A Blot on Ireland’s Past, Facing Demolition<br />Ms. Long, who tracked her mother down before she died, says she is not opposed to a hotel on part of the site — "people need jobs" —<br />but she wants a memorial too, something "more than a plaque on the wall." Mary Merritt, 86, is one of the last surviving inmates of the Gloucester Street laundry, albeit having only spent a week there, on a temporary transfer from the High Park laundry.<br />Founded in the 19th century, the Gloucester Street laundry was one of around a dozen such businesses run by Roman Catholic nuns<br />and staffed by unpaid inmates — mostly orphan girls or young women who had become pregnant outside marriage or whose families could not or would not support them — who were given to the nuns to hide them away.<br />"This is going to go," he says, standing on the former Mecklenburg Street, by the grim, gray wall of the derelict laundry, "and in 40 or 50 years, how do you explain what existed here, where everyone could see it?" Samantha Long’s birth mother, Margaret Bullen, was born in a mental institution<br />and later transferred to the Gloucester Street laundry at age 16.<br />The old Gloucester Street laundry, the last of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene Laundries to shut its doors, will soon be demolished<br />and replaced by a budget hotel and a student residence — if the City Council has its way.<br />Laundries, industrial schools, and mother and baby homes have all disappeared,<br />and the Gloucester Street laundry is now one of the last physical reminders of this Irish gulag archipelago.<br />The Magdalene women endured many of the same hardships as the inmates of the brutal church-run "industrial schools" for delinquent or unwanted children,<br />and the "mother and baby homes," where unmarried pregnant women were warehoused until their children were born (and then often taken for adoption).
