Don't know about now, but it was still there the last time Google maps were flapping around, because you can see it, if you know what to search for.

Go to Google Maps, type in "Cork City Gaol Ireland", a historic prison which is at least honestly-named. Put it on Satellite View and zoom in on the Gaol (Pin A), which close-up looks like two grey crosses enclosed by an oval. The laundry is just next to it, on the right, a cluster of handsome red-brick edifices, burned out since 2003. (Insurance fire?) Study it and weep.

The author Frank O'Connor, whose real name was Michael O'Donovan (and whose boyhood home I also used to live near) took the surname O'Connor, in honour of his mother Minnie O'Connor. She and her crippled sister grew up in Good Shepherd - I can't remember whether they were laundry girls or not, but life was still very hard there. He writes of her in his autobiography, and her sufferings through her life are the equal of anything that Angela McCourt ("Angela's Ashes") went through. To be fair, many of these woes were not the fault of the convent, but Frank is bitterly critical of the whole organisation for what she did endure. It's a very poignant read, in two volumes, which I heartily recommend.

Volume I deals with his early years - surprise, surprise - and is called "An Only Child". What it brings home to you is just how hard day-to-day existence was for so many of the Irish if they fell into the wrong social or economic category. (Going to be that way again too, considering what today's budget has done to the welfare and health services.)

I used to go to parties right around the corner from Good Shepherd, from when I first moved to Ireland in 1991 throughout the decade, and nearly moved into a nice flat near the foot of it. We don't know we're born, do we?