Depressing but not surprising: how the Magdalene Laundries got away with it

[mia]

By Anna Carey Published 17 July 2013 10:52

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/07/depressing-not-surprising-how-magdalene-laundries-got-away-it

...I loved High Park when I was a kid. The rambling grounds of the convent were just across the road from the quiet Dublin housing estate where I grew up in the 1980s, and every Sunday my family went to Mass in the convent chapel. The chapel was a pretty little Victorian building; when I was very small, I used to jump slowly down the wooden steps of the choir stalls and pretend to be Professor Yaffle from Bagpuss.

Away from the cluster of convent buildings, the grounds were beautiful, with meadows full of wild flowers and a small herd of cows. We would go on nature walks, looking out for squirrels and gathering leaves and flowers. It was all rather idyllic, apart from the fact that we were playing in what had, for decades, essentially been a forced labour camp.

Run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, High Park Convent was the site of Ireland’s largest Magdalene Laundry. Until well into the twentieth century, girls deemed to be “difficult” – because they were sexually active, or sexually abused, or simply poor – were sent to laundries by their families or the state. Despite having committed no crime, they were not allowed to leave the institutions and were forced to work for no pay, making them literally slaves. Many women spent their entire lives there, remaining long after the actual laundries closed down. They had nowhere else to go.

I used to see some of those women at Mass, the ones left behind, although I was almost grown up before I realised who they were. They’d shuffle in behind the nuns and sit quietly at the back. Their eyes were vacant, and they seemed completely institutionalised. I’m sure they weren’t as old as they looked. There was a large, empty building near the chapel which was still referred to as “the laundry”; it wasn’t until my late teens that I realised it was where those dead-eyed women had been forced to slave. The adults around me must have known, but nobody ever talked about it....

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[mia]

2. The film "The Magdelene Sisters"

...is a movie about barbaric practices against women, who were locked up without trial and sentenced to forced, unpaid labor for such crimes as flirting with boys, becoming pregnant out of wedlock, or being raped. These inhuman punishments did not take place in Afghanistan under the Taliban, but in Ireland under the Sisters of Mercy. And they are not ancient history. The Magdalene Laundries flourished through the 1970s and processed some 30,000 victims; the last were closed in 1996.

"The Magdalene Sisters" is a harrowing look at institutional cruelty, perpetrated by the Catholic Church in Ireland, and justified by a perverted hysteria about sex. "I've never been with any lads ever," one girl says, protesting her sentence, "and that's the god's honest truth." A nun replies: "But you'd like to, wouldn't you?" And because she might want to, because she flirted with boys outside the walls of her orphanage, she gets what could amount to a life sentence at slave labor.

This film has been attacked by the Catholic League, but its facts stand up; a series of Irish Times articles on the Internet talk of cash settlements totaling millions of pounds to women who were caught in the Magdalene net. What is inexplicable is that this practice could have existed in our own time, in a Western European nation. The laundries were justified because they saved the souls of their inmates--but what about the souls of those who ran them? Raised in the Catholic Church in America at about the same time, I had nothing but positive experiences. The Dominican Sisters who taught us were dedicated, kind and brilliant teachers, and when I see a film like this I wonder what went wrong in Ireland--or right at St. Mary's Grade School in Champaign-Urbana.

"The Magdalene Sisters" focuses on the true stories of three girls who fell into the net. As the film opens, we see Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) lured aside by a relative at a family wedding, and raped. When she tells a friend what has happened, the word quickly spreads, and within days it is she, not the rapist, who is punished. Her sentence, like most of the Magdalene sentences, is indefinite, and as she goes to breakfast on her first morning she passes a line of older women who have been held here all their lives....

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-magdalene-sisters-2003

[Sherman A1]

3. A great film

saw it several years ago.

[RebelOne]

5. So did I and it infuriated me. n/t

[Generic Other]

10. 30,000 girls whose only crime

was being non-docile daughters.

[East Coast Pirate]

4. I hate religion.

[Enthusiast]

6. I believe every word of it.

Lapsed Catholic here. The abuses would fill volumes. But Ireland is probably the worst because the church is so powerful there.

[Dawson Leery]

7. A criminal enterprise spanning some 1700 years.

From the time Constantine built the RCC, the mission of the church, as with all pyramid schemes, was to acquire money and power for those at the top.

[Enthusiast]

8. That is why organized religion exists.

To gain control over the people and to exploit that control for gain.

That is why the Council of Nicaea purged the gnostic gospels. The notion that humans could seek "salvation", independently, without the assistance of an organized religious structure was declared dangerous and heretical.

[Dawson Leery]

9. Correct.

[Boomerproud]

11. President Eamon de Valera is almost as much to blame as the church.

This whole story makes me ill. de Valera cowed down to the church at every turn because he wanted to stay in power.