Campaigners urge council not to accept bid for Magdalene laundry as 9,000 sign petition to stop sale
More than 9,200 people signed a petition calling on Dublin City Council to call a halt to its plans to sell off the Magdalene laundry site to a Japanese hotel chain.
Tokyo Inn has offered the local authority €14.5m for the two-acre site and plans to build to a 350-bed hotel, student accommodation, and shops. It also plans to build 60 apartments for social housing. The plans also include a permanent memorial to the women who worked in the laundry until its closure in 1996.
In recent weeks, Dublin City councillors have received numerous calls from campaigners to halt its plans to sell the site.
Elizabeth Coppin, who was in three separate Magdalene laundries, wrote to councillors “begging” them to “think carefully before you vote on selling this historical building”.
Do all of you individually and collectively want to be known as the councillors who sold an important part of Irish history?” she wrote. “I can’t see the logic of another hotel. Dublin has plenty of them.
Ms Coppin asked councillors to “think carefully before you vote”.
“Think of the thousands of Irish women who were enslaved and lived a life of abuse when in this laundry,” she said. “Any of the women held captive in this laundry could have been a relative of yours. It could have been your mother, sister, grandmother, daughter, or wife. Show compassion, humanity, and respect for the women enslaved in the laundry by voting against the sale of this building.”
Social Democrats councillor Gary Gannon, who tabled a motion to halt the sale, said selling the site would be “an act of cultural vandalism”.
“We spent long enough brushing issues we didn’t like under the carpet — we cannot continue to do that,” he said. “We cannot learn from our history without facing up to our past to abuses which society tolerated, and to abuses which continue to impact on those who were institutionalised in laundries, in industrial schools, and those who continue to live with the impact of clerical sexual abuse.”
Ending Clergy Abuse, a worldwide organisation of survivors and human rights activists calling on the Catholic Church to end abuse, also wrote to councillors urging them to halt the sale.
“This site must be preserved as a permanent public memorial of the brutality and injustice perpetrated upon vulnerable girls and young women by the Irish state and the Catholic Church,” the group said.
This is not only important to remember the victims of the Magdalene laundries, but all other victims of abuse in Catholic institutions in Ireland and around the world.
“In a museum, similar to war museums and Holocaust memorials, present and future generations can learn about this horrific history and work on a better future where this will not be allowed to happen again. Please let this site become a place of speech and remembrance of the suffering of so many.”
