Ireland’s disappeared
Magdalenes? What Magdalenes?
…it was Ireland’s hidden scandal: an estimated 30,000 women were sent to church-run laundries, where they were abused and worked for years with no pay. Their offense, in the eyes of society, was to break the strict sexual rules of Catholic Ireland, having children outside wedlock.
Their “offense” – but it wasn’t a mere offense, was it, it was a crime. We know this because of what the passage says: the women were imprisoned for years. They got the kind of sentence a convicted murderer gets. They were locked up, for years, and abused and worked for no pay. That’s an extremely harsh prison sentence – for having children outside marriage.
Until recently, the Catholic Church was the ultimate moral authority in Ireland, and it promoted strict rules on sex. In this climate, the shame of giving birth to an illegitimate child was so great that many unmarried mothers were rejected by their families. They were taken out of “decent society” and put into Magdalene laundries by members of the clergy, government institutions and their own families.
In Ireland it was a crime to have a child outside marriage – a crime for a woman, that is; naturally no man was ever locked up and worked for years for that crime – but it wasn’t a crime to imprison women without trial and treat them like shit for many years. That’s Catholic morality – sex is the worst crime there is, as long as it’s not a priest doing it, and imprisoning, abusing and exploiting girls and women is no crime at all. That’s Catholic priorities. That’s what life is like when the church gets to run everything.
I’d like Karen Armstrong to explain that.
The Magdalene laundries were a network of profit-making workhouses run by four religious communities — the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Charity, the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity…
Magdalene women worked long hours, typically seven days a week, without pay. There have been accounts of the harsh conditions the women endured, including allegations of mental, physical and, in some cases, sexual abuse. Many lived and died behind convent walls until the last laundry closed in 1996.
Because they had sex. Life imprisonment at hard labor for having sex.
The Irish government acknowledged as far back as 2001 that the Magdalene women were victims of abuse but says that because the laundries were privately run, they are outside its remit. It has resisted numerous calls for a statutory inquiry, the latest from the Irish Human Rights Commission in November 2010. The government also rejected proposals for compensation, saying that the state “did not refer individuals, nor was it complicit in referring individuals to the laundries.”
However, there is evidence that the state was involved. The Irish courts routinely sent women who were handed down a suspended sentence for petty crimes to the laundries, which operated as a kind of parallel detention system.
Public records show the government also awarded lucrative contracts to the nuns for its army and hospital laundry without ever insisting on fair wages for the “workers,” nor did it inspect conditions inside.
Testimony from Magdalene women claim that state employees like the Irish police force and social workers brought women to the laundries and returned those who had escaped.
It’s foul.
1996!
That is so recent. More to say on continuums later, but it’s this sort of thing that always makes me wonder what is going on RIGHT NOW.
I know. 1996 – absolutely mind-boggling, isn’t it?
It’s not just because they had sex.
I wonder how easy it was to get someone locked away by saying, “I saw her flirting”?
‘The Magdalene laundries were a network of profit-making workhouses run by four religious communities — the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Charity, the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity.’ Not much sisterly mercy, charity or even good shepherding: particularly when you read that 150 bodies were discovered in unmarked graves when one such workhouse closed down. And the Irish state washes its hands…
How about this, from the Wikipedia article “Magdalene asylum”:
I’m increasingly beginning to think that the claims that religion provides solace and comfort to people is actually highly questionable. It is rather like hitting a child and then hugging them and then hitting them again and repeating the process, and then claiming that religion provides solace and comfort. No, it’s not providing solace and comfort, it’s conditioning people into slavery.
Yes, religion is very much like abuse. Congregants are told that they are worthless, evil sinners from birth–no matter how good they have actually been in life–and that the only way to be good is to accept the ‘love’ and authority of God through the church. Disgusting.
“I’d like Karen Armstrong to explain that.”
But that’s not her religion!
I wish this sort of behavior surprised me but it doesn’t, the sheep will always flock to the shepherd like lambs to the slaughter.
