Fire crews extinguish another fire at derelict  northside former Magdalene Laundry

A northside councillor has said that, if something is not done soon, it is “only a matter of time” before lives are lost in a derelict former convent and Magdalene Laundry which has once again suffered a fire.

The former Good Shepherd Convent site in Sunday’s Well suffered its fifth blaze in recent years on Friday evening, with two units of Cork Fire Brigade putting out what they described as “ a rubbish fire inside the building”.

It is understood that this fire was not serious.

Kenneth Collins, Sinn Féin councillor for the Cork City North West ward, said it was “absolutely disgraceful behaviour out of the owners of the property” that the property had been allowed to fall into dereliction.

“This is the fifth fire in the last several years and they need to do something about it, because someone is going to get killed there, trapped in a fire, it isn’t good enough.

“I will be raising this matter with Cork City Council alongside my colleague Michelle Gould, and we will be calling on the council to carry out a compulsory purchase order and do something with the site, because if this continues, it will be only a matter of time before someone is killed,” Mr Collins said.

“It’s unbelievable that another fire is taking up resources, and that is a difficult site for the Fire Brigade to get into.” In September 2018, Drogheda-based Moneda Developments Limited secured planning permission through An Bord Pleanála with a proposal to build 234 apartments at the site, which has remained derelict since.

The site was placed on Cork City Council’s derelict sites register in 2019.

Last year, following a number of reports of anti-social behaviour on the property, Fianna Fáil councillor Tony Fitzgerald called on the site’s owners to secure it before someone was seriously injured.

“The owners of Good Shepherd Covent must respond to residents’ concerns about health and safety issues at the site, and trespassing issues which will only increase over the summer months,” Mr Fitzgerald said.

“I am calling on the owners to take immediate action, as a lack of security at the site is attracting anti-social behaviour there regularly.” 

He said the ruined convent was in extremely poor condition and he described as “an accident waiting to happen” reports of young people repeatedly accessing the upper storeys of the western section of the building.

Completed in 1881, the site is a former Magdalene Laundry and is also home to the mortal remains of Ellen Organ, better known as “Little Nellie of Holy God”, a girl who died aged just four in 1908, and who is venerated within the Catholic Church as “the unofficial patron saint of Cork”. Little Nellie is buried in the nuns’ graveyard on the north-east edge of the site.

There is also a mass grave at the north-west extreme of the site, at the top of a sheer hill and beneath a vandalised memorial stone cross, containing an uncertain number of women who died in the Magdalene Laundry. 

Thirty names are recorded on the memorial but – as reported by Conall Ó Fátharta in the Irish Examiner – four of those women are also recorded as being buried, in two separate mass graves, in St Joseph’s Cemetery. 

One of those graves was only discovered by Justice For Magdalenes Research in 2012, when they also found a grave in Kilcully Cemetery. 

That grave appears to contain later burials from both the Good Shepherd and Peacock Lane laundries.

The Echo was unsuccessful in attempts to contact Moneda Developments.