be ashamed of. The truth is good.’
She entered her High Court proceedings for personal injury damages against Bishop Casey in 2001, and they were later struck out in 2005 after the redress settlement was confirmed. The Redress Board made awards to people who were abused as children. But the fact of her redress was only revealed for the first time last week, after a reference to it was found in files relating to former Bishop Casey, given to his niece Patricia Donovan.
The settlement was subsequently confirmed by Limerick Diocese.
Vindication that came too late for one victim.