But these women didn’t flock to those sisterly representatives of the Good Shepherd: they were harried there.
Don’t miss Joni Mitchell’s biting, bitter story of a woman who was branded a Jezebel at 27 and sent to the laundries.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_KK6qOlb30
Much to say, not necessarily about the basic facts as there’s not much more to be said about what went on, it’s bad, all the way down, and indefensible. My mind is wondering to some of the other stuff I’ve been reading over the last couple of weeks for the philosophy subject I’m doing right now.
The topic for the second last week was historic injustice and indigenous rights. (I’m in Australia, FYI) The readings all discussed how and why and where you delineate between past injustice, whether current generations should be held accountable in any way for past injustice, etc. There’s obviously much to be said about it, but one of the take home messages I got is that you really can’t easily distinguish between present and past if what was going on has never been properly dealt with or there is still injustice continuing now, with no clear cut off, like there was with truth and reconciliation in Sth Africa, or post WWII Germany. To bring it back to the catholics, if the pattern is the same, and the behavior is the same and the results are the same, and we’re still going to be having a variant of this discussion next year, 2 years, 10 years later, then there’s no cut off where history ends and the present begins. Clearly, like the Australian government and the Stolen Generations, the Catholic Church wants to create the appearance of truth and reconciliation, of dealing with it’s problems once and for all, but it never actually wants to deal with them.
I found this a useful little graphic from an excellent show out here called Hungry Beast. Hopefully the vid works outside of oz:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ1_aQz6IuU
For my final essay I’ve been reading up on our fucking disgraceful treatment of asylum seekers. Reading many different sources, including this (http://www.quarterlyessay.com/issue/sending-them-home-refugees-and-new-politics-indifference) Quarterly Essay from 2003, and Julian Burnside’s excellent Watching Brief.
We have men women and children locked up in places that are frankly worse than prisons who have committed no crime. The quarterly essay is talking about recent history, but it makes it hard to listen to the current discussion, completely politicised as it is, with Liberals telling us that it’s all the current Labor government’s fault, when it’s just a clear continuation. (http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/warnings-of-more-detention-centre-deaths-20110329-1cemm.html) A news report from 2 months ago that could have been seven years ago. This is something that is happening NOW, it didn’t magically fix itself in the last seven years!
Woah, absolute ramble again. And very much on a tangent from Ophelia’s blog post.
I don’t know, I’m just wondering how these cycles are broken. My gut tells me the answer is actually saying something and actually opposing these things as we discover them, and not being afraid to say that this stinks RIGHT HERE AND NOW.
BBC4’s 1997 doc “Sex in a Cold Climate,” the documentary that inspired the film “The Magdalene Sisters”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJs-4cncGmk
PZ Myers, in writing about these ‘sisters’, also draws attention to this (his words):
‘a documentary has been broadcast in Ireland (but it’s also available on the web) describing the horrific abuse of African children by Irish Catholic missionaries. One of the perks of being a missionary in Africa was that one could pick up a young boy or girl for cheap — promise them a path out of grinding poverty, and an education, for instance — and have a live-in sexual servant for the duration of their stay. Don’t watch it if you’re sensitive to personal stories of abuse: they interview many of the victims, who are broken and ashamed and overwhelmed by the betrayals of the church.’
The documentary is harrowing.
Like Tim Harris, I was particularly disgusted by the revoltingly ironic names of the orders– Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity. Reading down the comments, it just gets worse and worse. Can the Catholic Church be convicted of something like War Crimes?? It just turns my stomach to read this– and yet, we cannot turn away. Every case of blatant immorality on the part of the Catholic Church should be publicized, publicized, publicized until people wake up and vote with their feet.
