Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment [1 ed.] 026801311X, 9780268013110, 026804127X

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Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries

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I R E L A N D’S

M AG DA LE N L AUNDRIES A N D T H E N AT I O N ’ S ARCHITECTURE OF C O N TA I N M E N T

J A M E S M. S M I T H University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

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University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Copyright © 2007 by University of Notre Dame Published in the United States of America Designed by Wendy McMillen Set in 10.3/13.6 Visage by Four Star Books Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, James M., 1966– Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the nation’s architecture of containment / James M. Smith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-268-04127-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-268-04127-X (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-268-09268-9 (web pdf) 1. Women—Institutional care—Ireland—History. 2. Prostitutes— Rehabilitation—Ireland—History 3. Church work with prostitutes—Catholic Church. 4. Unmarried mothers—Institutional care—Ireland—History. 5. Reformatories for women—Ireland—History. I. Title. HV1448.I73S65 2007 362.83'9—dc22 2007025510 This book is printed on recycled paper.

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To my parents, Patrick J. and Rosaleen Smith

And to the memory of Caridad A. Valdés (1941 – 2000) and Adele M. Dalsimer (1939 – 2000)

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Contents

Acknowledgments Preface

Introduction: The Politics of Sexual Knowledge: The Origins of Ireland’s Containment Culture and the Carrigan Report (1931)

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Part 1 The Magdalen Asylum and History: Mining the Archive

CHAPTER 1 The Magdalen in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

2 The Magdalen Asylum and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland

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CHAPTER

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Part 2 The Magdalen Laundry in Cultural Representation: Memory and Storytelling in Contemporary Ireland

CHAPTER 3 Remembering Ireland’s Architecture of Containment: “Telling” Stories on Stage, Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed and Stained Glass at Samhain CHAPTER 4 (Ef)facing Ireland’s Magdalen Survivors: Visual Representations and Documentary Testimony

5 The Magdalene Sisters: Film, Fact, and Fiction

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CHAPTER

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6 Monuments, Magdalens, Memorials: Art Installations and Cultural Memory

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Conclusion: History, Cultural Representation, . . . Action?

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Appendix

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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CHAPTER

CONTENTS

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Acknowledgments

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begin with those whose love and support sustains me on a daily basis, my wife, Beatriz, and our daughter, Isabel. I also thank my parents, siblings, other family members, and good friends for their constant encouragement over the years. I acknowledge too the real-life victims and survivors of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries and the nation’s architecture of containment who inspired this project. I do not presume to speak for them. Rather, my hope is that this book will foster the emergence of a new dialogue about their place in Irish society, in the past and in the present. I owe a special debt of thanks to the survivors and advocacy groups that assisted me in the research and writing of this book, in particular, Imelda Murphy, Mari Steed, and Claire McGettrick; the members of and contributors to the “Justice for Magdalenes” listserv; and Patricia Burke Brogan, Patsy McGarry, Mary Raftery, Paddy Doyle, Cinta Rimbaldo, and Anton Sweeney. Many colleagues, mentors, students, and friends at Boston College supported me in bringing this project to completion. Studying and then working in an interdisciplinary Irish Studies program taught me the value of collaboration and cross-disciplinary scholarly exchange. I appreciate their varied contributions to my work—as readers, conference organizers, or colloquium attendees, or in informal conversation. They not only improved the work by asking questions but also made the experience of writing it more rewarding. This book emerged from a single chapter of my doctoral dissertation, and I thank my committee members for guiding me toward completion. Special thanks are due to Professors Kristin Morrison and

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Adele Dalsimer. Their generosity was constant, their assistance endless. For reading and providing insightful commentary on specific chapters, I thank Michael Cronin, Marjorie Howes, Kevin Kenny, Vera Kreilkamp, Robin Lydenberg, Robert Savage, Andrew Sofer, and Chris Wilson. I also thank Mary Crane for her guidance and encouragement. I am also indebted to the larger Boston College intellectual community. The College of Arts and Sciences, in particular Dean Joseph Quinn, awarded me a Research Incentive Grant that funded a number of research trips to Ireland and underwrote the Undergraduate Research Assistant program from which I benefited greatly over the course of six semesters. The Center for Irish Programs, especially Professor Thomas Hachey, sponsored numerous research and conference trips. The Irish Studies Program provided opportunities to present my research and always made available its resources to enhance my goals. In addition to those already mentioned, I thank Catherine McLaughlin, Seamus Connolly, Ruth Ann Harris, Ann Morrisson Spinney, Philip O’Leary, Kevin O’Neill, and Liz Sullivan. Many of the Burns Library Visiting Professors in Irish Studies engaged with my research and provided important feedback. In a particular way, I acknowledge and thank Professor Maria Luddy, who read my complete manuscript and whose scholarship I am especially indebted to. Steve Vedder and the staff of BC Media Tech Services were generous in providing their expertise to produce the images that appear in the text. Through my membership in scholarly organizations I was fortunate to meet, share ideas with, and learn from a host of fellow travelers in the world of Irish Studies. Those who generously read sections of this book in draft form include Margot Backus, Ruth Barton, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, Margaret Kelleher, George O’Brien, Donal Ó Drisceoil, Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh, Lauren Onkey, Margaret Preston, Paige Reynolds, and Eibhear Walshe. Others helped shape my ideas through conversations and scholarly exchange, including Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Jim Byrne, Claire Connolly, Kathryn Conrad, Gearoid Denvir, Frances Finnegan, Louise Fuller, Luke Gibbons, Breda Grey, Liam Harte, Richard Haslam, Colleen Hynes, Richard Kearney, Anthony Keating, Declan Kiberd, Joe Lee, Joseph Lennon, Moira Maguire, Yvonne McKenna, Sarah McKibben, Gerardine Meaney, Paula Murphy, Briona NicDiarmada, Brian Ó Conchubhair, Anne O’Connor, Eunan O’Halpin, Lance Pettitt, James Rodgers, Louise Ryan, and Kevin Whelan.

ACKNOWLED GMENTS

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Because the nature of my work is heavily dependent on archival research, I owe a special debt of thanks to the many librarians who facilitated my scholarship. Kathy Williams, John Atteberry, Elizabeth Sweeney, Brendan Rapple, and Anne Kenny at Boston College found ways to make available even the most obscure material. The staff at Ireland’s National Library were always welcoming and encouraging. Likewise at the National Archives in Dublin, Caitriona Crowe and Tom Quinlan assisted this nonhistorian in primary research. David Sheehy, formerly Dublin Diocesan Archivist, Brian Lynch at RTÉ Archives, and Sunniva O’Flynn and Antoinette Prout at the Irish Film Center were generous with their time. Emma Stevens at the Office of Public Works library assisted me with information regarding the Magdalen Memorial Bench in St. Stephen’s Green. Two sections of this manuscript were previously published. Chapter 1 appeared as “The Politics of Sexual Knowledge: The Origins of Ireland’s Containment Culture and the Carrigan Report (1931)” in the Journal of the History of Sexuality 13, no. 2 (April 2004). A version of chapter 5 and the conclusion appeared combined as “The Magdalene Sisters: Evidence, Testimony . . . Action?” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32, no. 2 (Winter 2007). I thank the editors and anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful contributions to my research and the journal editors for permission to reprint. Diane Fenster kindly gave permission to reprint images from her installation, Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries. Likewise, Gerard Mannix Flynn kindly gave permission to reprint images of his extallation, “Call Me by My Name ”: Requiem for Remains Unknown, 1889–1987. Patricia Burke Brogan kindly arranged permission for Sarah Fitzgerald’s photographs of Eclipsed that appear in chapter 3. Thanks to Terry Fagan for permission to reprint the historic photograph that appears in chapter 5; and to Jane Roche at Element Films for arranging permission to reprint images from The Magdalene Sisters. Thanks also to Robert Savage and Hugh Smith for permission to use their photographs in chapter 6. Finally, I acknowledge the two reviewers who read and provided invaluable critical commentary on the manuscript for the University of Notre Dame Press and Barbara Hanrahan and her staff at the press for their patience, perseverance, and support in seeing the book through the production process. Obviously, any errors are of my own making.

ACKNOWLED GMENTS

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Preface

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his book has three primary objectives. First, it offers a partial history that connects Ireland’s Magdalen laundries and the nation-state’s nativist politics in the postindependence era. Second, it critically evaluates cultural representations of the Magdalen laundries that have, over the past fifteen years, recovered these institutions from the amnesia at the center of state politics. Third, it challenges the nation—including church, state, and society—to acknowledge its complicity in Ireland’s Magdalen scandal and to respond by providing redress for victims and survivors alike. This study is by necessity an interdisciplinary project: history, cultural critique, and, in the end, a call to action. In its concrete form, Ireland’s architecture of containment encompassed an assortment of interconnected institutions, including mother and baby homes, industrial and reformatory schools, mental asylums, adoption agencies, and Magdalen laundries. These institutions concealed citizens already marginalized by a number of interrelated social phenomena: poverty, illegitimacy, sexual abuse, and infanticide. In its more abstract form, the nation’s architecture of containment also comprised the legislation that inscribed these issues, as well as the numerous official and public discourses that denied the existence and function of their affiliated institutions. Those incarcerated included unmarried mothers, illegitimate and abandoned children, orphans, the sexually promiscuous, the socially transgressive, and, often, those merely guilty of “being in the way.” This bureaucratic apparatus operated as a bulwark to the state’s emerging national identity. In a still-decolonizing society, those citizens guilty of such “crimes” contradicted the prescribed

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national narrative that emphasized conformity, valued community over the individual, and esteemed conservative Catholic moral values. At precisely the moment the fledgling state was authoring a new story of Irish identity, institutional provision became the favored response to perceived social and moral deviancy. As I demonstrate in the introduction, postindependence Ireland contained what it perceived as sexual immorality by locking it away—out of sight and out of mind. My project underscores the regulatory function of this institutional system that supported the state’s nativist politics. The existence of sites of confinement functioned as a constant reminder of the social mores deemed appropriate in Catholic Ireland and of the consequences awaiting transgressors of those standards. As the church’s institutional infrastructure continued to expand in this climate, it increasingly relied on the state’s legislative, judicial, and financial support. My interdisciplinary examination of the Magdalen asylums reveals the complexities of this sinuous relationship between church and state, exposing the collusion between these hegemonic partners in social control. Ultimately, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment asserts that the state was always an active agent in the operation and function of the Magdalen laundries.

While this book addresses the ten Catholic Magdalen laundries operating in the Irish nation-state between 1922 and 1996, I recognize that there is nothing essentially Irish or Catholic about these asylums for “fallen” women. And yet, I argue, the Irish variety took on a distinct character after political independence. Chapter 1 traces their origins in Ireland back to 1767, and Protestant and Catholic lay organizations continued to operate these institutions at least until the 1830s. While religious congregations of women would assume control and eventually dominate the Catholic asylums after 1850, the majority of Protestant lay asylums closed their doors or changed their mission by the early decades of the twentieth century. The Good Shepherd Sisters’ Magdalen asylum in Belfast operated for much of the twentieth century but did so in a different political jurisdiction and thus falls outside the scope of this study of the nation-state’s containment culture. Magdalen asylums were a common feature in many societies outside Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth century; by 1900 there

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were over three hundred such institutions in Victorian England and at least twenty north of the border in Scotland (Finnegan 2001, Mahood 1990). The history of the Good Shepherd Sisters is a history of the worldwide spread of these institutions, from the congregation’s French foundation at Angers, stretching to Britain, Ireland, the rest of continental Europe, America, Australia, and beyond. The first asylum for fallen women in the United States, the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia, was founded in 1800 and closed its doors in 1916. Other North American cities, including New York, Boston, Chicago, and Toronto, proudly boasted a similar institutional response to prostitution and the reform of sexually active single women. Many of these institutions shared overriding characteristics, including a regime of prayer, silence, work in a laundry, and a preference for permanent inmates. Women across the continents sought to escape the harsh working conditions in which they toiled in these asylums, suggesting that their punitive nature is not unique to the Irish context (De Cunzo 2001; “New-York City Magdalen Asylum” 1869; Cushing 1944; Hoy 1997; Murray 2004; “An Asylum That Is Not a Refuge” 1878, “Cells in the Magdalen Asylum” 1878; “Plunged from Third Storey to Freedom” 1948; Mahood 1990). There are, as I argue in chapter 2, a number of distinct characteristics to the Irish asylums, foremost their longevity. According to survivor testimony, women were still entering the Magdalen laundries in the 1980s. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, the Irish institutions were functioning less and less as rehabilitative short-term refuges. Fewer women entered these asylums voluntarily, as they did in the nineteenth century, and women were detained for longer periods, many for life. In the postindependence decades, these institutions increasingly served a recarceral and punitive function. Consequently, at precisely the time when their foreign equivalents were closing their doors or reforming their mission to become more vocational in orientation, the Irish asylums were progressively more secretive and opposed to public scrutiny. Also, after 1922 the asylums’ population changed significantly. Historically consisting of two distinct classes of women— the “fallen” (prostitutes) and the “preventative” (young women in moral danger)—Irish asylums in the twentieth century hosted an ever more diverse community of female inmates, including “hopeless cases,” “mental defectives,” infanticide cases, those on remand from the courts, transfers from industrial and reformatory schools, and “voluntary”

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committals. This heterogeneous population contradicts the religious congregations’ stated mission to protect, reform, and rehabilitate. How can we account for the Irish asylums’ atypical development after political independence? Why did they mutate from their original mission, and why did they continue to operate in an Irish setting later into the twentieth century? Reliable answers to these questions must await a comparative historical study of Irish and non-Irish asylums, and such a study falls beyond the scope of this project. Nevertheless, at least two features mark Ireland as different from the countries listed above. First, the history of twentieth-century Ireland is largely the history of the nation-state’s emergence from a colonial experience. It is a history, moreover, that makes manifest the characteristic hallmarks of a stilldecolonizing society caught in a nativist stage of postcolonial development. For the purposes of this study, therefore, I identify Ireland’s postcolonial status as a determining factor shaping the nation’s containment culture. Second, although a number of other countries had large Catholic populations, the overt relationship between Catholicism and nationalism, especially at the level of the state, makes the situation in Irish society distinctive. Irish nationalism merged with religion, more specifically a Catholicism that was both Ultramontanist and Jansenist in character, to establish the hegemonic partnership between church and state in the postindependence era, a partnership that determined the formation and function of Ireland’s architecture of containment.

