Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries

A Campaign for Justice

Claire McGettrick, Katherine O'Donnell, Maeve O'Rourke, James M. Smith, Mari Steed

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755617500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia irlandese

Between 1922 and 1996, over 10, 000 girls and women were imprisoned in Magdalene Laundries, including those considered 'promiscuous', a burden to their families or the state, those who had been sexually abused or raised in the care of the Church and State, and unmarried mothers. These girls and women were subjected to forced labour as well as psychological and physical maltreatment. Using the Irish State's own report into the Magdalene institutions, as well as testimonies from survivors and independent witnesses, this book gives a detailed account of life behind the high walls of Ireland's Magdalene institutions. The book offers an overview of the social, cultural and political contexts of institutional survivor activism, the Irish State's response culminating in the McAleese Report, and the formation of the Justice for Magdalenes campaign, a volunteer-run survivor advocacy group. Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries documents the ongoing work carried out by the Justice for Magdalenes group in advancing public knowledge and research into Magdalene Laundries, and how the Irish State continues to evade its responsibilities not just to survivors of the Magdalenes but also in providing a truthful account of what happened. Drawing from a variety of primary sources, this book reveals the fundamental flaws in the state's investigation and how the treatment of the burials, exhumation and cremation of former Magdalene women remains a deeply troubling issue today, emblematic of the system of torture and studious official neglect in which the Magdalene women lived their lives. The Authors are donating all royalties in the name of the women who were held in the Magdalenes to EPIC (Empowering People in Care).

1

Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and the lives lived there

The notorious eighteenth-century Penal Laws denied Catholics in Ireland not only religious freedom but also the rights to a formal education and entry into the legal profession and government. Their rights to own and inherit land were also severely curtailed. The result was that the Irish Catholic elite largely became merchants and were educated on the Continent, and an increasingly wealthy Catholic mercantile class became more evident by the end of the eighteenth century. With the outbreak of the French Revolution, a National Seminary was established in Maynooth as Catholicism came to be understood by the British colonial powers as a bulwark against the radical Republicanism that appeared as an imminent and menacing threat. The early decades of the Irish nineteenth century saw a zeal for Catholic emancipation, which became a mass movement led by Daniel O’Connell. The eventual passing of the Emancipation Act of 1829 led to further consolidation of Catholic cultural, social and economic power on the island.¹ Between 1790 and the Famine of 1847 more than 2,000 Catholic Churches were built in Ireland,² even as the vast majority of the country’s Catholic population suffered from exploitation by landlords, starvation due to unequal access to land-holding or coerced emigration. The Catholic Repeal and Revival movements were experienced by Catholics of all classes, wealthy and poor alike, as a resistance to the inequities of colonization. The obligation on all to pay significant taxes to the Protestant Church of Ireland was keenly felt as an injustice by Irish Catholics – all the more so because the foundations of many of the Anglican churches were formerly Roman Catholic in the pre-Reformation era, before the brutal subjugation of the country by Cromwell’s army in the 1640s. As the bishop of Kildare and Leighlin expressed it in the 1820s, ‘They [Catholics] still are bound to rebuild and ornament their own former parish church and spire, that they may stand in the midst of them as records of the right of conquest, or the triumph of law over equity and the public good.’³ Another contemporary Catholic commentator concurred: ‘It is not right that those who live upon potatoes and sour milk, should be called on to build elegant churches for those who fare sumptuously and drink wine every day.’⁴ (The irony appears to be lost on the commentator that the Irish poor were also called upon and indeed responded to the consistent fundraising efforts led by the Catholic hierarchy and clergy.) There is a remarkable consistency in the rhetoric of Catholic fundraisers throughout the nineteenth century: they deployed emotional appeals to overcoming the defeats of the Reformation and colonization and forging a proud national identity of morally upright, economically stable and hence respectable Victorian Irish Catholics.⁵

The Great Famine of 1845–53 resulted in a near annihilation of the cottier class who lived in the worst housing: in the fourth-class cabins with an acre attached to grow their food (potatoes being the favoured crop). Yet in this post-Famine era we see what historians describe as an upward Catholic socio-economic transition – a ‘Catholic embourgeoisement’ – that is a distinct ‘upward’ social mobility, where an increasing number of Catholics entered the respectable and economically secure ranks of the middle class.⁶ The rise of the Catholic middle classes was most evident from the 1860s and is indivisible from the expansion of Catholic religious orders, which offered the Catholic middle class an education and an affirmation of respectability. The growing Irish middle class generously funded their Church which also was adept at seizing on opportunities available through State funding. As James M. Smith describes it,