In the documentary PZ draws attention to, it is said that the Catholic church in Africa grew (I think I recall it rightly) by 7000 percent during the 20th century, and one of the people interviewed said that the Catholic church is coming to regard Africa as its main source of souls, money and power (not in so many words, but…). I imagine the same is coming to be true of the Anglican church, whose faithful in Africa I suspect far exceed the remaining faithful in Britain or in any other single country where the Anglican church used to be strong. And then there are the activities of evangelising American churches in Africa, with all the grief that has brought, and with the help of the Catholics, will bring to those who are gay – not to mention the difficulties being put in the way of contraception, abortion, etc.
Its foul
You should add – Bastards , Demons, Fiends. Seems to go with anything related to the Catholic church.
The Catholic Church casts such a dark shadow over the history of this country. It’s why I scoff when anybody tries to talk to me about “the good old days.”
A few years I had occasion to visit Letterfrack, site of a former Industrial School, part of the same system as the Magdalen laundries. A bleak building in the middle of nowhere. The most chilling thing was a local casually mentioning that ‘bodies sometimes turn up in the soil round here’.
Regarding the Catholic focus on ensnaring souls in Africa, that of course was why Mugabe was invited to the Vatican recently – an invitation that in addition to being utterly cynical, is surely a warning: for how is the Catholic church going to use the power that accrues to it in a continent whose governments are often weak or corrupt, and which are unlikely to stand against the church in its endeavours to maintain and extend its authority against, and immunity from, secular governance? Perhaps we need to wake up a bit to what is going on in Africa.
It wasn’t just a limited set of institutions in which this happened. My mother went to a local convent school in a town called Kells in county Meath as a day student. She occasionally mentioned to me about ‘orphans’ who lived there permanently. She describes them as living a life of utter slavery, ruled by the nuns who ran the school. I think the whole experience instilled a deep distrust of the church in her that she never lost.
There was talk a few years ago about prosecuting the Vatican using RICO. I’m wondering how widely that strategy can be used today?
There is of course already a strong influence on the Anglican church from the African bishops regarding such matters as the appointment of gay bishop; and Rowan Williams seems unable to stand up to it.
It is depressingly unsurprising that the RCC is once again discovered at the heart of yet another instance of consummate wickedness. Given that a make-believe deity “grounds” their morality the morality will also be make-believe.
But make-believe is what it’s all about. Believe it, have faith, trust us. All those words: Sisters, Mercy, Charity, Good Shepherd. This good shepherd grinds his flock on the treadmill, overlooks abuses (in more than one sense), and thanks god for the fat fleeces. Sisters? But in Christ, you mustn’t forget that bit.
But then there is this:
How can the activities of Irish private enterprises on Irish soil be outside the remit of the Irish government? Don’t they even want their taxes? Perhaps they call it “rent”.
Money, then. They’d have to pay. Also apologise, grovel, even, god forbid, prosecute people. And pity the poor Church. They’d have to pay back all those tithes and laundry profits and and…And perhaps (but surely god will forbid it?) melt down a few gold crosses !
Karen Armstrong. Well, let me guess: God doesn’t “exist” and true religion is really all about compassion. Ha ha ha ha ha…..
I was forgetting that a Church laundry would be a charity, so it wouldn’t pay taxes. Well then, support for enterprise, good for the economy, deal with a perceived social “problem”, and go to heaven. Women pay the real bill, but that’s their fault for being so, well, female, isn’t it. The RCC mops up the outcasts of society and reforms them. How compassionate. It can start a profit-making concern, talk about repentance, and tut-tut at the sinfulness of a society which is not at all their fault.
The bit about it being private does disturb me. Does the Irish government think that people can give away their rights (as if going into such a hell was voluntary, but …)? I’ve wondered about that for a while now …
Isn’t it time for some enterprising young politicians to arrest the bishops, seize the assets of the Catholic church, and solve all their budgetary problems while bring justice to decades of victims?
It’s too early in the morning to be reading such depressing material. Maybe that’s why my first thought when I read the title was, “It has?”
