‘The nuns and gardaí came to bring me back, but I told them I’d set my dogs on them’
An 85-year-old survivor of the Tuam mother and baby home has welcomed plans to develop a former Magdalene laundry into a national research centre.
This week Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman announced that he would be lodging plans after Easter to develop the Sean McDermott former laundry in Dublin into a remembrance centre.
The campus will include the provision of social housing units, further and higher educational facilities, and facilities for family and parenting supports.
The repository of records related to institutional trauma in the 20th century is being led by the National Archives.
Rose McKinney was incarcerated in the Tuam mother and baby home as a teenager between 1955 and 1959, where she gave birth to two babies.
Both children were taken by the nuns and adopted, and Rose eventually escaped the former religious-run institution by jumping the back wall and running away.
She later moved to Dublin where she married and had other children. Since then she has been an advocate for saving the former Sean McDermott Laundry in north inner-city Dublin.
Rose believes the centre should be used as a memorial unit and remembrance for all survivors.
“There are few buildings left like this in the country, this one stands out and is right in the centre of the city,” she said. “There is no escaping the laundry, and it immediately makes people remember what went on in there.
“I fully support the saving of this building. I do understand some people might not agree, but I am glad that it is there for generations to come and that no one forgets what went on.
“I believe it will also bring community-based people to come together as survivors if they wish to put their records into a lovely reflection area and prayer area.”
Rose was born in Dunmore in 1938 and is the youngest of nine children. When she fell pregnant as a teenager, a priest came to her home “demanding” she move into the Tuam home to have her baby.
She was 15 and one of the youngest to enter the home in Galway.
When she did escape, the nuns and gardaí came to her house demanding she return to the institution — however, she fiercely resisted and left Galway.
“I was petrified on the night I went into Tuam,” she said.
“It was a big old building full of women and children. The children were grand, I minded them like the other women in there. I had my son, and then my sister and brother got me out of there.
Former Labour Party minister and TD Joe Costello is supportive of the remembrance centre concept.
“It is good to have somewhere in town that is easily accessible and a reflection area, for people to go there,” he said.
“It will have an educational element to it and a housing element as well as an archive area, as well as a housing element to it.”
Meanwhile, a protest took place at the Dáil on Saturday organised by Professor Niall Meehan, whose research uncovered the names of the 222 Bethany babies who died in a protestant institution in Dublin.
He said the rally was due to the “inadequacy” of the mother and baby home compensation scheme.
The scheme is not providing compensation for adoptees who spent less than six months in an institution, as well as those who were boarded out.