This book is not the history of the Magdalen laundries in twentiethcentury Ireland. Indeed, no such history can exist until the religious congregations afford scholars access to their archival records—“penitent” registers and convent annals—of women entering the asylums after 1900. As a result, definitive answers to important questions remain beyond the scope of this project. How many women passed through these institutions after 1900? Where did they come from? What brought them to the Magdalen? How long did they stay? What became of them if and when they left? How many lived and died behind the convents’ walls? The historical vacuum that surrounds these questions, however, does inform one of this book’s major contentions, namely, that the Magdalen laundry exists in the public mind chiefly at the level of story (cultural representation and survivor testimony) rather than history (archi-

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val records and documentation). This is the first study to evaluate critically the entire range of contemporary cultural representations emerging since the early 1990s, including available archival records, legislative documents, and survivor testimony, as well as an assortment of dramas, documentaries, art exhibitions, films, poetry, and other cultural reenactments. Contemporary cultural representations hold the potential to speak out about aspects of the nation’s history so long constrained by secrecy and silence. On the one hand, they educate society at large about the sexual double standard by which the patriarchal nation-state institutionalized problem women, and they relocate the problem from the individual psyche to the social and political institutions that imposed a rigid national morality. They also inspire victims to act constructively on their own behalf and thus make the transition from passive victim to active survivor. On the other hand, cultural representations, especially those in the popular media, sensationalize and exploit: they appropriate survivor testimony for its shock value, they eroticize traumatic memories of abuse, they scapegoat easily identifiable targets as culpable while ignoring the collusion and complicity of other social and political agents. In other words, recent cultural representations of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries have paradoxically appeared empowering even while they have sometimes unwittingly facilitated the recuperation of dominant ideologies (Alcoff and Gray 1993, 261–63). And yet it is important to tell the story of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries and of the women in these institutions who constitute the nation’s disappeared. They are women who did not “fit the model” of the Irish family cell and thus were “excluded, silenced, or punished” (Conrad 2004, 4, 9–10). They did not matter, or matter enough, in a society that sought to negate and render invisible the challenges they embodied: they were sexually active when Irish women were expected to be morally pure; they were unmarried mothers of “illegitimate” children when the constitution rendered motherhood and marriage inseparable; they were women who killed their babies when the symbolic icon of Mother Ireland would not allow for this material contradiction; they were the victims of physical and sexual abuse by men under a legal double standard that evaded male culpability and condemned female victims as criminals; they were young women in state residential institutions who might fall pregnant and further burden the state’s welfare

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system.1 And in some cases they were more obviously innocent women, women perceived to be wayward, deemed simple or in the way, women who might go awry at home. In a society where even the faintest whiff of scandal threatened the respectability of the normative Irish family, the Magdalen asylum existed as a place to contain and/or punish the threatening embodiment of instability. It is important to tell this story because the Magdalen laundries are part of Ireland present, not just Ireland past. More specifically, this story is important for at least three distinct groups of former Magdalen penitents. The first are those who remain confined. As recently as 1996, when the nation’s last Magdalen laundry closed its doors, there were at least four such communities living in the care of and dependent on Catholic religious congregations—two in Dublin, one in Waterford, and one in Galway. Most of these women are elderly and after years of incarceration too institutionalized to return to society. The second group comprises the larger community of Magdalen survivors, those who escaped or left and are imperiled by the natural passage of time. The majority of these women, as is their right, remain silent about this aspect of their past. Unlike survivors of the industrial and reformatory schools, comparatively few Magdalen women choose to come forward to provide testimony. This suggests that the stigma traditionally associated with these institutions, a stigma rooted in the perception of the Magdalen asylums as a corrective to prostitution, still operates in Irish society today. This misapprehension feeds off secrecy, silence, and shame; telling the story of these institutions promotes understanding and awareness. The third community of former Magdalen women lie buried in anonymous and, until recently, unmarked communal graves. These women died behind convent walls, some as a result of medical maltreatment, others naturally after a life spent toiling in the laundry. In some cases, the women’s final resting places have been disturbed. As former convents fall victim to dwindling vocations and are purchased for redevelopment, some graves have been exhumed and the human remains cremated and reinterred, again anonymously. Other former Magdalen buildings have been purchased, refurbished, and reborn by universities and colleges 1. The use of the terms “fallen,” “penitent,” and “illegitimate” throughout this book reflects Irish society’s rendering of women and children transgressive of social norms. Hereafter, the terms appear without quotation marks.

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in Limerick, Waterford, and Cork. The historical traces of this chapter in Irish history—convent archives, survivor testimony, human remains, and concrete remnants—are slipping away on the tide of post–Celtic Tiger economic development and newfound cultural confidence. Telling the story of the Magdalen laundries defies the elision of this history.

The difficulty attending the writing of this book was not, as one might expect, in the research tasks of compiling the resources and mining through the archives, or in the methodological demands of maintaining its interdisciplinary balance. The challenge, rather, was how to separate academic detachment from personal indignation. Moral outrage and academic objectivity do not sit easily on the same page. Irish historiography, moreover, privileges empirical evidence as the only basis for understanding the past; lack of detachment in historical research can lead to criticisms of personal bias, subjective interpretation, and retrospective applications of today’s moral standards on readings of the past. The three history chapters, the introduction and part 1, work hard to respect the disciplinary conventions that allow the past to speak on its own terms, letting the evidence reveal the conditions of its own making. The structure in part 1 is chronological in nature, although there is a deliberate disjunction in its organization. The introduction focuses on a particular moment in time—the Carrigan Committee (1930–31), its ensuing report (1931), and the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1935. Chapter 1 returns to the nineteenth century to examine the origins and development of the Magdalen asylum in Ireland. Chapter 2 returns to the twentieth century and moves forward in time from where the introduction left off. Part 2 struggles with a different aspect of the moral indignation problem. The four chapters in this part are thematic rather than chronological; they each evaluate how popular and popularizing forms (drama, documentary, film, visual art) reimagine the elided history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries. Although they give voice to a population that was intentionally silenced, and represent the nation’s hidden containment culture, these cultural forms have the potential to close down the past. Popular indignation here takes the form of validating the present as modern and progressive by comparison. Condemning “those bad nuns,” something that has happened wholesale in the popular Irish media since

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the early 1990s, allows the state and society to scapegoat the church for all the sins of the past. The nation-state, as a result, evades culpability not just for complicity and collusion in past institutional abuses but also for the unresolved challenges of that history in the present. The writing of this book has demanded a constant struggle to redirect the energies of moral indignation—personal as well as collective—away from the easy targets in the past and the easy scapegoats in the present and to identify a broader obligation to respond. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment will achieve its goal only if it increases awareness and understanding that ultimately lead to action and change.

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Introduction The Politics of Sexual Knowledge The Origins of Ireland’s Containment Culture and the Carrigan Report (1931)

Whenever a child is born outside wedlock, so shocked is the public sense by the very unusual occurrence, that it brands with an irreparable stigma, and, to a large extent, excommunicates the woman guilty of the crime. James F. Cassidy, The Woman of the Gael (1922)

Writing in the same year the Irish Free State was founded, James F. Cassidy, himself a Catholic priest, captured the inherent contradictions informing contemporary Irish attitudes toward women’s virtue and outlined the ramifications for those women who violated the social and moral ideal. Branded by the public as simultaneously a mother and a criminal, a family member and an outcast, the unmarried mother faced shame, betrayal, and exile. With little or no social welfare system to fall back on, her choices were limited to entering the county home, begging on the streets, or possibly resorting to prostitution. Cassidy’s scenario carefully avoided the unmarried mother’s male partner, father to her illegitimate child. Similarly, he ignored the social powerbrokers— church and state—that facilitated these communal responses.

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The historically powerful Catholic Church and the fledgling Irish Free State cooperated increasingly throughout the 1920s as the self-appointed guardians of the nation’s moral climate. Already by 1925 this partnership had provoked legislation establishing censorship of films and proscribing divorce, characteristic hallmarks of the socially repressive Free State society. These initiatives were followed by a series of official investigations, for example, the Inquiry Regarding Venereal Disease (1926), the Committee on Evil Literature (1927), and the Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor Including the Insane Poor (1928). Such inquiries typically generated lengthy reports that resulted in legislation addressing social and moral issues, including the Censorship of Publications Act (1929), the Illegitimate Children (Affiliation Orders) Act (1930), the Legitimacy Act (1931), the Registration of Maternity Homes Act (1934), and the Dance Halls Act (1935). This chapter examines the historical contexts informing one final church-state initiative from the early Free State years, the Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts (1880–85) and Juvenile Prostitution (hereafter referred to as the Carrigan Committee), its ensuing report, and the subsequent Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935). The Carrigan Report, I propose, was a formative moment in establishing an official state attitude toward “sexual immorality” and the subsequent legislation in authorizing the nation’s containment culture.1 In its concrete form Ireland’s architecture of containment encompassed an array of interdependent institutions: industrial and reformatory schools, mother and baby homes, adoption agencies, and Magdalen asylums, among others. In its more abstract form this architecture comprised both the legislation that inscribed these issues and the numerous official and public discourses that resisted admitting to the existence and function of their affiliated institutions (Smith 1997, 2001). In arriving at a hegemonic discourse that responded to perceived sexual immorality, the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Act sanitized state policy with respect to institutional provision. They disembodied sexual practice by obscuring social realities, especially illegitimacy, in discursive abstractions. And they concealed sexual crime, especially rape, infanticide, and abuse, while simultaneously sexualizing the women and children unfortunate enough to fall victim to society’s moral proscriptions.2 Moreover, this official discourse helped to construct an illusion of political nonpartisanship against the backdrop

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of post–civil war divisiveness. Finally, it helped to engineer widespread public consent by way of the legislative agenda, even while the operative functions of the institutional response to sexual practice were shrouded in secrecy. An examination of the Carrigan Report and its political reception in this context underscores how the discourse of sexual immorality enabled, even as it was perceived to threaten, postindependent Ireland’s nativist national imaginary.3 Recent feminist historiography has considered how the project of national identity formation in the decades following independence mobilized Catholic notions of sexual morality in ways that were particularly oppressive for Irish women.4 Against the backdrop of partition and fueled by the desire to “create a new imagined community within the boundaries of the twenty-six-county state,” church and state fashioned a seamlessly homogeneous society (Gray and Ryan 1998, 126). Working in unison, these two institutions closed off internal challenges and contradictions even as they represented society as pure and untainted by external corruption (Clear 2000; O’Callaghan 2002; Daly 1995). In volume 4 of the Field Day Anthology, Marjorie Howes illuminates this alliance, arguing that “one method of defining and asserting the national character that enjoyed wide popular support, accorded with the Free State’s now legendary social and economic conservatism and marked a clearly visible difference between Ireland and England was the formal and informal enforcement of Catholic social teachings, particularly in the area of sexual morality” (2002, 923–24). Catholic morality became at once a hallmark of Irish identity, differentiating the national community from its near neighbors, and an emblem of the uncontested political territory, enabling politicians to eschew party affiliation and seek unanimity through religious conformity.5 Maryann Valiulus outlines the consequences of this strategic allegiance of church and state, arguing that “political and ecclesiastical leaders in the Irish Free State constructed an identity for Irish women solely in domestic terms— women were mothers, women were wives” (1995, 169).6 This idealization and objectification required a series of legislative vehicles with which to constrain women so that they might visibly conform to the prescribed national paradigm (McAvoy 1999; Luddy 2001). The process also necessitated a series of punishments to negate and render invisible those women unlucky enough to countermand social conventions.