This is the sort of thing you’d think would have gone on until 1896, perhaps, in a sane and decent world (ie, fantasy land). Then again, in that sane and decent world, it wouldn’t have started, let alone need to be stopped. But for it to only have been abolished in 1996… And as others have said, these are the practices we know about. Perhaps we can get the child molestation to stop by 2096? Seems about par for the speed of progress within the church.
Sigmund, your mother, in all probability, also heard about the Cavan industrial school fire, which resulted in the deaths of 35 children and one elderly lay worker. As Kells is not too far away from the ex-industrial school. Incidentally, I was on innumerable occasions in Kells, Sisters of Mercy, convent, visiting a very kind nun. The latter was very progressive and eventually moved into accommodation in the town. i remember telling her about the atrocities of the Sisters of Mercy at Goldenbridge. The weight of how children were treated in the past by those of whom she was a Sister in Christ with, in the same congregation, bore very heavily on her heart. Prior to encountering this very kind nun i had an absolute aversion and trembling fear of the Sisters of Mercy. I expect the disbandment of the antediluvian eerie black robes – post Vatican 11, also made it possible to relate to the nun. My mother went to – nearby from Kells, St Martha’s boarding school. She held very bad memories of one particular nun there who treated her viciously because of her very ‘tall stature’. She had plans of joining a religious order, up till that specific time.
i personally knew a sister of one of Mullan’s “The Magdalene Sisters” characters. Her sister told me that the sister had lived in Scotland and was very relieved to pour out her story to the right sources, before she died. Sadly it was six months before the setting up of the respective commission to inquire into child institutional abuse and the residential redress board. (Note: euphemism in *residential*). Children were incarcerated by the courts and were *inmates* not *residents*. Both siblings had been in the same industrial school in Ireland. Lots of inmates, after serving their time in industrial schools, till they were 16 years old, went straight into Magdalen Laundries. The industrial schools religious management you see, were only paid capitation grants for inmates, up to the age of 16. The inmates knew absolutely about the outside world. They went from one prison system into another one. They knew no different. They discarded their prison number for that of a penitent’s new religious saint name.
There is another story to be told of the children of the Magdalen *penitents* who were snatched away from them after a short nursing period. They were apparently sold off to rich people in America. Parenthood books about the stolen, disappeared offspring of the penitents would definitely sell like hot cakes?
1996 is not too surprising. Divorce was still illegal in Ireland until the same year, having been outlawed by a constitutional ban which was only overturned by the slightest of margins in the 1995 referendum.
Thanks for your post Marie-Therese, it’s fascinating to hear these details from someone who knows them first hand.
Indeed. Anybody who doesn’t already know about them should check out Marie-Therese’s two articles here about life at Goldenbridge (another industrial “school”).
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2006/the-goldenbridge-secret-rosary-bead-factory/
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2007/goldenbridge-ii/
Beats me. Given that said enterprises were criminal – I really don’t know. These girls and women were simply abducted and held in unlawful confinement for years and years, decades and decades. In addition they were abused and enslaved. Was slavery actually legal in Ireland until 1996? I don’t think so! Yet the Irish state is saying it can’t touch “private” crimes. It’s such bullshit it beggars belief.
Just looking though my copy of The Purple Economy…
Stories from The Rock newspaper in Australia.
October 17 1947
NSW Police return a 45 yr old woman to a Sydney Convent of the Good Shepherd where she had been incarcerated for 14 years “Without a magistrates order”
Dec 2 1948
JWW Cambell The Rock Editor defames Hobarts Arch Deacon on order to bring the magdalane laundry to court to bring it to public attention.
March 3 ArchDeacon issues a writ
September 15 ArchDeacon dies from a heart attack.
The book has a copy of letters from th 1940s, that where published in The Rock newspaper. Sadly it had to wait for 50 more years for justice to be done..well actually no justice hass yet been done, so lets change that to “Their story has started to be told”
1996. Amazing. Back then I was still trying to bend over backwards to ’be fair’ to religion by pointing out the good things they did. Things like orphanages, schools, and the like.
