Published August 2015
By David Jo Murphy
Although Travellers’ Voice tries to highlight the positive aspects of the Traveller community, there can be no shying away from the abuse that many people have experienced at the hands of church and state institutions over the years. This has been highlighted by journalists such as Nicola Cooke in an Irish Examiner article on 29th January 2003, more recently by Wayne O’Connor in the Irish Independent on 16th July 2015, in the 2003 film The Magdalene Sisters and on the website www.magdalenelaundries.com. We were contacted by Martin Ward (former Mayor of Tuam) regarding Mary Collins, a Traveller originally from the Tuam area, to tell her side of the story about her campaign for justice to gain recognition of the abuses committed against herself and others who were in the ‘care’ of state and religious institutions. Martin Ward has been helping Mary to find out about her family and on the 14th July I met up with them both in order to attend the Magdalene’s protest at Dail Eireann and to listen to Mary’s story. This is what Mary told us.
Mary Collins was found on the side of the road with her mum Angela (30), her sister Brigid (l4) and father Patrick, near Tuam almost fifty years ago. Mary says that Angela was taken by Gardai to a County home in Middleton where she was seen by a psychiatrist. Angela then ran away from the home and made her way back to Tuam with Mary but was later captured again by the Gardai and a psychiatrist admitted her into a Magdalene laundry for a period close to 27 years. Mary tells us she was not convicted of any crime and was neither a danger to herself or others. According to Mary, she has seen medical records which state that she and her siblings were well nourished when the Gardai brought them in. Mary says that she was subsequently detained in an industrial school and her mother Angela was again sent to the Good Shepard’s laundry in Cork. The whole family were separated and didn’t see each other again until five years later.
During this time, Mary says that her mother was also taken into a Magdalene laundry and her younger sister was taken from their mother and placed into the foster system. When Mary was seven years old she was allowed to see her mother again in the laundry. The reason this was permitted was, according to Mary, her mother was told that she would only be permitted to see her daughter if she signed away adoption rights to her youngest daughter.
Mary continued to stay at the children’s home but would regularly visit her mother at the Magdalene laundries where she alleges she was “beaten, locked up with the pigs, had her face smashed into tables, was drowned in the bath, and had sores cut open with scissors by the nuns while she was screaming and howling. ” When she was visiting her mother, Mary alleges the nuns subjected her to horrific abuse, “name calling” and telling her she was “dirty and would end up like her mother,” whom Mary says, was also subjected to similar abuse.
Mary’s Mother Angela spent the rest of her life in the Magdalene laundry until the age of 48 when Mary states that her mother was admitted to hospital. Mary accessed Angela’s medical notes which she recounts: “Angela was extremely anxious, not talking to anybody, was mute and had extremely low blood levels”. Adding, “The hospital recommended that Angela have a hysterectomy if this continued”. According to Mary, the nuns “left Angela without medical treatment and Angela died of ovarian cancer at the age of 57”. In Mary’s opinion “the nuns practically killed her” adding, “When she died they dumped her in a mass grave in Cork with 72 other women”. Mary told Travellers’ Voice, “They knew that she came from a Traveller background, that she had 3 children, they knew me, and they still dumped her in a mass grave”.
Mary didn’t return again to the mass grave until years later when she had her own children. When they were visiting the big black headstone at St Finbar’s cemetery in Cork, one of Mary’s children said: “mum when I’m older I’ll come back and put a flower on it.”
Mary tells us she has been contacting the government and religious institutions for several years and has yet to have her questions addressed sufficiently, neither, Mary says, has there been any apology from the State for what she claims was the horrific abuse and disruption to her family when she was a young girl. Mary told me, “The government have ignored me on the basis that I’m a Traveller and they don’t want to bring up issues regarding the Traveller families. I do believe that a lot of the Traveller families are in these mass graves and nobody is talking about it. The women and children were stolen off the streets and somebody needs to look into this. I got beaten because they (Travellers) were classed as murderers, as robbers; but these people were confused people who had their children robbed from them and if I had my child taken of me in the morning I would murder someone as well. This needs to be looked at because there was bad discrimination against the Traveller families because they were poor. ”
In the case of her mother, Mary alleges she was taken into the laundry against her will because she was poor and had children outside of wedlock. According to a person Mary knows, “on the first night she (Mary’s mother) was taken into the laundry she screamed the place down, you can imagine being a Traveller living on the side of the road and then being locked up in a laundry, she must have gone through horrendous torture to lock her up, and basically nobody’s answering my question of why this was allowed to happen”. Mary says that her mother “wasn’t breaking the law, she was a Traveller living on the street with her three children, why did the government take me away from my Travelling family to go into a home and to be abused so badly that it’s left scars?”
Mary says she is still living with the effects of the abuse she suffered at the hands of church/ state institutions. When she received medical treatment in London, she says they diagnosed her with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) brought on by the years of seeing her mother being locked up in a Magdalene laundry and being institutionalised herself.
Mary has carefully documented her I plight and that of her mother and sisters, and three years ago she presented her evidence to government ministers at a meeting in the Dail before the commission was set up to investigate the Magdalene laundry. Mary alleges that the government has chosen to exclude her ‘testimony about what happened and she feels that this is because she is a Traveller. Mary states “I wasn’t invited over, my story wasn’t asked and I know why, because I came from a Traveller background. The Irish government has a lot of questions to answer about the mother and baby homes.”
Despite having such a traumatic start in life, Mary has raised three lovely children in London and works as a manager in mental health services. However, when her youngest son was studying for his GCSE exams he began vomiting blood and almost died from a rare illness which required a bone marrow transplant. Mary explained that it was when her son was ‘fighting for his life” with a rare blood disorder and the hospital asked if the family could be tested for donor compatibility that she realised that “they had taken away the one thing, his bloodline, that’s going to help him to live.”
The treatment Mary says she has suffered at the hands of Church and State institutions is nothing short of scandalous. We are not talking about something that happened back in the midst of time; we are talking about the same State. The same religious institutions who have allegedly profited from the unpaid labour of hundreds of women and children and who still retain the vast amount of their wealth and property. Instead, according to Maeve Sheehan writing in the Irish Independent on 23rd February 2014, the tax-payer has ended up footing the bill for money that the church had agreed to pay and spokeswomen {or the Magdalene survivors have stated in an article in www.thejournal.ie on 10th June 2015 that the amount paid out by the redress boards have fallen short of what was promised. They have also reported shortcomings in the ‘enhanced’ medical card cover that they had been promised. For example, Mary Collins says she required corrective surgery to her nose as a result of assaults that she suffered in the Magdalene laundry. The Travellers’ Voice Magazine pledge our support to her and all of the Magdalene survivors who are campaigning for justice.