INTRODUCTION

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Retelling the history of the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Act exposes the state’s willing abdication of responsibility for matters of sexuality and sexual education to the Catholic Church and challenges the general avoidance of sociosexual issues in favor of the political aspects of church-state relations in much Irish historiography (Whyte 1980, 24–61; Keogh 1986, 163–66, 205–8; Keogh 1995, 71–73; Lee 1989, 157 –60). Recent scholarship allows for a fuller understanding based on the release in 1991 of the Department of Justice’s official files relating to the Carrigan Committee (Finnane 2001; Kennedy 2000).7 More recently still, in 1999 the National Archives made available the minutes of meetings and the files relating to persons and organizations giving evidence before the committee.8 This introduction synthesizes this new archival material. In addition, it argues that the Carrigan Report’s political reception—first the suppression of the report, then the legislative response—established a precedent for church-state management of sociosexual controversies, proscribing visible manifestations of “sexual immorality” while failing to address, or choosing to ignore, the social realities attending them. This political response reveals how the discourse of sexual immorality marginalized the real-life sexual practice that resulted in single motherhood and illegitimacy while it simultaneously elided the pervasive reality of rape, incest, and pedophilia. Both the report and the ensuing legislation demonstrate a significant discursive distortion, one that would enable Ireland’s church-state partnership effectively to criminalize sexual relations outside of marriage and thereby inscribe moral purity into the project of national identity formation. Thus, representations of sexual immorality buttressed this collusive relationship. Moreover, in concealing actual crimes against women and children, the discursive distortion neatly collapsed sexual abuse into the disembodied discourse of sexual immorality. But by suppressing the compromising realities of sexual abuse within this broader discourse, the politics of abstraction helped to constitute a fiction of Irish cultural purity on which the national imaginary depended. Finally, this introduction explores the discursive claims of the Carrigan Report and thereby reveals the distortion’s inherent instability. By focusing, in part, on women who presented testimony before the committee, I reveal how Ireland’s political hegemony ensured that young women would remain uneducated regarding their reproductive biology

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and unaware of their civic and legal rights. I demonstrate how the state’s reliance on a discourse of sexual immorality narrowly focused on illegitimacy stigmatized young women even as it exculpated their male partners. Likewise, I underscore how political discourses legitimized state practices of institutionalizing many of its most vulnerable citizens in mother and baby homes, Magdalen asylums, and industrial and reformatory schools. Does the women’s testimony represent a striking instance of potential dissent from hegemonic practice or, as seems more likely, a response by women themselves unable to imagine an alternative to the regulation, prosecution, and incarceration of social behavior deemed aberrant by both church and state? The female witnesses too offered an institutional response to seemingly transgressive sexuality, arguing that unmarried mothers be confined to state-funded mother and baby homes and juvenile prostitutes to religious-run Magdalen asylums. Operating as they were within a prescribed social and political system, however, the female witnesses’ very participation obliquely contests the containment culture that the Carrigan Report effects. In the final analysis, nobody—not a single committee member or witness, not a single politician or member of the judiciary—argued against or offered an alternative to institutionalization as the solution to sexual immorality. Similarly, nobody suggested that the problem of sexual abuse and pedophilia should take precedence over the “problem” of the unmarried mother. In the absence of any overt contestation, the report and subsequent legislation licensed the state’s abstract, secretive, and punitive response to sexual immorality. The origins of Ireland’s containment culture, in short, are rooted in the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1935.

T H E H I S T O RY What was the Carrigan Committee, what did its report recommend, and how did it influence the Criminal Law Amendment Act? James Fitzgerald Kenney, minister for justice in the Cumann na nGaedheal government, appointed the committee on 17 June 1930 (Report of the Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts 1931, 3).9 Historians generally consider the appointment a deliberate attempt by

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William T. Cosgrave, president of the Executive Council, to deflect church pressure for legislation to ban contraceptives and to close the loophole in the Censorship of Publications Act (1929), which outlawed the advertisement of contraceptives while not legally proscribing their importation or sale.10 The committee’s terms of reference were ambiguous; it sought recommendations to amend the 1880 and 1885 governing statutes as well as legislative proposals to “deal” with “the problem of juvenile prostitution” (Report 1931, 3). William Carrigan, K.C., was appointed chairman, and his name remains indelibly linked with the committee and its highly contentious report.11 On 20 August 1931, after seventeen sittings, the Carrigan Committee submitted its final report to the minister for justice (Report 1931, 43–44). The report recommended a combination of enlightened social reforms together with a series of punitive legislative proposals, for example, raising the age of consent to eighteen, abolishing the “reasonable belief” clause allowing male defendants to argue that they had reason to believe their female partner was old enough to give informed consent, extending to twelve months the period within which a prosecution could be initiated, revising judicial practice requiring corroboration of a young person’s testimony, allowing for courts to hear cases in camera, offering suggestions for the licensing of dance halls, and instigating a general prohibition on the sale of contraceptives, together with recommendations for a series of strict fines and custodial sentences for procurement, solicitation, and public indecency. Most controversially, the report recommended the reintroduction of flogging as punishment for those convicted of sexual crimes against young people and the blacklisting of those found guilty of public indecency (Report 1931, 40–41). As Mark Finnane argues, the report’s findings proved profoundly unsettling for the political and clerical elites governing Irish society (2001, 525). They pointed to a general moral degeneration, evident both in rising illegitimacy rates and in unassailable proof of sexual crimes against very young women and children. Such findings contradicted the prevailing language of national identity formation, which emphasized Catholicism, moral purity, and rural ideals. The reception of the Carrigan Report reveals much about how political decision making established a new Free State moral order. In August 1931, as Cumann na nGaedheal faced a looming general election, Cosgrave undoubtedly wanted to avoid placing the potentially polariz-

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ing aspects of the contraception debate before the public eye.12 Consequently, although the Carrigan Report as well as a fourteen-page Department of Justice memorandum were shared with members of the Executive Council on 2 December 1931, no action was taken.13 The memorandum called into question the Carrigan Committee’s “judicial” experience, indeed its impartiality.14 Moreover, the Department of Justice suggested that the witnesses’ testimony presented a narrowly defined and publicly endorsed version of the facts and that these were singularly consistent with Catholic teachings on morality.15 It characterized the report as overly anxious to increase prosecutions and convictions for sexual immorality but as insufficiently concerned with measures to prevent crime. The memorandum concluded by stressing the undesirability of making its findings public: “The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that the ordinary feelings of decency and the influence of religion have failed in this country and that the only remedy is by way of police action. It is clearly undesirable that such a view of conditions in the Saorstat should be given wide circulation.”16 Almost immediately, therefore, the Carrigan Report became a de facto censored government document. February 1932 witnessed a general election and the first democratic change of political power in the history of the Free State. Feelings of animosity and suspicion ran high.17 The Eucharistic Congress later that year probably eased partisan political tensions, for by the ensuing autumn, when the newly appointed minister for justice, James Geoghegan, again took up the issues raised by the Carrigan Report, political discord had dissipated. At the 27 October meeting of the Executive Council, Eamon de Valera, leader of Fianna Fáil, and his cabinet decided to establish “a committee consisting of representatives of all parties” to consider on a “strictly confidential” basis what course to follow in response to the Carrigan Report.18 There ensued a series of communications between Geoghegan and Cosgrave, now leader of the opposition, to ensure that the eight-member committee “be so representative as to be likely to fully criticize the report . . . , with a view to avoiding as far as possible public discussion of a necessarily unsavoury nature.”19 The process of closed-door deliberations, however, had only begun. Geoghegan sought counsel from two leading members of the Catholic clergy and subsequently met a delegation representing the Standing Committee of the Catholic hierarchy. Both clerics, Rev. J. Canavan, S.J.,

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and Rev. M. J. Brown, agreed in large part with the Department of Justice’s negative estimation of the report as too “drastic, lacking in judgment, and unworkable.”20 They recommended that the report form the basis of new legislation, with Canavan specifically calling for a bill reflecting the committee’s findings to be “passed into law without public discussion in the Dáil.”21 Neither priest accepted the department’s criticisms of Carrigan’s proposals to raise the age of consent as merely “punitive” and “vindictive,” arguing instead that “the object of this law is certainly [a] deterrent.”22 Canavan maintained that the “Government should seek, in the first place, to stop the earths, to remove, as far as possible, the occasions of offence”; in particular, he asserted the need for “rigorous control” of dance halls and motor cars used for immoral ends.23 Whereas Brown recognized the potential benefit of shocking the Free State population into greater awareness through public debate, in the end he joined his fellow cleric in advising against publication, admitting that the report’s findings “will rejoice our enemies.”24 Geoghegan’s negotiations with members of the hierarchy required delicate handling, especially as he navigated between the government’s secular and religious loyalties. In a meeting with Dr. David Keane, bishop of Limerick, and the bishops of Ossory and Thasos on 1 December 1932, Geoghegan assured the bishops that “he would like to see a Bill go through which would bring the law into accord with the best Catholic practice and teaching.”25 However, when the delegation of bishops sought greater influence over the “informal” committee of Dáil deputies, Geoghegan informed Keane that it “could best do its work privately and to avoid ‘lobbying’ there should not be any announcement of names for the present.”26 The minister did solicit a memorandum representing the hierarchy’s views. Keane’s reply amounted to a wish list of concerns the Catholic Church sought to have addressed in any legislation.27 Specifically, the hierarchy gave priority to four issues: a general prohibition on the sale and importation of contraceptive appliances, raising the age of consent to eighteen, effective licensing of public dance halls, and legislation dealing with moral abuse in motor cars.28 The informal committee met eight times between December 1932 and May 1933, while, with the cabinet’s consent, Geoghegan organized preparation of legislation to amend the criminal law.29 So high was the level of secrecy that members of the Dáil were not privy to the committee membership.30 Geoghegan and his cohort finally arrived at a

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watered-down version of what the Carrigan Report initially proposed but one that substantially incorporated the hierarchy’s concerns. The draft “heads” proposed that the age of consent would be seventeen, not eighteen, and that unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl between fifteen and seventeen would remain a misdemeanor, not a felony, as would attempted unlawful carnal knowledge with a girl under the age of fifteen. The committee resisted the report’s suggestion both that the offense of solicitation be redefined and made applicable to men as well as women and that whipping be reinstated and sex offenders’ names be published.31 At the meeting of the Executive Council on 17 November 1933 de Valera and his cabinet accepted all but two of the informal committee’s suggestions for what became the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, 1934. First, after extended deliberations, the cabinet replaced the general prohibition that allowed for “exceptional circumstances” based on religious conviction or medical need with an absolute ban on the sale or importation of contraceptive appliances and drugs.32 Second, the cabinet excised the heads pertaining to licensing of dance halls and, after minor revisions, created the separate Dance Halls Bill, 1934.33 These bills were considered and approved at the Executive Council meeting in June 1934, followed by “second stage” and “committee stage” hearings in both the Dáil and the Seanád. Throughout, the government maintained the secret and closed nature of deliberations leading to both pieces of legislation.34 In the end, both the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935) and the Dance Hall Act (1935) passed into law without any substantive debate or public participation.