Over the last decade and a half, as I have learned more about what these institutions are actually like, I have found fewer and fewer actual good works to offset the lies and false certainty at the heart of whole enterprise. In fact, the institutions I used to imagine as balancing the books have more evils to answer for than I could have imagined. Far from balancing the books, they have tipped the scales so far towards evil that nothing on earth could restore balance, let alone tip the scales to the good.
What I would have seen as hyperbole in 1996 (had it been published then) I see as a self evident truism now: religion poisons everything.
It is not hard to believe the horrifying stories of abuse by the church. Just consider. The last Magdalene laundry closed in 1996! 1996! If this kind of abuse could take place during the late twentieth century, just imagine the kind and extent of abuse during earlier centuries when the church was fully in control of practically every aspect of social life, and communication was primitive and largely in the hands of the church.
It’s just a memory now, but Uta Ranke-Heinemann tells the story in her book Eunuchs for the Kingdom of God — which is all about the history of the sexual pathology of Christianity — about a young nun, very young, as I recall, who fell in love with a young swain. The nuns caught them together. They caught the young man, tied him down, and forced his lover to castrate him!
Manichaeism is very deeply embedded in Christianity, although it is officially a heresy. Augustine was a Manichean before he became a Christian, and Augustinian theology, which became definitive for the Western Church, as well as having a profound influence on Protestantism, is deeply coloured by the doctrine of original sin, which, in Augustine’s mind, infected humanity not only with a tendency to do evil, but with an inability to avoid evil without divine aid. For Augustine, anything which is not rationally governable is evil, and being a man, this was particularly so for the sexual organs, a problem which he describes graphically in The City of God (Book XIV, Chapter 16, The evil of lust, in the specifically sexual meaning).
There, encapsulated, is the reason why condoms are prohibited, sexual intercourse is to be used solely for the purpose of procreation, and why women who become pregnant out of wedlock were (are still?) shunned, because their sin is visible in their bodies. Why is the church opposed to abortion and birth control? Because then a woman can sin with impunity, and we can’t have that now, can we?!
Birth control, abortion, suicide, euthanasia: all these are specially sinful, for they arrogate the functions of god. In general, choice should be limited to those things that are permitted by the church. The idea of freedom and choice is deeply suspect in Christian theology. Individualism, human rights, autonomy: these are all looked at with deep suspicion in Christian morality. Even though the church likes to think that the foundation of human rights is to be found in the church’s teachings, the idea of rights without correlative obligations is not a Christian value.
There is a great similarity between the way women are regarded in Christianity and how they are regarded in Islam (and Judaism as well, I suppose). There is an emphasis on modesty, but that is not because women are respected. The truth is that women must be concealed because they are so highly sexualised in these religions; they are believed to be so highly charged with sexual energy that they become a threat to holiness. Women saints are always asexual, like Mary, with her eyes cast demurely down, still a virgin, almost adolescent, quite unlike Eve in Christian iconography, who is always pictured boldly staring at the viewer, confident, self-assured. It’s no wonder that catholic priests end up as pedophiles. Their sexual fixation is upon an apparently asexual, immature girl. The idea of a real woman terrifies them. That’s the reason, too, I think, that women who conceive children “in sin” had to be locked away. Women in Christianity and Islam are supposed to present themselves publicly as asexual, like nuns, yet they are in fact thought of by the men (and religion is almost always a male power trip) highly charged with hidden sexual power. It’s a man’s view of the world. No wonder they locked those poor women away. Women who express their sexuality openly shatter the false images of purity and threaten chaos. You can hear it in Augustine’s diatribes about sex. You can also hear it in the things that Christians say about abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide. Chaos always portends.
The Stanford Prison Experiment ran six days before it had to be stopped. So I feel shocked by the suffering, but not surprised by the criminal level of cruelty inside the system of captivity. So on this point, I’m all worldly and hip.
But what does surprise me is government giving criminal behavior like slavery a pass as late as circa 1990. So on this point, I’m clueless and naïve.
