Another view of Goldenbridge

TERESITA Durkan is a mild mannered, optimistic sort of person who greets me with a warm handshake and a serious, purposeful look in her eye. A former nun who spent five years living and working in the Sisters of Mercy community at Goldenbridge, Inchicore, Dublin during the now notorious 1950s era, she has just written her memoirs of that period of her life.

Golden bridge - A View From Valparaiso is a short, easy to read book in a gentle, nostalgic tone far removed from the horrific tales of abuse and neglect spoken of by former residents of the orphanage at Goldenbridge during the same period.

A look of exasperation crosses Durkan's face when I bring up the inevitable subject of the revelations in the Dear Daughter drama documentary shown on RTE in February of last year. How does she reconcile such disturbing stories of physical abuse and mental anguish with her memories of the same place at the same time?

"My first reaction to the programme was that these were exaggerated, heightened, isolated experiences. That is not to say that those who went through these experiences don't have real, subjective, painful memories and I don't doubt the veracity of those involved, but the very nature of a drama documentary is to select, focus and heighten experiences," she begins.

"These people must have very painful memories to have lived in conditions where there was nobody to be their real Mammy, Daddy or Big Sister," she continues, explaining, however, that although she lived in the community, she never worked in the orphanage at Goldenbridge.

Nonetheless, her motivation for writing Goldenbridge - A View From Valparaiso was directly linked to the huge focus of public attention that fell upon the place, following the transmission of Dear Daughter. Now based in Valparaiso, Chile where she has worked with the poor since the late 1980s, she felt the urge to commit her memories of Goldenbridge to paper. In the first part of her book Durkan simply recounts her life as a Co Mayo- born novice in her early 20s - experiences of teaching primary school children in poverty-striken Inchicore, attending night lectures at UCD in Earlsfort Terrace and her relationships within the convent.

"In the second part of the book, I am trying to find why a place like Goldenbridge which, in my experience, put an enormous effort into fighting against poverty, should suddenly run into a cloudburst of negative appraisal," she says. "Initially, I found this disconcerting, sad and then challenging."

Speaking to Durkan, one realises that her reason for writing her Goldenbridge memoirs was not to clear the name of the Sisters of Mercy, but instead to provide the Ireland of the 1990s with a sociological context in which such things may have happened.

"We have to remember that we had just been through the second World War, where everybody was in uniform, obeying orders in a regimented way. Thus there was a higher tolerance for being abrupt, giving orders and getting things done in a regimented manner.

"In a society like this, you can lose sight of the sensitivities and sensibilities of people - particularly children.

"Society had a very low esteem for these places and those who worked in them were very poorly and untrained professionally.

In her book, Durkan admits to seldom having been inside the orphanage building in her five years in Goldenbridge. Sister Xaveria, the nun at the centre of the Goldenbridge controversy last year, was not among the nuns she knew well. "I was very relieved I wasn't sent to work in the orphanage because it was not very highly esteemed work and you were on call 24 hours a day," she says.

"In an ongoing commitment to the struggle against poverty, we have to ask what can we learn from this? What is it that we didn't share back then, neither in the ethic nor the atmosphere of the time?

"We didn't share ourselves, our own lives, our sense of one person to another simply because society was, at that time, very authoritarian, structured and hierarchical. This wouldn't be the way to approach the struggle against poverty today because now, we recognise that what you share ultimately with someone else is not just material well-being but your sense of personhood, your sense of life, love and compassion."

SPEAKING of convent life during these times, Durkan adds: "Society is very resourceful in certain ways when it can't pay for a service at market rates: it finds other ways of getting the job done. Irish women were encouraged to form communities where their energies were directed towards providing health care and education services and pooling their salaries to expand these services. Their rewards, if any, were meant to be spiritual. This system was posited on a very idealised view of human nature that many people couldn't live up to. If I had to live that life now, I couldn't."