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The traditional history of the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Act only partially captures the full significance of these moments in the early Free State period. Archival material released in 1999, specifically, the minutes of evidence and the various memoranda submitted by organizations and individuals presenting testimony, permit excised segments of this story to be reinserted.35 Public access to this material is significant for a number of reasons but especially because in August 1931 only Carrigan’s final report, with its eight-page

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“general statement” summarizing witness testimony, was forwarded to the minister for justice. The Department of Justice immediately identified the impact of withholding the various witnesses’ memoranda and the committee’s official minutes of meetings: “The Committee explains that it was considered necessary to take evidence in private and while difficulty would probably have been encountered if any other course had been adopted, the fact remains that the reader of the report is presented with the Committee’s conclusions without having access to the evidence on which those conclusions were based. In these circumstances, it is not easy to assess the value of the Report.”36 It is unlikely that the civil servants who authored the Department of Justice’s critical evaluation ever had access to the “evidence,” just as it is certain that the politicians who constituted Geoghegan’s informal committee did not.37 The witness testimony was never discussed in public either: at its first meeting the committee decided to withhold evidence from the press.38 The following analysis, initially focusing on the clerical witnesses and Gen. Eoin O’Duffy, resituates the significance of their testimony in light of my argument that the church-state formulation of sexual immorality became an enabling discursive distortion. The political responses to these witnesses—first the report and then the legislation—foreground how perceptions of sexual practice (in the case of the clerics) and the reality of sexual abuse (in O’Duffy’s testimony) were accommodated and therefore contained by the discourse of sexual immorality. This accommodation, I argue, buttressed even as it helped to constitute Ireland’s national imaginary. Of the twenty-nine witnesses, six were members of the Catholic clergy. The most prominent was Rev. R. S. Devane, S.J., author of sociological writings on illegitimacy, the unmarried mother, and proselytism in publications such as Studies and the Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Devane 1924a, 1924b, 1928, 1931a, 1931b).39 For much of the 1920s Devane and like-minded social thinkers heralded the Free State’s opportunity to fix the “legal standard of morality in true consonance with the ideals set before them by the teaching of the Catholic Church” (Devane 1924a, 58; see also Glynn 1921, 461– 67; MacInerney 1921, 140– 56; MacInerney 1922, 246–61; “An Sagart” 1922, 145–53). In pointing to underlying problems determining “immorality” in the Free State, Devane was unique among his religious brethren who appeared before the com-

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mittee. He articulated critical concerns that would remain prominent in sociological debates for decades, for example, “the dual standard of morality accepted in this country, as in perhaps no other, where the woman is always hounded down and the man dealt with leniently.” Devane was especially alert to the implicit hypocrisy of the well-meaning in Free State society, suggesting that the citizen too often appeared interested in the welfare of “any other’s child or sister . . . rather than one’s own.” Most devastating, perhaps, he surmised that an exclusively male point of view in “the administration as well as legislation” elided any “adequate appreciation of female psychology in matters involving morality.”40 The Carrigan Report largely ignores Devane’s significant challenges.41 Instead, it disproportionately privileges those elements of the cleric’s testimony that were loudly echoed by his fellow priests, in particular, a seeming obsession with the dangers associated with popular amusements, especially the dance hall. In contrast to Devane’s sociological observations, Fathers Fitzpatrick, Lee, Flanagan, Roughneen, and Gildea reported that they waged war against moral degeneration in their respective parishes. Such anecdotes conjure a level of authenticity more in tune with the committee’s predilections: “boys and girls lay[ing] by the roadsides near Limerick,” the dangers arising from “the return home late at night of young boys and girls from dance halls,” and “2 cases of domestic servants—both under 20 years of age— who had been seduced.”42 Lobbying to eradicate “sexual immorality” at its point of origin, these clerics attributed the recent rise in illegitimacy almost entirely to the “vice” imported by popular entertainments. This conflation of vice and immorality was not necessarily exclusive to the Catholic Church; indeed, the committee’s very name—Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts (1880–85) and Juvenile Prostitution—and the official report of the same title similarly elide immorality and juvenile prostitution. In effect, then, such discourse transformed every unmarried mother into a potential prostitute. Devane also joined his colleagues in identifying contemporary sources of “immorality”: the loss of parental control, the perversions of modern cinema, the illicit book, the absence of supervision and the licensing of dance halls, and the “opportunities afforded by the misuse of motor cars.”43 Rather than directly confront the social consequences attending extramarital sexual practice or sexual abuse, clerical witnesses focused

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their censure on visible manifestations of sexual immorality. But singularly focused as they were, they failed to contain compromising realities. For example, in their comments regarding “bad housing accommodation” and “the appaling [sic] manner in which members of families are crowded on each other,” both Fr. Fitzpatrick and Fr. Flanagan were aware that incest contributed to increased numbers of unmarried mothers and illegitimate children.44 But, as J. J. Lee concludes, “the obsession with sex permitted a blind eye to be turned towards the social scars that disfigured the face of Ireland”: on this occasion the clerics’ obsession with the visibility of sex deflected attention from the plight of individuals occluded by sexual immorality: the unmarried mother, the illegitimate child, and victims of rape, incest, and pedophilia (1989, 159; see also Finnane 2001, 530). In its uncritical emphasis on clerical concerns, the Carrigan Report replicates this unwillingness to consider the social conditions fostering incest and illegitimacy, including poverty, the absence of birth control, and the need for education regarding human sexuality and legal entitlements.45 In contrast to the clerics’ focus on extramarital sexual practice, General O’Duffy, commissioner of the Garda Síochána (the state’s police force), focused his testimony on prosecutions for sexual offenses, addressing the modern nation’s need to legislate against immorality, especially rape, incest, and pedophilia.46 More than any other witness, O’Duffy influenced the shape of the committee’s final report and the eventual legislation.47 Prior to his appearance he submitted a statistical survey documenting sexual crimes between 1924 and 1930, including a breakdown by year for each county, capturing the “Defilement, Carnal Knowledge, or Rape” of girls under ten, between ten and thirteen, between thirteen and sixteen, between sixteen and eighteen, and over eighteen. This survey similarly details “Indecent Assault on Girls,” “Incest,” “Sodomy,” “Indecent Assault on Boys regardless of Age,” and “Bestiality.”48 For each offense it charts the numbers of prosecutions and ultimate convictions. O’Duffy also submitted a twenty-eight-page analysis of these statistics in which he provided significant detail about the nature and quantity of sexual crime in Ireland. Like Devane, he urged the newly independent state to legislate against immorality according to Irish Catholic principles: “The present state of the law is disgraceful in a Christian country, and the whole question of morality crimes should be now dealt with from an Irish point of view.”49 O’Duffy’s memoran-

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dum included summary particulars for thirty-four sexual offenses during the year 1930 to date; during his testimony he addressed each case more fully with the benefit of the actual case files—seven involving girls under ten years of age.50 Despite graphic anecdotal and irrefutable statistical evidence suggesting widespread sexual crime in Free State Ireland, the Carrigan Report attempted to rein in this damaging portrait of Irish society. The report edits out O’Duffy’s most specific charges and textually minimizes troubling comparisons suggesting, for example, that “children of the poorer classes” in the Free State are “less protected than in Great Britain.”51 Nevertheless, the report could not avoid reproducing O’Duffy’s major contention, that “there was an alarming amount of sexual crime increasing yearly, a feature of which was the large number of cases of criminal interference with girls and children from 16 years downwards, including many cases of children under 10 years.”52 Especially troubling for the politicians and civil servants who were to decide the fate of the report was O’Duffy’s assessment that less than 15 percent of such cases were prosecuted in any given year. He attributed this low rate chiefly to peculiarities in the judicial process that required corroboration of a single witness or mandated that a judge warn the jury of the danger of convicting the accused on uncorroborated evidence.5 3 Ironically, the Carrigan Report thus demonstrated how prevailing judicial processes operated to mark young women and children as accomplices to a crime rather than as victims of an outrage.54 Yet the Department of Justice memorandum considered precisely this aspect of the report unbalanced. “It is understood that many competent authorities have grave doubts as to the value of children’s evidence,” it noted. “A child with a vivid imagination may actually live in his mind the situation as he invented it and will be quite unshaken by severe crossexamination.”55 Would the issue of child sexual abuse have been handled differently by the civil servants in the Department of Justice and by the male legislators in the Dáil and Seanád if the Carrigan Report or O’Duffy’s testimony had entered into public debate? The refusal to acknowledge child abuse as a concern and the elision of that issue in the political and journalistic arenas guaranteed its invisibility (McAvoy 1999, 261). Only after the deluge of revelations in the 1990s regarding contemporary child sexual abuse (e.g., the various clerical pedophilia scandals involving,

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among others, Fr. Brendan Smyth and Fr. Sean Fortune, the Kilkenny Incest Inquiry, and the “West of Ireland Farmer” [a.k.a. Joseph McColgan] case) can the significance of suppressing the Carrigan Committee testimony and report be fully appreciated.56 The precedent established between 1930 and 1935, which legitimized secrecy and silence as a response to child abuse and pedophilia, reverberates for twentieth- and twenty-first-century survivors of these crimes throughout the nation.

FEMALE WITNESSES Carrigan’s report only once alluded explicitly to participation in the proceedings by women and then only to representatives from the Irish Women Doctors’ Committee who challenged official statistics on illegitimacy as failing to reflect “the actual condition of the country.”57 Such an underrepresentation is especially egregious given that eighteen of the twenty-nine witnesses were women. Although the report acknowledged that these witnesses represented a range of charitable social welfare organizations protecting women, children, and unmarried mothers, treating sexual disease, and reforming offenders, it failed to incorporate the expertise the women brought to the committee’s deliberations.58 The recent reemergence of the minutes of evidence and the various organizations’ memoranda help to redress this historical elision.59 The women’s testimony diverged significantly from the prosecutorial and regulatory emphasis of O’Duffy and the clerics. As practicing social workers and doctors, these women dealt with women’s and children’s medical, educational, and social welfare needs. In their testimony they suggested a systematic provision of care and emphasized prevention rather than punishment. Pointing to the practical consequence attending legislative and judicial proscriptions, they advocated a more charitable social environment for the vulnerable in society.60 Although their testimony anticipated issues that were to burden social welfare provision for much of the twentieth century, these women were silenced in the official discourse of the state, which established a further precedent in the area of social provision as church and state countered expertise with resistance and failed thereby to respond to social need.

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Three specific aspects of the women’s testimony demonstrate forcefully the state’s failure. Many witnesses emphasized the need to educate young Irish women about human sexuality.61 Apparently grasping the need to bridge their concerns with the committee’s political agenda, they argued that female ignorance about reproductive biology increased illegitimacy rates, the incidences of sexually transmitted diseases, and a wide range of related social ills. Many of the witnesses distinguished between young women in Ireland and in Britain. According to Dr. Angela Russell, representing the Irish Women Citizens and Local Government Association, Irish girls were “physically more immature than those of equal age abroad and temperamentally they were more trusting and simple.”62 Likewise, Mrs. J. M. Kettle, representing the Dublin County Union, argued that “Irish Girls were less sophisticated than English girls.”63 Drs. Delia Moclair Horne and Dorothy Stopford Price, representing the Irish Women Doctors’ Committee, were more forthright in calling for enhanced instruction, pointing to young Irish women’s “remarkable” ignorance about physical facts. Both doctors cited personal knowledge of thirteen-year-old girls who had recently become mothers.64 Mrs. Margaret Gavin Duffy and Dr. Ita Brady, visitors to the Lock Hospital in Dublin, claimed that such ignorance appeared to make girls released from industrial schools “an easy prey to designing men” and suggested a direct correlation between the industrial school system and the prostitutes they visited in the Lock.65 They concluded that female doctors attending such girls’ schools should impart sexual education.66 The Carrigan Report’s evasion of this testimony suppressed these professional women’s call for education, particularly for members of society marginalized by poverty or institutionalization. Such concealment occurred repeatedly in subsequent Irish discussions of “sexual immorality”—in the Catholic hierarchy’s resistance to pre- and postnatal care in debates surrounding the “Mother and Child” scheme (1951) and, more recently, in attempts to thwart the “Stay Safe” program (1993).67 The report’s suppression of female testimony reveals how church and state worked to ensure that neither school nor dispensary nor even home would provide the necessary education to combat ignorance about human sexuality. Moreover, this cultivated ignorance not only reinforced a stereotype of the pure Irish woman; it also enabled state leaders to imagine an ignorance that may not have been that profound. The legacies of these political choices resonate in a series of sociosexual Irish

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controversies since the early 1980s: the Ann Lovett case, the Kerry babies inquiry, and the various industrial schools scandals (Maguire 2001, 3–35; Inglis 2003; Hug 1999; Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999). Another focus of the women’s testimony concerned Irish society’s intolerance of sexual immorality in general and unmarried mothers and their children in particular. Many witnesses suggested that an inhospitable social environment stigmatizing illegitimacy contributed directly to prostitution, infanticide, and emigration among young women.68 M. J. Cruice, secretary of St. Patrick’s Guild, maintained that the majority of unmarried mothers arriving in Dublin from the provinces sought to escape their shame and conceal their children.69 Horne and Stopford Price related this issue of secrecy to the underreporting of sexual crimes against women and children. Both witnesses argued that in their experience young girls admitted to rape or assault only if and when they became pregnant.70 Representatives from Dublin’s Lock Hospital corroborated this testimony, describing the young woman’s reluctance to disclose the name of her “betrayer” or to seek recourse through the recently passed Illegitimate Children (Affiliation Orders) Act.71 Carrigan’s final report echoes these recurring observations: it acknowledges the impossibility of knowing the annual number of illegitimate births that unmarried girls—in “their distressful plight and shame”—sought to conceal.72 The report notes the number of unmarried Irish mothers supported by various charitable societies in Ireland that were not included in the Department of Local Government and Public Health’s official statistics.7 3 It also documents information from Catholic rescue homes in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and London caring for unmarried Irish mothers and their children.74 The report not only portrays the relationship between stigmatization and underreporting of sexual immorality but also reveals that incarceration and emigration were the accepted societal responses to manifestations of embodied sexual practice. Political responses to the edited report thus easily sidestepped the unpleasant contradictions highlighted by the suppressed female testimony. A developing rhetoric of national identity formation, in particular, the official discourse of Irish motherhood, refused to acknowledge and therefore ignored the maltreatment of unmarried mothers and their children. By preventing public debate, the political response legitimized the stigmatization of illegitimacy and contributed to the perpetuation of oppressive conditions directly and disproportionately impinging on