I don’t know what I should do to stop this in the [present and] future.
The only thing that will come anywhere near preventing this kind of thing in the future is the liberation and equality of women. Until this truly happens, and it’s not happening, the future is very menacing indeed.
Yes; I had a little email exchange with Zimbardo on the relevance of the industrial “schools” a few years ago. I think he was not uninterested.
It’s things like this that make me wonder, how can any woman be Catholic. How can any human being, to be fair… but this institution is severely and violently anti-woman. Why do women give it the time of day? I can understand that in some countries, women are not given much choice… but in the UK, the US etc women can leave the Church without any significant repercussions. So why do I turn on the TV and see hundreds (if not thousands) of British women gathered to watch the remains of a ‘saint’ drift by, crying with joy and crossing themselves? Is it because they have a relatively nice time with their religion – go to mass every Sunday, see their friends, and so on – so anyone suffering at the hands of the Catholic Church just doesn’t matter?
Is it simply selfishness?
I think it’s conditioning, Amy. If I can try to describe how it seems to me, it’s something like:
I just can’t believe that this religion can be true — but oh god! I’ll be damned if I think that…
The church’s “mercy” and “compassion” are plain hypocrisy — but it can only come from god, so the church is right…
As religion grounds (that word !) people’s values, so it grounds all the mental tools they have with which to think. Everything goes round and round that same point, everything homes in on that one spot. It’s like neurosis, one can’t stop thinking the same thoughts over and over and every experience confirms the underlying vision and leads back to it, simply because the mind is running in circles. It’s what I think of as belief: whether neurosis, religion, or unconscious assumption, it seems to be obviously true because it’s like a mental magnet for every other thought, the conclusion of every experience.
I think that this is generally true, even of relatively “harmless” assumptions, but it is especially true when the beliefs are reinforced by fear (sin, shame, hell, social disapproval). And religion knows about critical thinking, and defines it as evil, for obvious reasons. As with mercy, compassion and love, so truth is also perverted by the system. This effectively deprives most believers of even the possibility of clarity of thought. So I suppose I am saying that religious belief and neurosis have a lot in common.
I think I have not put this quite clearly, so I hope you can see what I mean.
That is completely and absolutely true and it is the most important thing of all.
I’ve heard a story that up North the RUC actually returned women who’d escaped from those places – apparently Eamon McCann from Derry wrote about it but I can’t find a copy.
The Irish government acknowledged as far back as 2001 that the Magdalene women were victims of abuse but says that because the laundries were privately run, they are outside its remit.
Goretti Horgan: Changing women’s lives in Ireland (Part 1 had this to say:
“Because she was only 15 she could not be put in Mountjoy jail with the other strikers. Instead she was committed to High Park Convent in Drumcondra, where the nuns ran an Industrial School and Magdalen institution on the same site.”
There were women sent “On Remand” to Sean McDermott St, Magdalen Laundry after 1960. Women were alsoOn Probation at various religious convents, including Magdalen laundries. Women were also referred to Magdalen Laundries by courts in the past. Women were transferred from government funded mother and baby homes to Magdalen laundries. The States complicity is self-evident. So trying to say that it’s not analogous with those who were mentioned in the Ryan Report is not good enough. The four religious orders who ran the ghastly slave-labour laundries have ignored written letters sent to them by ex-inmates. Well, even if the government acknowledges that there were children in these religious-run prisons. it does not deem fit to live up to the children’s constitutional promise. “to provide the place of the parents” (42,5), to “provide a minimum basic education” 42,3,2), and to “ensure that the strength and health of workers and the tender age of the children shall not be abused.”(45,4,2)?
The Ryan Report Vol. 3, Chapter 18) conveniently elided the term “Magdalen Laundry” and replaced it withResidential Laundry. it smacks of “schools’ as in industrial schools when children were in fact incarcerated into child prisons and given prison numbers. Or calling children “Pupils” when children received only miniscule schooling from some untrained JAM teachers and mostly worked at slave-labour jobs. Most of the inmates were clueless as to know how to write or spell their names upon leaving their respective institutions at the age of 16.
