Magdalene laundries in Ireland
Andrea Parrot and Nina Cummings wrote, "The cost of violence, oppression, and brutalization of women is enormous" and in their struggle to survive, the inmates suffered not only physically, but spiritually and emotionally.
[13][14] According to Frances Finnegan, author of Do Penance or Perish: A Study of Magdalen Asylums in Ireland, "Missionaries were required to approach prostitutes and distribute religious tracts, designed to be read in 'sober' moments and divert women from their vicious lives.
Finnegan wrote: The issue of continued demand for prostitutes was barely confronted, so absorbed were moralists with the disgraceful and more visible evidence of supply.
And while acknowledging that poverty, overcrowded slum housing and lack of employment opportunities fuelled the activity...they shirked the wider issues, insisting on individual moral (rather than social) reform.
[18] With the multiplication of these institutions and the subsequent and "dramatic rise" in the number of beds available within them, Finnegan wrote that the need to staff the laundries "became increasingly urgent.
[22] Several religious institutes established even more Irish laundries, reformatories and industrial schools, sometimes all together on the same plot of land, with the aim to "save the souls primarily of women and children".
[24] These "large complexes" became a "massive interlocking system…carefully and painstakingly built up…over a number of decades"; and consequently, Magdalene laundries became part of Ireland's "larger system for the control of children and women" (Raftery 18).
Both women and "bastard" children were "incarcerated for transgressing the narrow moral code of the time" and the same religious congregations managed the orphanages, reformatory schools and laundries.
[27] These particular institutions intentionally shared "overriding characteristics, including a regime of prayer, silence, work in a laundry, and a preference for permanent inmates", which, as Smith notes, "contradicts the religious congregations' stated mission to protect, reform, and rehabilitate".
[19][20] Though these women had committed no crime and had never been put on trial, their indefinite incarceration was enforced by locked doors, iron gates and prison guards in the form of apathetic sisters.
[citation needed] By 1920, according to Smith, Magdalen laundries had almost entirely abandoned claims of rehabilitation and instead, were "seamlessly incorporated into the state's architecture of containment".
A 2013 report made by an inter-departmental committee, chaired by Senator Martin McAleese, found no evidence of unmarried women giving birth in the asylum.
[28] Given Ireland's historically conservative sexual values, Magdalen asylums were a generally accepted social institution well into the second half of the twentieth century.
[29] Though Finnegan suggests that a more critical reason is that they ceased to be profitable: "Possibly the advent of the washing machine has been as instrumental in closing these laundries as have changing attitudes.
[33] Due to the religious institutes' "policy of secrecy", their penitent registers and convent annals remain closed to this day, despite repeated requests for information.
[34][35] As a direct result of these missing records and the religious institutes' commitment to secrecy, Magdalen laundries can only exist "at the level of story rather than history".
[20] In Dublin in 1993, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity – owners and operators of the laundry in High Park, Drumcondra – had lost money in share dealings on the stock exchange; to cover their losses, they sold part of the land in their convent to a property developer.
The 1997 Channel 4 documentary Sex in a Cold Climate interviewed former inmates of Magdalene Asylums who testified to continued sexual, psychological and physical abuse while being isolated from the outside world for an indefinite amount of time.
[57] Elderly survivors said they would go on hunger strike over the failure of successive Irish governments to set up a financial redress scheme for the thousands of women enslaved there.
[58] The Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, while professing sorrow at the abuses revealed, did not issue an immediate apology, prompting criticism from other members of Dáil Éireann.
"[65] In 1955, while the abuse of inmates was still occurring, the Scottish writer Halliday Sutherland was touring Ireland to collect material for his book Irish Journey.
When he applied for permission to visit the Galway asylum, Michael Browne, the local bishop, reluctantly granted him access only on condition that he allow his account to be censored by the Mother Superior.
[73] In 2015, Ennis Municipal Local Council decided to rename Friars Walk, a road which ran through the site of the former Industrial School and Laundry, in honour of the Sisters of Mercy.
The film is loosely based on and "largely inspired" by the 1998 documentary Sex in a Cold Climate, which documents four survivors' accounts of their experiences in Ireland's Magdalen institutions.
[77][78] James Smith wrote that "Mullan offsets the long historical silence" that allowed the laundries and the violations by the religious institutes to "maintain their secrecy and invisibility".
[79] The film is a product of a collective, including the four survivors (Martha Cooney, Christina Mulcahy, Phyllis Valentine, Brigid Young) who told their story in Sex in a Cold Climate, the historical consultant and researchers of the documentary who contributed historical information (Miriam Akhtar, Beverely Hopwood and Frances Finnegan), the directors of both movies (Steve Humphries and Peter Mullan, respectively), the screenwriter of The Magdalene Sisters who created a narrative (Peter Mullan again) and the actors in the film.
The Journey Stone memorial, situated at St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin, is meant to remember the suffering of the women who were incarcerated in Magdalene laundries and similar institutions.