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women and eliding male culpability. Perhaps anticipating this form of political resistance, the female witnesses had petitioned to increase the age of consent to at least eighteen for the general population and twenty-one for female employees, claiming that the current age of consent was related directly to increasing illegitimacy rates. The Criminal Law Amendment Act diluted such suggested measures, and legislative proscriptions did little to alleviate the underlying social and cultural prejudice. Because the nation-state effectively criminalized sexual immorality, in both the legislative response and societal discourse, it criminalized single mothers and their children as well as the victims of rape, incest, and pedophilia; they were indiscriminately marked as aberrant and deemed deserving of scorn and punishment. Irish society continued to stigmatize single mothers and their illegitimate offspring for much of the twentieth century, driving the lucky ones abroad in search of new lives and condemning the most unfortunate to incarceration and forced separation at home (Milotte 1997; Batts 1994).75 This too is part of the Carrigan Report’s legacy. The female witnesses’ most controversial goal, perhaps, was to undermine the easy conflation of “vice” and “sexual immorality” that was so unproblematically presented by their male colleagues. Speaking on behalf of the Irish Women Citizens and Local Government Association, Dr. Angela Russell and Ms. I. Dodd warned that “prostitution” accounted for only “20% of the . . . immorality” in contemporary Ireland.76 Establishing a distinction between prostitution and extramarital sexual practice and sexual abuse would rescue women from prosecution and imprisonment and simultaneously rehabilitate the unmarried mother into society. These witnesses also sought to decriminalize juvenile prostitution and provide opportunities for reform, education, and rehabilitation to so-called young offenders. Institutional provision, however, remained central to the women’s proposals. Their attention to rehabilitation, education, and spiritual reform on the one hand and alternative forms of institutional confinement on the other signals a transitional moment in sociological thinking: assumptions of late-nineteenth-century Victorian philanthropy were giving way to emerging trends in professional social work (Luddy 2001, 805–6; Luddy 1995a; Clear 1987; Finnegan 2001). Numerous witnesses, including Cruice, Gavan Duffy, Brady, Dodd, and Russell, called for the establishment of separate voluntary institutions for unmarried mothers

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and their children to accommodate the large volume of cases currently dependent on county homes, former Irish workhouses long evoking social stigma. After noting that county homes—funded by state and local government—provided for 2,105 unmarried mothers in 1928, Carrigan’s report tellingly points to “the objectionable fact that unmarried mothers cannot be maintained apart from the other inmates (the decent poor and sick).”7 7 In contrast to such class and moral prejudice, the female witnesses sought to rehabilitate first-time unmarried mothers: they recommended that so-called first-fall offenders be protected from both public ostracism and the contaminating influence of more hardened prostitutes also residing among the county homes population. As a solution, the state should establish and subsidize homes for unmarried mothers, according to the representatives of the Irish Women Workers’ Union, Helena Moloney and Helen Chenevix.78 These mother and baby homes, to be operated by female religious, would train and prepare inmates for their return to ordinary life.79 K. M. Sullivan, representing the Probation Office, as well as Cruice, Russell, and Dodd, also argued vehemently against imprisoning young girls convicted of prostitution in Borstal-type institutions; they claimed that “a short period of imprisonment would be less detrimental to such offenders than a long period of detention in an Institution” and recommended a system of suspended sentences for women agreeing voluntarily to enter “a religious Home or Refuge.”80 A representative from one such home, Emily Buchanan, of the Protestant-run Magdalen asylum on Dublin’s Leeson Street, praised her institution’s success in bringing religious influence to juvenile prostitutes.81 Gavan Duffy and Brady called for similar provision for juvenile prostitutes in Catholic-run Magdalen institutions.82 Given what is now known about the appalling conditions of mother and baby homes such as Bessboro and Castlepollard or Magdalen asylums such as Gloucester Street and Sunday’s Well, the female witnesses’ recommendations for institutionalization complicates the subversive nature of their testimony.83 Only with the benefit of recent representations of these institutions—June Goulding’s disturbing memoir of life in one of Ireland’s mother and baby homes (1998), Patricia Burke Brogan’s play Eclipsed (1994), Peter Mullan’s movie The Magdalene Sisters (2002), and documentaries such as Sex in a Cold Climate (1998) and Washing Away the Stain (1993)—do the consequences of the wit-

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nesses’ recommendations emerge. Yet these professional women in the early years of the nation appeared to seek provision for rather than prosecution or abandonment of those in Irish society marginalized by the hegemonic discourse of sexual immorality. From their perspective in the early 1930s, voluntary incarceration would enable rehabilitation, giving the unmarried mother or the victim of sexual abuse a chance to rejoin society with her character intact. By contrast, the prevailing modes of confinement—the county home, the Borstal, and the prison—offered permanent stigmatization or criminalization. Thus, the testimony of these women reflects a particular moment in history; it reflects both their class and professional backgrounds and the influence of Catholic social thinkers such as Devane, M. H. MacInerney, and Sir Joseph Glynn. The institutional aspect of the women’s testimony, like the proposals of their male counterparts, nonetheless facilitated the maintenance of Ireland’s national imaginary. By institutionalizing unmarried mothers and juvenile prostitutes, if only to effect their rehabilitation, these women contributed to the containment of embodied sexuality crucial to the project of national identity formation. Whereas the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Act largely ignored the women’s suggestions regarding education and the stigma of illegitimacy, they silently incorporated institutional provision as Irish society’s preferred response to an undifferentiated sexual immorality. They also ensured that incarceration would remain shrouded in a web of secrecy and denial, thereby reinscribing the institution’s punitive rather than rehabilitative function. Church and state embraced the institutional impulse not only because it accorded with accepted practice—punishing women for sexual transgressions while avoiding male culpability—but also because it sustained their collusive relationship with respect to moral purity and the project of national identity formation. This solution to sexual immorality proved mutually beneficial to Ireland’s powerbrokers, which explains the state’s abdication of responsibility for the women and children placed under church control. Women were promised secrecy and rehabilitation. In return, church and state negated the comprising realities of embodied sexual practice. Containing sexual immorality, specifically, illegitimacy and prostitution, behind the walls of Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalen asylums helped to constitute and to perpetuate the fiction of Irish cultural purity.

INTRODUCTION

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CONCLUSION Some six years after the Criminal Law Amendment Act became law, the fate of one survivor of child sexual abuse was revealed before Dublin’s Central Criminal Court. The judgment, delivered on 16 June 1941, demonstrates how Ireland’s containment culture operated.84 The court determined that the girl, who had been raped repeatedly by her father when she was between the ages of eleven and fourteen, was “living in circumstances calculated to cause or encourage . . . prostitution or seduction.” Under the terms of section 21 of the Children Act (1908), she was removed from her home and committed to High Park Convent, the location of one of the largest Magdalen asylums in the country. In a letter to the county registrar, Elizabeth Carroll, the probation officer handling the case, explained that Ireland’s industrial and reformatory school system refused to admit the girl, fearing that her mere presence would contaminate her young peers. Moreover, Carroll admitted to being “sorry” that “we could not fix the girl in a better Home” and quickly moved to explain, “But you know our difficulties, and in any event she is better where she is than at home.”85 Although the young girl was the victim of a crime, the various authorities initially regarded her as a threatening embodiment of sexual deviancy. In the absence of an acceptable alternative, she was abandoned to High Park and its population of adult women and routine of hard labor, incessant prayer, and submission to a religious rule focused on cleansing the body of sexual impurity. Questions regarding her release persist, as they do for all women who entered the Magdalen: the committal order stipulates a six-month stay, but it is not clear when or whether she was eventually released.

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1

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CHAPTER

1

The Magdalen in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

There is no branch of state service for which religious communities are more especially fitted, and in which they succeed more notably, than in the rescue of fallen women. Mary Costello, “The Sisterhood of Sorrow. No. II.— The Magdalens,” 15 March 1897

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riting just three years before the dawn of the twentieth century, Mary Costello explicitly links the work of religious congregations that operate Magdalen asylums with “state service.”1 She explains that the nuns’ task requires that they accept “one, two, or three hundred souls,” women from the lowest fields of “licence,” “pleasure-craving temperaments,” and “confirmed inebriates,” and offer them “a spiritual hospital” in which to repent their sinful ways and seek spiritual salvation. Entry to the asylum requires that the penitent women “abjure” their former habits and lead lives of “virtue,” “sobriety,” and “restraint.” They must be prepared to “look upon the joys of this world as at an end” and spend their “remaining days in works of usefulness and abnegation.” And, Costello underscores, the women must enter the asylum

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voluntarily, for the “Sisters have no legal control,” and the women remain “free to leave the institution at any moment they like” (Costello 1897b, 7). One might reasonably ask how the nuns supported their charitable activities, since unlike the industrial and reformatory schools also managed by many religious congregations, Magdalen institutions were never funded by government capitation grants. In the main, these institutions survived by means of a combination of charitable donations, endowments received through wills and legacies, and the operation of commercial laundries in which the penitent women worked without remuneration.2 In addition, many sectors of society benefited from the religious communities’ “state service.” 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. The religious communities acquired significant social and cultural authority through their charitable work and, in the case of the Magdalen asylums, accumulated financial resources through the operation of commercial and presumably profitable enterprises. Some penitents even might be seen to have benefited from the short-term refuge of the Magdalen in the absence of alternative forms of relief and assistance. In laying the historical background for this study of the Magdalen institutions in twentieth-century Irish society, this chapter considers the intersection of these spheres of interest in the preceding century. The written history of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums is almost exclusively focused on nineteenth-century Ireland. Indeed, the historical record comes to an abrupt end with the advent of the twentieth century. Because the religious congregations that operated these laundry institutions continue to deny access to records for women entering the asylums after 1900, historians are constrained in what they can say, with authority, about the Magdalen laundries as they developed and continued to operate throughout the past century. We know that these voluntary asylums developed in the nineteenth century in relation to apparently high levels of prostitution in Irish society.3 We know that the asylums reflect the emergence of women’s involvement in philanthropy. And we also know that they signal the dominant influence of Catholic

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female religious in postfamine Ireland. This history underscores, moreover, how Ireland’s Magdalen asylums changed significantly throughout the first 133 years of their existence. Institutions founded with a philanthropic mission became, by the close of the nineteenth century, more carceral than rehabilitative in nature. The origins of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums stretch back to 1767 when Lady Arbella Denny opened the first refuge for “fallen women” at 8 Leeson Street in Dublin.4 As its mission, the asylum promised the women that they would be sheltered from “Shame, from Reproach, from Disease, from Want, from the base Society that ha[d] either drawn [them] into vice, or prevailed upon [them] to continue in it, to the utmost hazard of [their] eternal happiness” (Widdess 1966, 5).5 Closely associated with the moral reform and spiritual conversion of fallen women in the city, Leeson Street, together with the other twenty-two asylums operating in Ireland by the end of the nineteenth century, provided shelter for women considered likely to end up on the streets.6 As philanthropic enterprises, these institutions attempted to aid poor women while seeking, of course, to alleviate a contemporary social vice, and therefore contributed to the semblance of order and respectability in nineteenthcentury Irish society. The name adopted by the institutions was no accident, even if it proved curiously ironic. Influenced by the biblical figure of the prostitute, the name appropriates Mary Magdalene as a role model for repentance and spiritual regeneration. Mary Magdalene repented her sins in time to wash Christ’s feet and dry them with her hair before his crucifixion. In the Bible, she is rewarded by being selected as the first witness to Christ’s resurrection.7 Initially, the majority of these institutions —both Protestant and Catholic— were operated exclusively by laywomen with the support of managing committees of male and female trustees.8 It was not until the 1830s that congregations of female religious began assuming control of Catholic Magdalen asylums. While the Catholic religious–run institutions would continue to operate into the 1990s, the majority of Protestant lay-managed asylums ceased operation by the early twentieth century.9 Although they shared many common features (e.g., neither institution discriminated along lines of religion, they followed a similar routine of prayer, silence, work, and recreation, and they cultivated a similar environment of guilt and shame related to female sexuality), there were key differences.