Amy Clare:
It’s a set of blinkers they put on, or which are put on them as children. I have a particularly irritating work colleague who is upset dutring the summer because the university chaplaincy no longer does its morning mass, so she can “only” go to mass twice a day (lunchtime and after work), and not before work as well. She fasts and goes on pilgrimges, and regards me with pity. She insists that her beliefs “be respected”, while at the same time making portentous pronouncements about Satan being able to enter the lives of non-believers & c. She dismisses references to Croatian clerico-fascism (because she goes to Medjugorje every year) with “there’s corruption in every organisation”, as if the deep-rooted links between Catholicism and fascist ideologies internationally is simply human error or a few ‘bad apples’. It’s sickening.
Marie-Thérèse, the laundries might have been privately run, but surely the fact that women were placed there was within the cognisance of the law. The government, therefore, must have had some knowledge that this was taking place. How much knowledge did they have? Were women sent there as a consequence of legal proceedings. If they spent so many years there, who had legal oversight? It seems absolutely impossible for the government not to have had some day to day relationship with these establishments, and so they are, ultimately responsible, and if it was the church that oversaw this frightful abuse, then the government should be taking the church to court for crimes committed. They were either crimes, or the abuse took place with the scope of the legal system, in which case both the government and the church are responsible.
the laundries might have been privately run, but surely the fact that women were placed there was within the cognisance of the law.
Eric, I would surmise that the government cheery-picked institutions that went on the redress schedule list, because it was afraid of the floodgates opening up further and of the precedence it would set if it decided to put other institutions on the RIRB list. It was not going to widen the parameters under any circumstances. It concentrated mostly on industrial and reformatory schools and some mother and baby homes and then left the Magdalen Laundries, mother and baby homes of both Catholic and Protestant persuasions out of the equation. Period!
There is a clause in the act which states: “Under the Residential Institutions Redress Act 2002, institutions that were not originally on the 2002 list can be added by ministerial order if they comply with Section 4 of the act, which states:
“The minister may by order provide for the insertion in the schedule of any industrial school, reformatory school, orphanage, children’s home… in which children were placed and resident in respect of which a public body has a regulatory or inspection function.”
In the original list, contained in the act itself, there were 128 institutions.
Since then Mary Hanafin, Minister for Education and Science, has added some 16 institutions by ministerial order. (There is now a new government). In November 2004 she signed an order for 13 institutions to be added. In July 2005, three more institutions were added.
Re” pension that survivors of Magdalen Laundries were seeking along with compensation The government claims:
at no time did the State license, regulate or inspect the Magdalen Laundries which always operated on a for profit basis. Consequently survivors do not receive a pension for their compulsory yet unpaid work in harsh conditions.
Yes they are definitely within the cognizance of the law. Obfuscation and denial are the middle names of the Irish government.
Were women sent there as a consequence of legal proceedings.
Yes, Eric, research shows that the irish Courts Service sent women to the Magdalen Laundries “On Probation” and “On Remand” and the Dept of Health paid capitation grants for “problem girls” sent there up to the 80’s.
The research also highlights how at no time did the State regulate or inspect the Magdalen Laundries, which always operated on a for-profit basis. In order for institutions to be placed on the redress board scheduled list it had to fulfill section 4 of the RIRB ACT. In the case of the mother and baby home i was in. it was proven that the State had regulatory inspections in place, but the latter started splitting hairs. If the State did not inspect the former, it should have done so and is to be found wanting. The religious got away with blue murder as the religious and the State were synonymous with each other. Archbishop McQuaid ruled with an iron fist. In October 2010 Conference of Religious in Ireland (Cori) refused to meet with representatives of the Magdalen Laundries. The survivors are getting more powerful by the day and they are not giving up. I wish them all the best.