The governing burden of the British colonial administration was lightened as it increasingly ceded responsibility to the Catholic Church for areas of social welfare including education, health care, and institutional provision. Irish society in general, especially the emerging Catholic middle class, strengthened its identity as a nation; its sense of modernization and progress was increasingly vested in notions of social and moral respectability.⁷

As modern democratic and nationalist states came to be established throughout Europe in the nineteenth century and as European imperialism expanded globally, the Catholic Church hierarchy operated a policy of setting up ‘voluntary’ organizations run by religious orders or laypeople with express allegiance to the institution, in order to assert its power and maintain its relevance within the dominant political structures. The increasing number of Victorian Catholic enterprises across the island of Ireland made manifest the new social, cultural, political and economic successes of Catholics more generally. Irish middle-class women became nuns in significant numbers; at the very beginning of the nineteenth century there were 120 nuns in Ireland and by 1901 there were 35 religious orders of about 8,000 nuns living in 368 convents. This increase occurred at a time when the Irish population went from 6.5 million recorded in the 1841 census to 3.3 million in 1901. In 1800 nuns made up approximately 6 per cent of the Catholic Church’s ordained workforce; by 1851 they comprised about 38 per cent and they were 64 per cent of the Catholic ordinations by the end of the nineteenth century.⁸ The idealization of women in nineteenth-century Ireland was compatible with British Victorian idealization in general terms, and the Magdalene institutions were understood to be part of the ‘rescue’ movement so evident throughout the nineteenth-century British Empire.⁹ The object of ‘rescue’ was the prostitute or ‘wayward’ female who was regarded as ‘fallen’ even from the status of ‘woman’, that idealized paragon who was without sexual drive or sexual experience apart from a dutiful response to facilitating her husband’s desire. The religious sisters were universally admired for embodying sexual chastity, a ‘purity’ essential to idealized womanhood, and the religious sisters of the Magdalene institutions were further admired for sacrificing their pure lives to the rescue of the ‘impure’ and trying to elevate the ‘fallen woman’ to a respectable standard of womanhood. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, an overwhelming majority of the Catholic middle classes supported the IPP who argued that they were capable of Irish nationalist self-governance or ‘Home Rule’ within the British Empire. The Sisters in Ireland’s Magdalenes played their part in confining the disreputable women or the daughters of disreputable women and putting them to penitential hard labour where they could atone for their sins.

From 1895 the IPP lobbied assiduously to ensure that businesses run by religious sisters such as laundries and needlework enterprises would not be subject to legislative oversight. British House of Commons’ debates in 1901 and 1907 reveal how the IPP fought for exemptions from health and safety regulation on behalf of the nuns. The leader of the party, John Redmond, sought to exclude Magdalene Laundries from the Factory and Workshop Act 1901, explaining that these institutions’ mission was to prevent ‘fallen women . . . from continuing with their evil courses’ and that ‘the great object [of the religious orders] was to keep these girls in those institutions’. The Good Shepherd Sisters were ‘unanimously of the opinion that the introduction into their institutions of an outside authority in the shape of Government inspectors would completely destroy the discipline of their institutions’, Redmond maintained.¹⁰ Irish MPs remained steadfast even when English MPs presented evidence of serious abuses involving forced labour in laundries run by the Good Shepherd Order in France. The IPP’s position, so tenaciously defended in Westminster, was to become official Irish Free State policy.

Ireland’s War of Independence, which concluded in 1921, led to the end of British rule in twenty-six of the island’s thirty-two counties and established the Irish Free State / Saorstát Éireann. In the newly independent Ireland, the ten remaining Magdalene institutions, all Catholic in ethos and operated by four congregations of nuns, were about to receive a renewed lease of life.¹¹ As Maria Luddy notes, in Ireland’s revolutionary period and in the early years of independence, the Magdalene institutions became carceral institutions rather than temporary refuges.¹² Irish patriots, with the support of the newly empowered Catholic hierarchy, were eager to establish control in symbolic and material terms. Maternity and social reproduction became significant territory on which to assert a national patriarchal discourse of moral probity and purity, particularly when opposed to the former colonizer. The British Empire might possess vast wealth and political power, but the fledging Free State would cultivate supremacy on the high moral ground – or so the argument ran. Ireland would be triumphantly Catholic above all else.