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Protestant asylums, such as the Dublin Female Penitentiary (1812), the Asylum for Penitent Females (1835), and Dublin by Lamplight (1856), tended only to welcome “redeemable” young women, turning away the “hardened” and “unworthy” sinner (Luddy 1995a, 110–22; Preston 2004, 48–49). It seems likely, therefore, that many of these women were not prostitutes at all but rather women who had been seduced. Despite the limited opportunities for women in terms of “respectable” employment, society at the time understood prostitution as a condition forced upon women rather than selected as a viable means of income. As Maria Luddy explains, “A ‘virtuous’ woman was first seduced, and thus shamed, after this, due to abandonment by her seducer, she continued as a ‘privateer’ and finally became so degraded that she took to the streets” (1995a, 103). Protestant asylums tended to detain women for short periods, typically less than two years. They also proved more successful in returning their reformed penitents to society, typically in positions of domestic service. These lay institutions, for as long as they existed, remained more faithful to the rehabilitative mission of the Victorian rescue movement: success was defined in terms of returning the repentant sinner, as a reformed and useful member, to society. The religious-run asylums came of age in the immediate postfamine era, a time of major demographic changes for Ireland’s Catholic population.10 The growing strength of the Catholic Church, initiated with the establishment of Maynooth College (1796) and bolstered by Catholic Emancipation (1829), reached new levels of cultural authority in the postfamine decades as the parish priest assumed a dominating influence in Irish social life.11 With the development of a coordinated system of parish clergy, the Catholic Church began defining new moral standards and domestic practices that in turn resulted in a new emphasis on the value of women’s modesty and respectability.12 In the Irish context, the ideology of the domestic sphere was increasingly linked to the “catholic-nationalist ideal of the nation as ‘proper’ family” (Wills 2001, 41). Dympna McLoughlin outlines the chief characteristics of the respectable Irish woman in the postfamine era as possessing “an overwhelming desire to marry” and remain faithful, subordinate, and dependent; a willingness to accept the domestic sphere as her natural habitat, and thus to engage in reproduction rather than production; and a readiness to confine her sexuality to marriage (1994, 266). Such beliefs were increasingly apparent among the emerging Catholic bourgeoisie com-

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prising Ireland’s mercantile and strong farmer middle classes, but they were cultivated and disseminated more widely by the newly energized Catholic clergy.13 Tom Inglis’s Moral Monopoly carefully delineates the emergence of this dependent relationship between newly domesticated Irish women and their religious fathers: It was not simply that the Church gained control of women but that, because of their isolation within the domestic sphere, women and especially mothers were forced in their struggle for power to surrender to the control of the priest and ally themselves with the Church. For women to attain and maintain moral power, it was necessary that they retain their virtue and chastity. This was the message which mothers began to pass on to their daughters. Within the rational differentiation of spheres of moral responsibility, chastity and modesty became the specific goals for women. (1998, 189)

Whereas Inglis insists on women’s adherence and allegiance to the church, historians of Irish women draw a more contentious relationship between women and priests in postfamine society. Cara Delay, for example, suggests that women frequently challenged the authority of the family, the state, and particularly the church: “When they exchanged words with their priest, such women demanded a voice in their own social and religious lives” (2005, 110).14 Inglis, however, signals important sociological and economic ramifications of the alliance between women and Catholic clergy: What happened, then, during the nineteenth century was that a Puritan sexual morality, which maintained women as fragile, delicate creatures whose nature had to be protected, began to be instilled among Irish women, first by the Catholic Church and later by women, as mothers themselves. It was the creation and maintenance of such women which was the mainstay of bourgeois Catholic morality, and the basis of the initial phase of modernisation of Irish society. (1998, 189–90)

This fusion of economic and moral interests resulted in the proscription of human sexuality, which was increasingly monitored, supervised, and suppressed as the nineteenth century progressed (Inglis 2005, 17). The sexually promiscuous woman, especially the unmarried mother and her

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illegitimate child, presented a serious challenge to the economic stability of men newly converted to the benefits of capital accumulation.15 Illegitimacy, tolerated under Ireland’s indigenous Brehon Law, became strongly prohibited, transforming the unfortunate mother and child into social pariahs.16 Kenneth Hugh Connell, writing on nineteenth-century observations of Irish peasant society, gives an account of the harsh and intolerant conditions endured by unmarried mothers based largely on evidence collected in 1835–36 by the “Commissioners for Inquiring into Conditions of the Poorer Classes in Ireland.” He states that “in the Irish countryside before—and probably long after —the Famine, it was the lucky mother, or likely mother, of an illegitimate child who was not shunned by her neighbours and despised, if not cast off, by her own family” (1996, 51). Moreover, Connell claims, the woman’s condition or “stain” was never forgotten; even her children’s children bore the stigma associated with being a social outcast. Because women, it would appear, were responsible for providing the mainstay of a new bourgeois Catholic morality, they were severely punished for failing to uphold the implicit requisite standards.17 After 1840 Catholic religious congregations, already engaged in a variety of related charitable works, including running schools and visiting the poor and sick, increasingly involved themselves in custodial care of various kinds.18 Nuns, in particular, operated hospitals, fee-paying orphanages, and asylums for the blind, the elderly, the aged, and the mentally ill. With the help of government funding through the Reformatory Act (1858) and the Industrial Schools Act (1868), Catholic religious congregations moved quickly to dominate the management of these institutions (Clear 1987, 103–4; also see Robins 1980; Barnes 1989; Magray 1998, 78). Empowered by the new emphasis on sexual morality and respectability in Catholic Ireland, and responding to an increase in prostitution, a select number of religious orders set about providing “an extensive, organised network of refuges” throughout the country (Luddy 1995a, 122). In 1832 the Irish Sisters of Charity, an indigenous religious congregation founded by Mary Aikenhead, assumed control of the General Magdalen Asylum, founded at 91 Townsend Street in Dublin, and relocated it to Donnybrook in 1837. In 1850 this asylum could accommodate some fifty penitents, a figure that more than doubled by 1883 (Prunty 1998, 268–69). The Sisters of Charity also assumed control of a lay asylum in

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Cork on 8 June 1846 (Atkinson 1882, 396–400; Sullivan 1924, 349–70). After building a new convent at Peacock Lane, the sisters moved the asylum there. Another indigenous foundation, the Sisters of Mercy, assumed control of the Galway Magdalen Asylum in a similar fashion. Founded in 1834 by a Miss Lynch, who had returned from France to pursue rescue work, this refuge was transferred to the Mercy Sisters in 1847 (Luddy 1995a, 22, 123). The Mercy nuns followed a similar pattern in assuming control of St. Patrick’s Refuge at Kingstown (modern-day Dun Laoghaire) (Prunty 1998, 269). In 1856 the Mercy Sisters opened a much smaller refuge in Tralee, at which time it confined only thirteen inmates (Finnegan 2001, 10n).19 Although Ireland’s indigenous congregations served a developing national identity, it is ironic that the church called on its international network of religious orders to augment this effort.20 The midcentury decades witnessed the arrival of female religious from abroad to participate in various philanthropic enterprises, including the operation of Magdalen asylums (Clear 1987, 103– 11). The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, a French order founded in 1641, were invited by Rev. John Smith to establish a refuge in Dublin. They later moved premises to High Park in Drumcondra. In 1853, the asylum had forty inmates, growing to 160 by 1883 and to 210 by century’s end, making it the largest Magdalen asylum operating in Ireland (Luddy 1995a, 122). The same order assumed control of the Lower Gloucester Street asylum from the Sisters of Mercy in 1877, which had subsumed a smaller institution at 76 Mecklenburgh Street in 1873 (Prunty 1998, 269).21 The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd of Angers, popularly known as the Good Shepherd Sisters, were invited to Ireland in 1848 to assume control of a lay-managed Catholic refuge operated at Clare Street in Limerick. This French order, committed to the reform of fallen women, went on to “dominate the Female Penitentiary Movement in Ireland for almost a century and a half ” (Finnegan 2001, 10).22 They took over the operation of another lay-managed asylum in Waterford in 1858, before founding asylums at New Ross in County Wexford in 1860 and in Belfast in 1867. Finally, in 1870, the Good Shepherds opened an asylum in Cork that they moved to a convent at Sunday’s Well in 1872, newly built in response to the implementation of the Contagious Disease Acts of 1866–69.

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With the establishment of these twelve Magdalen asylums, the Catholic Church responded to what it perceived as a significant moral and spiritual decline in postfamine Irish society. In the process, these institutions facilitated the removal of a heterogeneous group of women and girls from society: prostitutes, young women in “moral danger,” that is, deemed likely to fall, women of limited intelligence, victims of physical and sexual abuse, women found guilty of certain crimes, and women abandoned to the nuns’ care by family members, employers, and friends. Over the past fifteen years Irish historians have traced the complexities of the religious-run Magdalen asylums in nineteenth-century Ireland.23 Their statistical research documents 11,506 women entering nine of the twelve Catholic asylums before 1900 (see Appendix, table 1.1). Luddy argues that these asylums operated in the context of increased levels of prostitution and the limited availability of alternative social welfare provisions for women in need of refuge.24 This positive aspect of the Magdalen institutions is supported by the fact that before 1900 approximately 40 percent of women entering the asylums did so voluntarily and approximately 28 percent apparently reentered the homes a number of times (see Appendix, table 1.2 and table 1.1).25 For many women, faced with the workhouse as their only alternative source of relief, the decision to enter the Magdalen was “a matter of choice,” a fact supported by the relatively few instances of recorded escape from these institutions throughout the nineteenth century (Luddy 1995a, 124; Appendix, table 1.3). These findings contrast with more recent readings of the Magdalen asylums as prisonlike institutions wherein women were incarcerated against their wills. For most of the nineteenth-century at least, this was not the case. However, the women who found their way inside the asylums were drawn there by a variety of circumstances. In addition to voluntary entrants, the second largest source of referral came from Catholic religious involved in other convents and charities. Over 28 percent of inmates came to the asylum by this route.26 This statistic speaks to the interconnectedness, even in the nineteenth century, of the various charitable enterprises increasingly under the management of the Catholic clergy (Clear 1989, 100–34; Magray 1998, 74–108).27 Likewise, it speaks to the growth in prestige and power of the local parish priest who, especially

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in rural communities in the postfamine era, actively sought unprecedented authority to govern the moral climate under his jurisdiction. Irish families were also responsible for sending female members to the asylums. Although the convent registers are rarely explicit about the family circumstances leading to this practice, many of the women undoubtedly were compromised by the perception of sexual immorality, be that as a result of unmarried motherhood, rape, incest, or sexual abuse.28 Alternatively, family referrals might be explained as the abandonment of female members considered of limited intelligence, and therefore deemed a potential encumbrance on scarce family resources. The religious congregations considered such women “preventative” cases because they were considered likely to fall. Other women were incarcerated by the police and through the judicial system, which increasingly used the Magdalen asylums as an alternative to prison for women found guilty of certain crimes, including concealment of a birth. The courts also referred young female offenders placed on remand or on probation, although in such instances they were likely acting out of genuine concern for the women’s welfare. The Magdalen, unlike the women’s prison, was presumed to offer an environment in which a woman’s spiritual as well as moral welfare would be reclaimed and protected. There is no evidence to suggest that the state paid the nuns for confining these women, but the convent always benefited through the women’s labor in the laundries. It is unknown whether women entering through the courts were released at the end of their sentences or whether they were encouraged to remain as part of the penitent community. While the figures for such referrals are relatively small, that they exist indicates a reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationship between the Catholic Church and the British colonial administration.29 In the nineteenth century, regardless of how they entered these institutions, it was the women themselves who made the decision to stay (Luddy 1995a). Although the nuns certainly did not encourage women to leave, they had little choice in the matter if the women were determined to rejoin society. The Mercy Sisters’ Guide for the Religious (1866), ordaining the rules of operation for their asylums, insists that women “should come freely, without constraint” (Luddy 1995b, 59). The average period of detention in the nineteenth century was relatively short,

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sometimes only a few days or weeks and typically not exceeding more than two or three years.30 Many women were “sent out,” that is, expelled for a host of reasons including resisting the religious rule, inciting violence, soliciting fellow inmates to a life of prostitution, or engaging in “particular friendships”—a euphemism for lesbian relationships (see Appendix, table 1.3; Luddy 1995a, 131; Finnegan 2001, 29–30). Other women remained in the Magdalen asylums for life, especially those who entered in their teenage years or in their forties and later.31 The practice of encouraging women to remain for long periods varied somewhat depending on the congregation. Some evidence suggests that as the century progressed the practice of lifelong confinement increased, in particular, at the asylums operated by the two French orders. The Mercy Sisters’ Guide casts light on the different approaches taken: Establishing an asylum on the condition that the inmates should be confined in it for life, or else leave it destitute and unprovided for, prevents many from entering, who though they desire to withdraw from their sinful life, shrink from perpetual enclosure; it peoples Protestant asylums with Catholic unfortunates, because those hold out hopes of future character and situations. This may be seen in our cities where the Catholic asylums are all established on the above principle. Many who would not enter, or having entered, would not persevere at first without a hope of being restored to society at a future time, will, when grace has achieved the victory, choose to stay for life, in which they ought to be encouraged, but not constrained. Besides, providing for penitents leaves places for others to enter and receive the means of conversion; whereas many must be refused where all are expected to remain for life, unless the funds and accommodation are unlimited. (Luddy 1995b, 58)

The preceding excerpt not only underscores the sectarian nature of rescue work in nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly its concern with proselytism. It also establishes that even among the four Catholic congregations there was some disparity in their management philosophies. It again suggests that women entering the asylums had some choice, not only between Catholic and Protestant institutions, but also between short-term asylums and ones where rejoining society might