i should add that the government took responsibility for children who were transferred from an industrial school. The justification for this provision is that the State was still responsible for the welfare and protection of children transferred to a Magdalen Laundry from a State-regulated institution provided that they had been officially discharged from the scheduled institution. Many girls from Goldenbridge indeed would have fulfilled the criteria here. i remember going to visit Valerie, a GB ex-inmate, in Sean McDermott St, when I was very young. She worked on an industrial steamer presser all day long. She was well-used to hard work. She swapped a GB industrial bread cutter, the size, one sees in a butcher shop for that of the aforesaid Magdalen Stinking Laundry presser. She was 16, when she went there, which would have been considered old. As girls from disadvantaged areas with little schooling, went to work at 14 years old. If you went to Goldenbridge at 10 years of age you were also deemed old, as you had a much shorter serving period to your sentence. Even those who went to reformatory schools, were given shorter periods of sentences than those who spent whole childhoods locked up behind religious prison doors. Some boys who were carted around from one institution to another were the ones who suffered the most of all, as they didn’t even get the luxury of identifying with one Dickensian hellhole, when they had to contend with adapting to another. Boys were separated at 10 years old. It was so harrowing for those who had female siblings, as they were just torn away from each other, never to reunite, sometimes for their entire lives, Or if they did, they were just like strangers to each other. The psychosocial sequeiae knows no bounds.
Marie-Thérèse O’Loughlin
Thanks for bringing this story to our attention; I had no idea! Have you written a book about your experiences? Is there somewhere I can read your story? I would be interested in reading about the stories of these women.
For folks interested in learning more about the Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) campaign, please visit our group’s website at http://www.magdalenelaundries.com or visit us on Facebook at justiceformagdalenes@groups.facebook.com
For a good overview of JFM’s campaign, see our recent “Open Letter” to the Irish Cabinet, which appeared as a Op-Ed in the Irish Times in early May: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0502/1224295868515.html
Thank you for your interest and support.
Jim Smith, JFM Advisory Committee Member
Thank you, Jim. Maybe you or someone else at JFM would like to send me an overview to publish as an article here?
There’s a good article on the subject in todays Irish Times.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0607/1224298498372.html
I have just heard on RTE News that the religious would welcome enquiry into Magdalen Laundries. They had to be dragged screaming after hearings at European Courts of Human Rights. It rather sounds like a tiny move in a more positive direction. However, some twitter folk, who know the ropes, are not as optimistic as they feel that the religious will start stalling and non-cooperation tactics as they did with other investigations. Think Ryan Report! Think Christian Brothers, etc.
Nuns willing to participate in Magdalene probe: The four congregations of nuns who ran the country’s Magdalene l… http://bit.ly/mdVxj This sounds like positive news! I hope the nuns don’t stall and play around with the lives of these defenseless people who have suffered enough in the past. There was a lot of that kind of thing going on with the Dept of Education and Christian Brothers at the commission to inquire into institutional child abuse; when they wouldn’t hand over documents on time to Judge Mary Laffoy and judge Sean Ryan respectively. I wish the Maggies all the best in their endeavour to seek the justice that they are so righteously deserve.
great site, great comments, very informative links! not the first time I’ve visited to my enlightenment. Bear in mind however: 1) that yes, of course the Irish government was complicit, in all industrial schools and Magdalene asylums; 2) that whatever happens in religious institutions it is always coloured by the mores and practices (usually exploitative) of the society surrounding it. There have been plenty of abuses in secular children’s homes run by the state in UK. In memoirs I have read set in Jersey, the nuns’ home & the secular home were just as bad as each other. (the state place actually had more paedophiles running it. ) In a documentary I saw after the fall of the GDR, their children ‘s institutions & their indignities were eerily similar to ours – sex abuse included – only “bad” kids tended to get sent there for different “misdeeds”: eg drawing caricatures of Honecker etc. We need to reform developed human societies, not just rail against religion, IMHO.