Galway woman who rescued the Magdalen girls from a living hell

It might seem more at home in Hollywood or as part of a World War II thriller – but the bravery of one Galway family who conspired to smuggle more than ten women out of the city’s Magdalen Laundry can only now be fully appreciated in the aftermath of the publication of the McAleese Report.

Even more astonishing was the fact that the whole thing was organised from the inside – by a Galway woman who was a Magdalen employee, but who was never even suspected of her part in the daring plan.

Ena McEntee – nee Kennedy from New Road in the city – was one of a handful of local people paid to work alongside the women who were detained against their will in the Forster Street laundry, where she saw daily the brutality and beatings suffered by the women of all ages.

Her own three teenage sons also saw what was going on – and between them they hatched a plan to free some of the women under cover of darkness. Even more astonishingly, they then hid them in their three-bed family home in Mervue for weeks afterwards, where no one – apart from the immediate neighbours – suspected a thing.

Ironically Ena herself had four sisters who were already Mercy nuns, while she herself had qualified as a nurse but battled alcoholism throughout her life.

Now – after the truth of the terror inflicted on thousands of women forcibly detained at the Magdalen laundries around the country – her family want their mother’s bravery acknowledged.

Her sons Andy and Hugo, like their own father Hugh P, are involved in the newspaper distribution business and their younger brother Declan is a well known taxi driver in the city – and all three of them played their part in this series of Great Escapes on a number of different occasions back in the mid-Sixties.

Read the full, astonishing story in this week's Connacht Tribune.