Political discourse in support of this aspiration was distinctly gendered in the Free State: men immediately began to establish their new-found powers of self-governance by demonstrating control over the firepower of militarized men and the sexuality and reproductive powers of women, in particular the bodies of impoverished women and their children. The Irish establishment was keen both to demonstrate to their former British overlords that they could maintain law and order and to gain international recognition for the high moral order of the country. This morality became most evident in the State-sanctioned Catholic religiosity of the nation. Irish society’s ubiquitous religious expression was not something imposed on the everyday culture of the people by dominant powers; rather, it was understood by the vast majority of the people to be intrinsic to the freedom won from colonial oppression. The allegiance of the overwhelming majority of Free State (and later Irish Republic) citizens to the Catholic Church was deep; the people had a profound and intimate attachment to the moral teachings, metaphysical view, folk and canonical rituals, and consolation provided by a much-loved Church.¹³

The Irish establishment, meanwhile, emerged from the symbiotic dyad of Catholic Church and State bodies that combined to copper-fasten a monopoly on power in the new country. In 1931 the publication of a Papal encyclical by Pope Pius XI entitle d Quadragesimo Anno provided a clear manifesto and rationale for the Catholic Church’s practice of establishing voluntary bodies to run educational, health, social welfare and carceral institutions. The encyclical called for harmony between the social classes in order to defeat the spread of socialism. It argued against a strong State and big government in favour of the principle of ‘subsidiarity’, claiming that it was a disturbance of the Natural Law to assign to a higher association (government) what lesser and subordinate organizations could do. The Pope recommended that the State should merely regulate subsidiary organizations’ provision of social services. The Catholic Church hierarchy applied this policy in earnest and were masterful at harnessing State resources to social and educational initiatives which were managed by clergy, Catholic religious orders and lay Catholic organizations.¹⁴ John Charles McQuaid, who served as archbishop of Dublin from 1940 to 1972, was particularly adept at persuading successive Irish governments to finance Church involvement in what is still a large ‘voluntary sector’ while retaining ecclesiastical control of these projects.¹⁵ The Catholic Church’s pre-eminent political and cultural position in mid-twentieth-century Ireland can be seen most clearly in its resounding defeat of Dr Noël Browne’s ‘Mother and Child Scheme’ which was rejected because it was a plan for socialized medicine.¹⁶

Concern for the plight of the girls and women confined in Magdalene Laundries continued to be voiced throughout the twentieth century, yet time and again the governing elite ignored all complaints. Early on, the Irish State strengthened the religious orders’ hand by deliberately excluding their commercial operations from the Census of Production after the 1926 Preliminary Report on Laundry, Dyeing and Cleaning Trades revealed that nearly half (thirty-seven) of the eighty returns for commercial laundry work came from religious institutions (‘Convents, Penitentiaries, Female Industrial Schools, etc.’). The report states that ‘The amounts charged to customers in 1926 for laundry work done by such institutions amounted to £97,325’. It further acknowledges that the workers (referred to as ‘inmates’) engaged in this commercial laundry work were not paid for their labour.¹⁷

In 1936, the Conditions of Employment Act exempted all institutions ‘carried on for charitable or reformatory purposes’ from the requirement to pay wages to their industrial workers.¹⁸ While this legislation otherwise applied to the Magdalene Laundries, as did the Factories Act 1955 and subsequent regulations, State records show that only piecemeal inspections of Magdalene Laundries took place from 1957 onwards. The records also show that the factory inspectors merely ensured that the machines and processes of production met health and safety regulations, and none spoke to the incarcerated workforce or inquired into their living conditions, or lack of wages and social security payments.¹⁹ The archives show that State officials were involved in directing and escorting girls and women to the convents, in particular Court Probation Officers, but there is not one instance recorded of State officials ensuring their release at the end of the appointed sentences.²⁰

It was not until 1970 and the publication of The Reformatory and Industrial Schools Systems Report (known as the Kennedy Report) that we see a published official objection to the use of Magdalene Laundries as places of arbitrary detention. The Report stated that ‘at least 70 girls between the ages of 13 and 19 years’ were confined in the laundries when they ‘should properly be dealt with under the Reformatory Schools system’; the Report concluded:

This method of voluntary arrangement for placement can be criticised on a number of grounds. It is a haphazard system, its legal validity is doubtful and the girls admitted in this irregular way and not being aware of their rights, may remain for long periods and become, in the process, unfit for re-emergence into society. In the past, many girls have been taken into these convents and remained there all their lives.²¹

The Kennedy R...