women were compelled to send their children to these institutions. Tens of thousands of children, only a small proportion of whom were actually orphans, ended up in detention.
The schools were run by Catholic religious orders, and were prevalent in cities and towns throughout the country. Contrary to popular belief they were not charitable but state-run organisations. The Department of Education provided a grant for each child committed by the courts. This institutionalised method of childcare was economically more viable than providing individual families with financial support. It also appeased the Catholic Church by allowing them to maintain a level of political power within the community.
One such school, established in 1869 and run by an enclosed order of nuns, was in operation for almost 100 years. What the girls suffered there is not unique. What is unique, however, is the way in which thirty-five of these girls so needlessly lost their lives.
On the night of 23 February 1943 a fire started in the laundry of the convent. As the fire intensified some girls tried to jump from the second-floor windows, while others were overcome by smoke or consumed by flames. The thirty-five girls who perished were buried in an unmarked grave.
What follows is a brief glimpse into the lives of these girls, a means of memorialising and remembering their all-too-short lives. Using what information I could glean about their backgrounds, their ages and the running of the school, through research and interviews with survivors, I have tried to give each girl a unique voice.
We need to be reminded not only of the systematic abuse here and throughout the country, but of the fact that these girls were not simply numbers. They had names.
She had very good English, I remember thinking, probably because she lived in Oxford. The thought of those girls used to keep me awake when I was little. I couldn’t have the curtains open, not even the tiniest bit, in case I caught sight of them at the window. And now I was afraid all over again, as if they would come for me in the night.
Denise, 12
I am number 17. That is not my age! It is the special number I was given when I first came here. Sometimes I forget that my name is Denise. My favourite thing is to make paper dolls and cover them in silver paper, which me and my friend Aisling get from the bin at school, from the townie girls’ sweet wrappings. We tear the wrappings into wee jumpers and skirts and boots. At night we put the dolls in matchboxes to sleep. Aisling doesn’t give hers any names even though I told her to. She says she can’t think of any so she just gives them numbers too, like us.
When I grow up I am going to be a nun like Mother Assumpta, not like Mother Carmel. I pray every day, even when I’m not supposed to. Everyone has to line up and pray first thing in the morning, at six. I get up at five because I’m afraid of being hit and because I like to pray before everybody else. And then we wash and go to mass and have communion, and say ‘Our Father’ and sing ‘Holy, Holy’. And I pray when I’m doing the scrubbing in the morning too, mostly the Hail Mary over and over until sometimes I start to get a bit dizzy and get the words mixed up. Then I feel bad for that and have to ask forgiveness. From God and from Our Lady.
I always bow my head when I say ‘Jesus’.
My other favourite thing as well as my dolls is Christmas. On Christmas we get to eat meat and gravy. The ladies from the cathedral come in to serve us, the ones that don’t have their own children. They’re the same ones who stay with Father Fagan in the room behind the altar on Sundays and then come out to give us communion. They don’t say very much. They’re a bit like Aisling that way. Maybe she will be like one of those women when she grows up, and she’ll see what’s in that room at the back of the cathedral.
My worst thing is Jeyes Fluid. It’s when the townies bring lice into class, and then we have to have our heads scrubbed with Jeyes until they’re almost bleeding. Sometimes they do bleed. It stings like when you cut onions. I don’t remember ever having lice before I came here. Mother Assumpta tells me I was six when I came. I don’t remember. I don’t have a birthday like the other girls. Mother Assumpta says we can celebrate my birthday as the day I came in here, June 21st. It’s only pretend. We don’t tell anyone else. Not even Aisling. Just me and her. She gives me sweets in the laundry, which I’m not allowed to show to anyone. I won’t tell anything. I’m a good girl.
Green and pink and yellow wrappers. I use them to make dresses. That’s my other favourite thing! Aisling asks where did you get those and I tell her to keep her gob shut. She says the convent is a bad place but she’s lying. I’ve already said three good things.
I must have had a father and a mother but no one seems to remember. It was like I was dropped from the sky by a stork, Mother says. But I wasn’t a baby. I was six. How do they know what age I was? And why is it I can’t remember anything?
Mar and I talked about little else besides the disco – how we’d get there, what we’d wear, whether our hair would be up or down. No detail was too small. I stashed a couple of cans from the drinks cabinet under my bed. And Mar was going to steal some of her mother’s fags. Buying cigarettes wasn’t the easiest thing to do, as there was always a danger we wouldn’t be served, or that somehow the news would get back to our parents. You couldn’t do anything in this town.
We decided it best not to ask our parents if we could go. That would blow our chances altogether.
I didn’t go near the graveyard. I didn’t want to see the boy until the night of the disco. I couldn’t bear to. And anyway I didn’t want him thinking I was spying on him.
Mam didn’t look so different then – maybe just as if she’d eaten a few too many custard creams, which she had, so most of the time I could convince myself that it was one of those phantom pregnancies, where women carry ghosts around in their bellies, or that really she was suffering from menopause, though I wasn’t sure what that was.
I started to put things away in my new room – very slowly and reverentially to fold things into themselves. Nothing was ever so neat in my old room. My new room was bigger. It was colder too. One of the radiators was broken and the other one only half worked. Dad said he’d see to them but I knew he’d never get around to it. The walls were white rather than pink. And suddenly I seemed to have fewer things than before. They were stacked neatly against one wall in boxes. I put the few books, trinkets and cassettes I had onto the shelves above my new bed, and left the walls bare. I had all these posters rolled up, but I didn’t know where to put them. Jim Morrison and Laura Palmer didn’t look right on the new walls. The wardrobe was big enough almost that you could walk into it, and my clothes hung in it like dolls’ clothes.
The long mirror opposite the bed frightened me: I could see things moving in it in the darkness. It didn’t matter that I knew it was only my eyes playing tricks. If you looked at your own reflection by candlelight you’d see the devil looking back at you – that’s what people used to say. It didn’t have to be candlelight for me to be frightened out of my wits. Especially reading Celia’s book. I turned the mirror against the wall some nights, but even then I imagined things crawling out of it.
Where before my only view had been of the sky and the tops of the laurel bushes through a skylight, now I had the whole of the back garden. The window was long and narrow. It was strange to be able to see the ground: it made the room feel like a greenhouse, like I could step outside if I wanted to. The birds weren’t as loud from here as they had been upstairs, but I could see more of them before it got dark. I could see the swing, too, and the light fading from the sky above the fields. I had my desk so that it was facing out onto all of this, and at first there were no curtains, only an old thin white sheet, so I was woken early every morning until I adjusted to the light, and my dreams adjusted with it. They became all bright and watery, like I was in a flotation tank or something, and I’d wake as easily as if I had just blinked, barely remembering what it was I had been dreaming about.
I watched out for him as often as I could, though I could hardly make out his shape in the dark. It was pitch-black most afternoons, arctic. And at