Survivors excluded from planning of memorial centre on former Magdalene Laundry site, councillors warn

Survivors of church-run institutions are being excluded from key planning and governance structures for the new remembrance centre planned for the former Magdalene Laundry on Sean McDermott Street, councillors say.

“It remains a case of ‘everything about us, without us’,” said Jesslyn Henry, a Social Democrats councillor, in a motion tabled at Monday’s meeting of the North Central Area Committee.

The Office of Public Works (OPW) was granted planning permission for the National Centre for Research and Remembrance in February.  

The complex is intended to be a “site of conscience” to honour equally all those who were resident in Industrial Schools, Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby and County Home Institutions, Reformatories, and related institutions.”

Henry said in a statement that she was bringing the motion to the committee on behalf of Noelle Brown, her Social Democrats colleague who sits on a different area committee, and for all survivors of incarceration.

Brown was born in the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork. She never met her birth mother, who died nine years before Brown began efforts to track her down.

While she says she has no memory of the place, Henry was born in St Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home on the Navan Road.

Despite government assurances that the centre on Sean McDermott Street would be developed in conjunction with survivors, the motion says, affected individuals have been left out of critical decisions.

This includes the creation of legal and archival committees tasked with handling their personal records, the motion says.

It continues a pattern of systemic exclusion that survivors of church-run institutions have long endured, says the motion – including in redress schemes, commissions of investigation, and access to their own personal histories.

The National Centre for Research and Remembrance is being overseen, broadly, by the Department of Children, Disability and Equality, a spokesperson for the OPW said on Wednesday.

In April 2022, the department set up a steering group chaired by Martin Fraser, a former civil servant and ambassador, to drive the development of the centre, a spokesperson said. 

The steering group recognises the importance of survivors as partners who are involved in the process, they said. 

After recent feedback, the group has developed proposals that will see deeper involvement by survivors, they said. “The Minister hopes to bring these proposals to Government very shortly.”

Still not being heard

The promise of a memorial on the site of the old Magdalene Laundry on Sean McDermott Street dates back to at least 2013. 

That year, Justice John Quirke sent his recommendations to government for redress for women sent to work in the Magdalene institutions. 

One recommendation was for a memorial on the site of the old laundry on Sean McDermott Street, which held up to 150 women at any one time – many of whom would over the years try to escape. 

It was the last in the country to close – in 1996.   

Despite the report recommending it, there was little movement on a memorial for years, though.

Then, from 2018 onwards, survivors groups and some local councillors pushed for the government to make good on the recommendation – with research projects, and consultations, and events.

In 2018, councillors refused to sell the site to a Japanese hotel chain. And in 2022, councillors agreed to it over the OPW so that it could develop a memorial.

This past February, the council granted permission to the OPW for a project on the site, with a museum, exhibition space, garden space, and a repository of records related to institutional trauma in the 20th century.

The project also includes 18 social homes and educational facilities.

But survivors have not had real input in the steering group’s planning for the new centre at any meaningful level, said Noelle Brown, Social Democrat councillor for Kimmage-Rathmines, by phone on Wednesday.

Survivors have been invited to public engagements, she says. But at those, they were simply told about things that had already happened in the process, and plans going forward.

Survivors got to fill out an online form, says Brown. But no one knows if any of the suggestions were taken on board, she says.

A spokesperson for the Department of Children said that the steering group ran engagement events between October 2024 and February 2025 for survivors and affected people.

Attendees learnt about the high-level plans and work to date on the archive and museum spaces, they said. 

“Attendees had an opportunity to participate in discussions about what they would like to see contained in the National Centre and valuable feedback was granted,” they said.

Brown went to an event at the Ashling Hotel on 22 October, she says. “The OPW, the National Archives, the National Museum, were all telling us what's happened already and everything that’s going ahead.”

The new centre includes an archive for institutional records. Those “will include archiving relevant records and witness testimony by victims and survivors as well as presenting the historical and social context”, said a 2022 government press release.

The processes for preserving and accessing records will be done in “conjunction with survivors and relevant experts”, the press release says.

There are sensitive issues at play, says Brown.

Records will be handed over from the Adoption Authority and from Tusla to the National Archives, she says. “Survivors are still struggling to get full access to those records.”

After a deeply flawed commission of investigation report and a redress scheme that excluded 40 percent of survivors, it is time to get it right, says Brown.

“I don't know how many times we have to ask to be included,” she says.

To add further insult, Brown says, Fraser was quoted at a recent meeting, when responding to a query as to why survivors were not involved, as saying they would be bored.

“That is the way a parent would speak about a child,” Brown says. 

A spokesperson for the Department for Children, Disability and Equality did not respond directly to a question asking if Fraser had said that. 

There are, meanwhile, those among the survivors who still feel that the centre should just not exist, says independent Councillor Mannix Flynn.

As a young child, Flynn was sent to St Joseph's Industrial School in Letterfrack, Galway, before spending time in Marlborough House Detention Centre in Daingean, County Offaly, and St Patrick's Institution in Dublin.

The proposed centre does not do anything to bring real closure for survivors, Flynn said by phone on Wednesday.

Flynn says he is opposed to survivors of church-run institutions who want to access their own information having to enter a building where so much horror had occurred.

Sean McDermott Street needs “housing and a decent shop” and not a “trauma-fest” for the “nosey and people who want to exploit it”, Flynn says.

He says he knows a lot of people who live with the lingering effects of the abuse they endured from the Catholic Church, and some who died by suicide because of it.

People still need “proper justice, counselling and redress”, he says.

Support

Henry’s motion to the North Central Area Committee got overwhelming support from councillors at Monday’s meeting. 

As did a similar motion to the Central Area Committee meeting on 10 June, which was put forward by Social Democrat councillors Cat O’Driscoll and Daniel Ennis.

Deirdre Heney, a Fianna Fáil councillor, while supporting the motion, also suggested Henry bring it before the Dublin City Council Women’s Committee.

That, she said, “would send out a strong message that the women of this nation have had enough of being ignored, being abused, and being disrespected”.

Ireland has been missing a truth and reconciliation process when it comes to abuse perpetrated by the church, says Paddy Monahan, a Social Democrats councillor. “I think we’ve a degree of Stockholm Syndrome.”

Councillors on both area committees agreed to write to Fraser, and the OPW, to demand the “urgent appointment of survivor representatives to all decision-making bodies, including legal and archival committees associated with the Centre for Research and Remembrance”.