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prove less likely. It helps to explain, moreover, why the religious asylums, unlike their lay equivalents, were comparatively less successful in placing former penitents in positions of employment (see Appendix, table 1.3). Although the Mercy Sisters’ Guide betrays that the nuns’ preferred outcome was that the inmates would remain behind the convent’s walls, this must be evaluated in light of the growing stigma associated with confinement in any of Ireland’s Magdalen homes. Mary Costello, again writing in 1897, reveals society’s unforgiving nature: “The Dublin matron might maintain that were she to engage a ‘fallen’ sister to wash her stairs and kitchen, that there would be considerable difficulty, under the circumstances, in getting a trained ‘unfallen’ one to cook the dinner or usher in visitors. In all the world, I think, there is no boycott so rigid, so remorseless as the boycott of the Irish lower classes when one of their kind falls away from virtue” (1897a, 8). In a culture where one’s respectability could be enhanced, even among the lower classes, through opposition to the irredeemable figure of the Magdalen penitent, it is hardly surprising given the levels of intolerance and bias they were likely to encounter, that some women were hesitant about reentering society. Social prejudice must also explain, at least in part, why many more penitents died inside the asylum’s walls in the nineteenth century than were provided with positions of employment or emigrated to start life over abroad (see Appendix, table 1.3). One of the few detailed contemporary accounts portraying daily life inside one of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums is set in the High Park institution operated by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge in Drumcondra, at the time “one of the most extensive of our Dublin charities” (“The Magdalens of High Park” 1897, 176).32 Published in the Irish Rosary, the Dominican fathers’ monthly magazine, the article evokes unquestioning praise for the nuns’ charitable enterprise. The writer, most likely a Dominican friar, was given unfettered access to the penitents— making his article almost unique as a source of historical evidence. Although from a twenty-first-century perspective his account seems problematically optimistic and naively uncritical, his enthusiasm is perfectly compatible with social and cultural values in late Victorian Ireland. Consequently, he makes no effort to conceal or suppress his espousal of the moral philosophy underpinning the philanthropic regime. Indeed, given that his object is to solicit financial donations from the wider Catholic

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community, in whose name, according to the author, the nuns provide their services, he is unapologetic in his presumption that the religious sisters have a claim to support from Irish society. High Park, like the “other institutions of a similar character,” accomplishes much good “in sheltering, reforming, and sanctifying ‘the sinner’ ” (176). And, as the author reminds his readers, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge are providing refuge for women abandoned by society at large: “In the Magdalen Penitentiaries . . . they will find a home, when every other door except, perhaps, the public prison or lunatic asylum, has been closed against them” (178). This suggests that by the end of the nineteenth century the Magdalen asylum is already functioning to confine women who contradict Catholic Ireland’s insistence on social and moral respectability; the Magdalen is becoming less a site of temporary refuge and more a refuge of last resort. It provides for those utterly abandoned by society. The explicit agenda informing the author’s comprehensive portrait of the High Park Magdalen asylum is to justify the spiritually transformative work engaged in by his religious sisters. He seems intent on dispelling what, he claims, is a commonly held misconception that identifies the asylum as a place of punishment, and therefore links it with state alternatives: the prison and the workhouse. In fact, the article begins with a fervent protest dispelling any such correlation: One would form a very false notion were one to expect to find barred doors, small narrow spiked windows, or anything approaching to the semblance of a prison. There is an utter absence of any such repulsive features. He finds himself in cheerful well-lighted apartments, where everything speaks of order, peaceful calm, and willing industry. (176) 3 3

First and foremost, High Park is a “noble institution”: its rural location, “away from the din of the city,” together with environs “supplied by nature and improved on by art and taste,” plays no small part in cultivating the desired transformation the nuns seek to effect among their charges. The picturesque landscape—drawn in much detail—proves conducive to reform, eliciting from the penitents spontaneous admissions that “it is good . . . to be here” (176–77). The setting’s impact is felt equally by the visiting priest whose thoughts of “repugnance” and “revulsion” give way to “deep sympathy,” and by the penitents who greet him, not,

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as he presumed, with feelings of “humiliation” and “shame,” but with “happy faces” and “a confiding reverence” (177 –78). This attention to the women’s physiognomy reflects the contemporary belief that moral degradation was evident in a corresponding disfigurement of a physical nature; that “vice very often imprints on the countenance traces of its taints.” High Park’s existence, then, is justified in that the penitents exhibit a “trustful childlike simplicity” and a “subdued sadly-pleasing expression” (178). Having experienced this transformation in feeling himself, the writer, in turn, hopes to cultivate the reader’s sympathy for the nuns and the work they do on society’s behalf: they understand how and why young women fall, they are more generous than society at large, they unquestionably deserve public support. Victorian-era rescue literature invariably pointed to the role of parents in young women’s moral decline, and these nuns therefore compensate for familial failing. Parental neglect and/or abandonment results in “girls” falling prey to “unruly passions,” exposing them to “innumerable temptations.” The “downward progress” toward licentious activity is hastened by “early neglect of prayer and of the Sacraments,” and the result is their inability to withstand the “seductions of the world” (178). Religious conformity then is presented as the only effective bulwark against degeneration. Refuge from an unsympathetic society, however, was not refuge from social hierarchies that stigmatized some and liberated others. When the Dominican friar moves to a discussion of the two groups of women resident behind the convent’s walls, the discourse of nineteenth-century charity makes evident the moral and class distinctions dividing the “sinners” from the “saintly.”34 The penitent or fallen woman is predictably “a disgrace to her sex, a blot on society, one that must be avoided as the leper of old, because she is ‘unclean’ ” (178). By contrast, the nuns who administer the asylum are “motherly” and “accessible” to all. The juxtaposition appears to reinforce the chasm ever separating these two classes of Irish women: Innocence and guilt face to face! The bright cheerfulness of unsullied virtue so near to the most abject wretchedness of multiplied sinfulness! The spotless lily side by side with the rank, noxious, foul-smelling weed that grew up in the dark shadows of the crumbling tomb! The consecrated nun speaking to the polluted outcast! (179)

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The emphasis here on the extremes of womanhood—“spotless lily” and “noxious, foul-smelling weed”—again suggests a broader cultural tendency to categorize female sexuality in absolute terms. Female religious at the time were typically considered paragons of virtue, embodiments of self-denial and self-sacrifice, ideal models that their secular sisters would do well to emulate. Consequently, the proximity of the two groups of women, “face to face” and “side by side,” suggests an opposition not only between nun and penitent but also between penitent and other women in Irish Catholic society. The “polluted outcast” becomes the irredeemable other in this equation, signifying to secular women the dire consequences that attend perceived sexual immorality. The specter of the Magdalen penitent must always be available; she represents a stark contrast that enables women in the outside world, regardless of class, to secure their respectability based on religious, social, and sexual conformity. The usefulness of these permanently outcast figures conflicts with the stated rehabilitative goal of the Magdalen asylum. Even if the penitent repents the error of her ways, this does not secure a restoration of her virtue or, in some instances, her liberty. Rather, the process of repentance may require her to commit herself to a life of supplication inside the asylum’s walls, to sacrifice her earthly materiality in order to secure the desired goal of eternal life. In doing so, she embodies success for the asylum’s religious mission, but she also validates the wider society’s investment in rigid and inflexible definitions of womanhood. The depiction of the asylum’s rituals and of the penitent’s daily routine in “The Magdalens of High Park” makes a major contribution to our understanding of these communities of women. The author offers a supposedly typical scenario in which a young woman voluntarily makes her way to the door of the asylum—she has fallen as a result of parental neglect, a love of “tawdry dress,” keeping “bad company,” and a reliance on alcohol “to drown the remorse of conscience” (179). The process of reformation begins immediately; she is warmly greeted and encouraged for her decision to repent, and a “good nun conducts her to the Church to thank God for the mercy shown her” (180). After a warm supper, she is reclothed in symbolic fashion. Gone are the secular rags of the street, and in their place she dons a “simple tidy dress,” the penitent uniform (180).35 Salvation requires that she abandon all vestiges and thoughts of her past, which would inhibit her transition to

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her new state. Quoting from High Park’s 1881 Annual Report, the writer explains, “Until they forget the past nothing solid can be done towards their permanent conversion” (180). Women were therefore provided with new names to match their stated desire for a new moral identity. This rebaptism adopted spiritual significance in that the assigned name invariably was that of a Catholic saint who henceforth would act as a “special patron” guiding the woman in her quest for spiritual redemption.36 With this rebirth, the former sinner was afforded the opportunity to define a new future in the eyes of God. Ultimately, however, “rebirth” must be freely chosen, and it cannot be forced on her through “severity”: “If she persists in spite of all in going back to the world outside, of course she connot [sic] be prevented” (180). The hope remains, however, that the nun’s “forbearance and mild persuasion” can overcome the inmate’s “repugnance” when faced with the religious rule and discipline. This and other contemporary accounts that underscore the voluntary nature of the Magdalen asylum in nineteenth-century Ireland corroborate the historians’ statistical analysis cited earlier. The journey toward salvation, even if voluntarily chosen, is physically demanding, and the daily conditions are emotionally harsh and monotonously repetitive. The schedule consists of four interconnected activities —prayer, silence, labor, and recreation— that permeate the women’s every action. The author relates the daily regimen by once again quoting directly from the institution’s 1881 Annual Report: They rise at 5 o’clock in summer, and a half-an-hour later during the winter months. When the signal for rising has been given they dress promptly; and, in order that their first thought may be directed to God, one of them, appointed for the week, immediately commences the prayers, which are continued while they are dressing. When dressed all proceed to the lavatory, from which they descend to the class-room, where the image of Mary, the model of spotless innocence, welcomes them to a new day of labour and prayer. When the morning prayers are ended a chapter from a pious book is read. After an interval of work they go to the church for Mass, at which they daily assist. Mass is followed by breakfast, after which they kneel to recite some prayers. Then comes recreation for a short time; work is resumed again, and is continued without interruption till 6 o’clock in the evening, with the exception of the interval for dinner and the hour’s recreation after. At stated

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times during the day short prayers are said, and in this manner the day is filled up between labour and prayer. They sup at 6.30, and have recreation again for an hour. Instructions are given at 8. Night prayers follow, and all are in bed at 9.30. (181)

This total regulation of the women’s daily activity has the infantilizing effect of removing any independent agency or choice. And the infantilizing order was always symbolic. As the nuns at High Park explained to Costello in 1897, “All over the world, since the days of Père Eudes and St. Francis de Sales, we call the penitents ‘children,’ and they call us ‘mother’ ” (Costello 1897a, 8). The nuns who chose a celibate life “mother” the adult “children” in their care.37 The penitents, some of whom were unmarried mothers themselves, are rendered childlike once inside the Magdalen asylum. The arduous adult work engaged in by the women, however, makes problematic the nun’s “adoption” of their newfound child. Nevertheless, the paradigm suggested here offers a model of motherhood for the nascent nation: self-sacrificing, loving all children, confined, and morally pure. “The Magdalens of High Park” is striking in its absence of detail regarding the nature of the women’s “labour.”38 This otherwise extensive description nowhere alludes to the fact that Magdalen asylums were then, as they remained throughout the twentieth century, synonymous with commercial laundries.39 The employment of women in laundry activities assumed symbolic significance in that the cleansing of society’s dirty linen paralleled the individual cleansing of the moral stain on their souls. Hard labor, expended in washing, scrubbing, ironing, and folding laundry, was rendered virtuous precisely because it reflected a personal desire to attain a state of brilliant, and spotless, grace. But the laundry work also acquired more practical significance. In an era before electrically powered washing machines, the women were an indispensable source of free and exploitable labor necessary to the institution’s very survival. As I intimated earlier, the penitents represented an important commodity in assuring the profitability of what were crucial commercial entities in the Catholic Church’s ever-increasing institutional infrastructure.40 Although all the women performed the same symbolic labor, this account of the High Park asylum also insists on the distinction between those who were fallen and those who were merely at risk (i.e., “preven-

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tative cases”). In noting this difference, the author seeks to combat society’s false assumption that confinement in a Magdalen asylum brands a young woman as morally deviant. Unlike the penitent class, those “in danger” were typically considered a more transitory population whose confinement ended when they reached a more mature understanding of “habits of virtue” (184)—typically when they reached their early twenties and were considered better equipped to tackle social realities in the outside world. The author hastens to add, however, that in many cases in which an inmate has been claimed by a relative or placed in a position of employment they returned to the asylum “of their own accord, electing to spend their lives in the safety they find here under the motherly care of the nuns” (184).41 In such cases, it was possible, indeed ever more probable, that the women remained institutionalized for life despite committing no moral transgression. Likewise, the writer informs his readers that in recent years “comparatively few of the other class” (meaning the fallen) had left the asylum. The distinction between the two classes, in this sense, appears meaningless as increasingly it can lead both groups of women to the same end. The author’s suggestion that fewer women were leaving also signals that the asylum’s demographics were changing significantly as the century was drawing to a close. One possible explanation can be found in Maria Luddy’s assertion that the levels of prostitution in Irish society declined significantly by 1900.42 If the numbers of prostitutes seeking refuge in these institutions declined in turn, then the religious congregations were faced with finding ways to retain their population of inmates for longer periods so as to perpetuate their mission and/or seek alternative sources of penitent women to staff their commercial laundries. The continuation of these demographic, social, and economic changes was to affect the development of the Magdalen asylums in the twentieth century. The author explains that the congregation’s founder, Fr. John Eudes, laid down a system of internal divisions at High Park, beyond the distinction between the fallen and preventative classes. The inmates were classified along a series of gradations that symbolize their journey towards spiritual salvation—a rewards system of sorts. He explains: There are three classes—the ordinary penitents, the Children of Mary, and the consecrated. When a girl has gone through a term of probation, and given proof of sincere conversion, she is admitted into the

