3. Lost Girls of the Magdalen Asylums: Helen from Gloucester Street Laundry
Helen was sent to an industrial school when she was two years old. Her parents could no longer take care of her or her seven siblings. Sent to an industrial school, Helen was sent from school to school until she entered the Gloucester Street Laundry in Dublin at 16. Never living in the outside world, Helen gave birth to twin girls when she was 19. Her daughters were adopted when they were 9 months old. She gave birth again at 22 to a boy. When her daughters met her, Helen had an emotional breakdown as she never remembered giving birth to them or their brother.
At the Laundry, Helen’s day began at 4 am where she prayed the rosary in the cold in urine-soaked clothes. Helen was a persistent bed-wetter for which she suffered humiliating abuse from the nuns. Work in the laundry lasted until after sundown. When Helen and her fellow inmates had downtime, they embroidered and made baskets that were sold in town. None of the inmates received pay for their labor in the laundry or from the goods they made. She represents the hundreds of women who were placed in the laundries by the State and then simply forgotten about. Helen died one day shy of her 51st birthday.