Call for Tralee’s ‘Maggies’ to be re-interred

THERE has been a call for the bodies of women formerly incarcerated in Tralee’s Magdalene laundry to be exhumed and re-interred in a public cemetery.

The Magdalene Asylum operated in Tralee from 1856 until 1910, with hundreds of young Kerry women passing through the facility in that time.

An unknown number of these women died while in the Asylum and they are buried in a single plot in a small walled off cemetery on the old Mercy Convent site in Balloonagh.

At Monday’s meeting of the Tralee Municipal District council, Cllr Toireasa Ferris called for these women to be exhumed and re-interred in a public graveyard as was the case with the boys who died while imprisoned at the CBS-run St Joseph’s Industrial School.

Cllr Ferris said re-interring the women – many of whom remain unidentified to this day – was the right thing to do.

She said she was not suggesting that anything untoward or “bad” had happened to the women kept at the Tralee Magdalene Asylum – as was the case in many other such institutions – and that the Tralee facility is not associated with the “dark stories” that have emerged from other laundries.

“Re-interring these women would send out a much better message than having them buried in a small cemetery behind closed walls that very few people even know exist,” she said.

The Magdalene Laundry in Tralee shut its doors in 1910 and, according to information contained in the 1901 Census, 12 women were incarcerated there at the time of its closure.

These women – all listed as laundresses – were mainly aged from 22 to 60, though one young inmate was aged just 12.

When it opened it had a capacity for 13 women and while it remained a relatively small operation, hundreds of women passed through its doors – most of them spending around three years in the laundry.

Though it was called an asylum it did not cater for the mentally ill and it was operated as a refuge for prostitutes and ‘fallen women’.

In 1856 The Kerry Chronicle described the first inmates of the ‘Asylum’ as follows: ‘The most miserable members of the human family for whom the laws of the land have done nothing and upon whom society has set its ban’.

When the asylum closed, the Sisters of Mercy continued to run a laundry at the Nazareth House Girls Industrial School in Balloonagh.

This laundry – staffed by the child prisoners in the school – operated until the mid 1950s and its services were used by many prominent local businesses.

Since the revelations of the children’s bodies discovered the Bon Secours order’s Mother and Babies Home in Tuam, several former inmates of Nazareth House have called for the Magdalene women’s plot in Balloonagh to be exhumed. The former Nazareth inmates say they are firmly convinced that several unidentified children are buried there with the Magdelene women.