I'd like to see you tell it to the lady concerned.

I also overheard her comments, which were made to the councillors she mistakenly thought had approved the listing, at the public meeting last year. Incidentally, she also referred to the Magdalen Sisters, and was very angry on behalf of those 'inmates' she had known, suggesting not only that they would have been unimpressed by the listing, but that they would actually have cheered the bulldozers.

So while you may consider some awareness or respect for those involved with a particular part of history who were not in a position to document their experiences for posterity to be 'sanctimonious' or 'priggish', I would like to suggest that it is the dismissal of these experiences in the name of preserving bricks and mortar in aspic which can sometimes (although not always) fall into those categories.

Whatever happens to Louise House, I think it is very important that there is some form of display which commemorates the kind of lives the girls there would have led sensibely, without glorifying the original philanthropic intent at the expense of the suffering endured.