50 Years Later, a Victim of Ireland's 'Laundries' Fights for Answers

50 Years Later, a Victim of Ireland’s ‘Laundries’ Fights for Answers

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Elizabeth and Peter Coppin at their home in March, England. Mrs. Coppin, now 69, was placed at age 2 with the Sisters of Mercy in the Nazareth House industrial school in Tralee, Ireland.CreditCreditOlivia Harris for The New York Times



DUBLIN — For 30 years, she struggled with secret memories of beatings and other abuses, as well as most of the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: chronic anxiety, social isolation, compulsive behavior, depression, flashbacks, nightmares and suicidal thoughts.
Finally, 20 years ago, convinced the pain would never subside unless she acted, Elizabeth Coppin, now 69, walked into a police station in her native County Kerry, Ireland. She filed a complaint relating to the 12 years she had spent in an Irish “industrial school,” one of a now-defunct network of state-funded orphanages and reformatories run by religious orders on behalf of the state. Her statement, which the on-duty police officer typed up and signed, was accompanied by two letters that Mrs. Coppin had written in support of her case. “I need answers,” one of them pleads, adding: “The emotional scars I carry with me today are still very real. Please check out everything, please don’t be put off by the nuns. Check everything, dig deep, especially records.” There is no sign, she said in a recent interview, that the Irish police ever investigated her complaint.

A year later, in 1999, she filed a civil action against the Sisters of Mercy, who ran the industrial school, and two other orders — the Religious Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd — who ran two of Ireland’s notorious “Magdalene laundries” where marginalized, unwanted, or “fallen” women and girls lived and worked with little or no pay. Her suit claimed that she had been physically and emotionally abused in the industrial school, then transferred to the laundries without due legal process, having committed no crime. There she had been held against her will and forced to work without pay in deprived conditions. But that case was dismissed by the High Court in Dublin on the grounds that too much time had passed.

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At left, a copy of the complaint Mrs. Coppin filed with the Irish police 20 years ago about her treatment in Ireland’s “industrial schools.” At right, Mrs. Coppin points at herself in a photograph outside Nazareth House industrial school in Tralee.CreditOlivia Harris for The New York Times

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Now, the United Nations Committee Against Torture has agreed to hear Mrs. Coppin’s accusations of systematic human rights violations in the industrial school and the Magdalene laundries, where she spent five years. This time, in what amounts to a test case for all survivors of the laundries, the main target of her complaint will not be the nuns but Ireland itself. She is arguing that despite having paid roughly $30 million to 696 women who survived the laundries, including $63,000 to her, the Irish state has never admitted its role in supporting the laundries. Yet, according to an official report in 2013, thousands of inmates of industrial schools, including Mrs. Coppin, were sent to laundries directly from state care. Those who escaped were often returned by the police.

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Mrs. Coppin and her husband met at a dance in the Hammersmith Palais after she fled Ireland for London. “When I met him it was the first time I ever felt loved,” she said.CreditOlivia Harris for The New York Times

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A picture of Mrs. Coppin, second from right, during a class at Nazareth House in 1963.CreditOlivia Harris for The New York Times

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Sometimes she trembles as she tells her story, sometimes she chokes back her tears, but she is determined to keep searching. “I will never come to terms with the past,” she said. “They violated my human rights, the basic principles of my life. What gave these men and the church the right to deny us our rights, because we were women?”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/world/europe/elizabeth-coppin-magdalene-laundries-abuse-ireland.html