Documenting our Heritage

The Good Shepherd Magdalen Convent

Sundays Well, Cork.

The Good Shepherd Convent, Magdalen Assylum first opened it's doors in Sunday's Well, Cork on the 29th July 1872. It was the site of an orphanage and a Magdalene laundry until the late 1970s. The three main buildings - a home, convent, and orphanage have been in a derelict condition since a serious fire in 2003. The laundry building was among a number of buildings that were destroyed in that fire.

The existence of the Magdalen asylums was little thought of until, in 1993, an order of nuns in Dublin sold part of their convent to a real estate developer. The remains of 155 inmates buried in unmarked graves were discovered, and exhumed. All except for one body were cremated and reburied in a mass grave.

This triggered a public scandal and became local and national news in 1999.

Mary Norris, Josephine McCarthy and Mary-Jo McDonagh, all asylum inmates, gave accounts of their treatment. The 1998 Channel 4 documentary Sex in a Cold Climate interviewed former inmates of Magdalen Asylums who testified to continued sexual, psychological and physical abuse while being isolated from the outside world for an indefinite amount of time.

The conditions of Good Shepherd Convent, Magdalen Laundry Assylum and the treatment of the inmates was dramatized in the acclaimed film The Magdalene Sisters (2002), written and directed by Peter Mullan.