The Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary for the Protection of Irish Immigrant Girls

Maureen Murphy writes about the Mission girls.

That image became a call to action and she described herself as “tumbling” into the fight to improve conditions for emigrant girls: departure, transit and reception. She started with emigrant lodging houses in Queenstown (now Cobh, Co. Cork) where unscrupulous boarding house keepers took advantage of emigrants waiting to board their liners. She opened her own O’Brien Emigrant Boarding House at West Beach, Queenstown on April 1, 1882. It was a daunting task for a middle-aged single woman who had modest resources and was almost profoundly deaf. Her fellow Queenstown lodging house owners were so hostile that they urged local merchants to boycott her. She had to bring in every loaf of bread and pound of tea from Cork city.

Improving the boardinghouses was the first step in improving conditions for Irish emigrant girls. There were other dangers: the ocean journey itself and the emigrant’s reception on arrival. In fall, 1882, Charlotte accepted an offer of free passage aboard the White Star’s Baltic. The last couplet in her sonnet “Ireland-Farewell” affirmed her commitment to a life devoted to the welfare of her country:
“Rather henceforth shall my
rejoicing be / That God hath given me
life to live for thee.”

O’Brien arrived quietly in New York City  and spent a month with a longshoreman’s family in a tenement house on Washington Street, near the site of the former World Trade Center, where she acquainted herself with immigrant conditions in the city. Then she went west in October to see John Ireland, Bishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, the member of the American Catholic hierarchy who would be the most receptive to her proposal that there be a home for immigrant girls arriving in the Port of New York. She later recalled that when she said to Bishop Ireland, “I am only the plank over the stream, it is you, the Catholic Church, who have to build the bridge,” he told her, “You need not fear, Miss O’Brien, I will not let this matter drop.”

O’Brien returned to controversy in Ireland in 1883. The influential John Boyle O’Reilly, Irish Republican Brotherhood member, who himself had been transported to Australia and was now the editor of the Boston Pilot, denounced her as a British agent whose emigrant boardinghouse and plans for an American home for Irish immigrant girls facilitated the government’s assisted-emigrant scheme, the scheme that helped landlords clear their estates of poor tenants.

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Nster.com