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Confraternity of the Children of Mary, and from this, after another term of probation, she is free to pass by five different stages into the ranks of the consecrated. The consecrated are supposed to remain for life, and engage themselves to do so by an act of consecration. They are distinguished from the rest by being dressed in black, with a white kerchief, and having a silver cross suspended from their necks. At present there are in the Asylum forty-eight such inmates, while in the Association of Children of Mary there are no fewer than ninety-eight. (182–83)

To the contemporary reader, this system will no doubt appear slow and arduous. The number of years spent by forty-eight “Magdalens,” as the consecrated were alternately called, and ninety-eight Children of Mary in securing these desired ranks seems overly demanding; the internal hierarchy duplicates a recognizable power structure within the community of marginalized women but attaches no tangible reward to achievement. The women were, moreover, always subject to the sisters’ subjective judgments of the passage through the stages of this hierarchy. Despite progression between the different ranks, the women were never any closer to realizing their freedom; indeed, becoming a “consecrated” Magdalen required taking a vow to remain in the asylum for life. In this sense, the institution’s class system merely replicates society’s hierarchical class structure, and, as I suggest above, the latter would have irredeemably marked all penitents, regardless of rank, as socially and spiritually inferior. Reaching death in a state of spiritual grace, rather than securing physical freedom, provides the rationale for this structure. In this context, the author’s description of two recent deaths among the consecrated class takes on added significance. From the author’s perspective, the Magdalen of St. Ursula who “did penance” for seventeen years and Winifred who spent thirteen years in the asylum represent the definitive justification for High Park’s existence (183–84). Not only did both women seem “admirably prepared for that great closing scene”; when death came they faced it with “a joyful serenity” and a “calm resignation” that “was edifying beyond description” for the religious sisters at hand (183). Reaching death in a state of grace—“with a sweet smile on her face” in one case, “clasping the crucifix lovingly to her breast” in the other —obviously validates the nuns’ efforts on society’s behalf (183–84). But many readers at the time would also

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recognize the sentimental tropes at work here, tropes recognizable from both popular and devotional literature.43 As with the opposition between “saint” and “sinner,” discussed earlier, so too the descriptions here suggest that the penitents are significant in death because they validate normative discourses of social and spiritual respectability. Presenting death in this fashion confirms the practices of social control that rendered these women penitents in the first place. Ironically, in their particular cases, and despite lives of toil and sacrifice, the dignity assured in death would be rudely disturbed. Interred anonymously at High Park in 1897, these two sets of human remains were likely among those exhumed, cremated, and reinterred at Glasnevin Cemetery in 1993 (O’Kane 1993; O’Toole 1993; O’Morain 1993; Dempsey 1993). Society’s double standard whereby women are deemed solely responsible for sexual transgression is, as we might expect, unquestioned by this male cleric; the woman’s male partner is nowhere alluded to; his fall is either simply assumed or deemed irrelevant. And yet the contradiction speaks for itself: the Irish Catholic male is not held accountable in the same manner as his sister; in the temporal realm at least, he avoids institutionalization and lives his life unconstrained. In contrast, Costello addresses this double standard when describing one of six “jubilee children” celebrating their fiftieth anniversaries at High Park in 1897 (two had died within the year). Alice, the woman in question, was “disowned” by her family when she “fell at sixteen” and spent the next “fifty-six years” closely veiled in silence. This information prompts Costello to ask the reverend mother about the fate of Alice’s partner: “And the man—in what penitentiary had he spent his life?” In a moment that anticipates the criticism levied against nuns by many Irish feminists over the past few decades, Costello wonders whether “the sweet-voiced sisters” are not the “guardian angels of the weak, but the agents of man’s relentless ordinances through centuries of injustice, tyranny, and wrong.” But the reverend mother explains herself forcefully, and again her response is noteworthy because it also anticipates the now-standard response of Catholic religious when asked to justify the Magdalen asylums. First, the reverend mother insists that her feelings of “protest” are equally strong, especially given that Alice’s partner most likely “had sown his wild oats[,] . . . had settled down, married, and died in the odour of prosperous respectability.” Then she adds:

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Fifty years of penance may seem harsh . . . but remember that we do not look on a residence here as you do; to a great many of these poor souls, High Park is not a penitentiary, but a home in which all their interests are centred. . . . The poor thing whose story you have been told has had a peaceful, fruitful, and not unhappy life here. A beautiful life—yes, a beautiful life . . . precious in the sight of our dear Lord. For years, as a consecrated penitent, she has been the means of helping many souls to heaven. Had she returned to the world—ah! do you think her fate would have been as happy? Do you think that serene light would be in her eyes? (Costello 1897a, 8)

The reverend mother openly acknowledges her convent’s complicity in maintaining a male patriarchal hegemonic social order. But it does so, she insists, because secular society abandons women like Alice. She does not apologize for, and indeed celebrates, the “centred” life provided to the women in her institution. Her awareness of overlapping and seemingly incongruous interests complicates recent interpretations of these institutions as singularly oppressive for women. Moreover, contestation and complexity in interpretation is possible because a written history exists for the Magdalen asylum in nineteenth-century Ireland. Ireland’s last Magdalen asylum ceased operation in 1996 (Culliton 1996; O’Kane 1996). There is no history to account for how these institutions developed and continued to operate for almost a full century after the aforementioned account. Unlike those who entered before 1900, we still do not know how many women resided in the Magdalen institutions thereafter. In chapter 2, I argue that by 1922, when Ireland gained its political independence, this nineteenth-century paradigm for social control was already an anachronism, even though in Ireland it would continue to operate for decades. By the 1920s these institutions had largely departed from their original mission to rehabilitate women back into society. Rather, they were seamlessly incorporated into the state’s architecture of containment—the nation’s institutional response to various populations of problem women and children that also relied on the existence of mother and baby homes, county homes, industrial and reformatory schools, and insane asylums. Moreover, as part of the nation’s containment infrastructure, these religious asylums appear to have become emphatically more punitive in nature and certainly more secretive. There is a large body of anecdotal evidence, primarily survivor

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testimony, to suggest that basic living conditions did not improve for the penitent community after political independence. Similarly, it appears that it was more likely for women to be confined involuntarily for longer periods, indeed to die inside the Magdalen, in the twentieth century. What remains irrefutable, however, is that the Magdalen asylums continued to provide “service” to the “state” for much of the twentieth century.

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2

The Magdalen Asylum and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland

At five o’clock I was at the Magdalen Home and was introduced by the Mother Superior of the Convent of Mercy to the Sister-in-charge and six nuns who managed the laundry. We were all seated in the Sisters’ parlour where I put my questions. Most were answered by the Sister-in-charge. “How many girls have you”? “Seventy-three.” “How many are unmarried mothers”? “About seventy per cent.” “And the others”? “Some are sent here when they leave the Industrial School because they need special care.” “Are they mental defectives”? “No.” “Backward”? “Yes.” “Are the girls paid”? “No they earn their keep.” ... “Are the girls free”? “Yes.” “Can a girl leave whenever she chooses”? MOTHER SUPERIOR: No, we’re not as lenient as all that. The girl must have a suitable place to go. . . . “How long do they stay”? “Some stay for life.” —Halliday Sutherland, Irish Journey (1958, 81–83)

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Halliday Sutherland‘s interview with the Sisters of Mercy offers a unique perspective on daily life in Galway’s Magdalen asylum midway through the twentieth century.1 It also reveals the anachronism of this nineteenthcentury paradigm for social control in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the Sisters of Mercy might very well be describing the penitents from High Park in 1897. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the Galway penitents still receive no pay for their labor. This “Sister-in-charge,” again like her predecessor, insists on the voluntary nature of the Magdalen asylum; “yes” the girls are free.2 The Sisters of Mercy, echoing the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge at High Park, still prefer that their penitents remain for life; “most of them are Consecrated Penitents,” and have taken a religious vow to remain in the Magdalen until death (Sutherland 1958, 83). Although separated by almost sixty years, continuity, not change, characterizes the two representations of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums. Sutherland’s interview does, however, betray some adaptation in the operation of the twentieth-century asylum. This is especially the case when the nuns describe the diverse “classes” making up the community of seventy-three women. Prostitution is never once alluded to. Rather, we are told that approximately “seventy per cent” are unmarried mothers. Sutherland, as it happens, had earlier visited and written about the Children’s Home in Tuam, County Galway, a mother and baby home catering exclusively to unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children. Here he learned that “[if] a girl has two confinements . . . she is sent at the end of the year to the Magdalen Home Laundry at Galway” (Sutherland 1958, 77). Transferring women and children from the care of one Catholic religious congregation to another facilitated Ireland’s architecture of containment: “unmarried mothers” moving from the Sisters of the Bon Secours in Tuam to the Sisters of Mercy in Galway; illegitimate children similarly relocated from the mother and baby home to an industrial school managed by yet another Catholic religious congregation (Sutherland 1958, 77).3 The sister-in-charge underscores this interdependency between supposedly separate and distinct institutions when she volunteers that “some” of the Magdalen women are “sent here when they leave the Industrial School.” This latter population receives “special care”: the nun hastens to add that they are “backward” (i.e., socially immature) rather than “mental defectives” (i.e., physically or mentally challenged).4 These “girls” constitute the asylum’s preventative cases. They have committed T H E M AG DA L E N ASY LU M A N D T H E S TAT E I N

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no crime; rather, they are deemed likely to fall because of their age and naïveté. They are reinstitutionalized ostensibly to safeguard their moral purity. But if the girls’ moral purity is really what is at stake, then the interview exposes a fairly evident contradiction: the Magdalen asylum places young women whose moral purity is beyond question—girls who came of age in an industrial school under the watchful supervision of religious women—alongside unmarried mothers considered “hopeless cases” because they relapsed more than once. The transfer of young women from the industrial school to the Galway Magdalen represents an anomaly in the nation’s architecture of containment. The state, to this day, considers the Magdalen laundries “voluntary,” “charitable,” and “private” institutions (Dáil Éireann 490, 30 April 1998; Dáil Éireann, 12 February 2002, 537 –38). It insists, moreover, that the women confined in the Magdalen remained there by choice; this despite the religious congregations always attaching conditions to a woman’s release (e.g., “The girl must have a suitable place to go” [Sutherland 1958, 82]). Unlike the industrial and reformatory schools (Children Act, 1908) or the mother and baby homes (Registration of Maternity Homes Act, 1934), the Magdalen asylums were never governed by state legislation. They never received state capitation grants. They resisted all forms of government regulation and inspection. As the interview suggests, however, the unmarried mother and her illegitimate child—given the passage of enough time—might find themselves transferred beyond direct state control, abandoned to the Magdalen asylum and encouraged to become lifelong “Consecrated Penitents.” This chapter examines Ireland’s Magdalen asylums in light of the nation’s architecture of containment. As outlined in the introduction, this architecture encompassed a variety of residential (i.e., industrial and reformatory schools and mother and baby homes) and recarceral (i.e., remand homes and prisons) institutions. It also comprised both the official and public discourses that concealed the existence and function of these facilities. In particular, it relied on legislation that proscribed contraception, cultivated ignorance regarding human sexuality, and fostered intolerance for illegitimacy.5 As I demonstrate below, the availability of this containment infrastructure empowered the decolonizing nation-state to confine aberrant citizens, rendering invisible women and children who fell foul of society’s moral proscriptions. In this way, I argue,

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the state regulated its national imaginary; it promoted a national identity that privileged Catholic morality and valorized the correlation between marriage and motherhood while at the same time effacing nonconforming citizens who were institutionally confined. In offering a partial history for the Magdalen’s role in twentieth century Ireland, I reconstitute these institutions as an indispensable component of the nation’s architecture of containment. Magdalen asylums surface repeatedly in legislative and judicial debates addressing unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, women found guilty of infanticide, women on remand and awaiting trial, and young women leaving industrial and reformatory schools. Government archives suggest that these asylums were always considered available to the state as sites of confinement. Moreover, there was a general awareness of the institutions’ punitive regime, in particular, the fact that many women remained confined for life. No one sought to understand how these institutions actually operated; that religious congregations were in control was enough to excuse official inquiry, inspection, or regulation. This partial history demonstrates the nation-state’s absolute deference to the Catholic Church in the realm of institutional provision. For the vast majority of Irish politicians, civil servants, and members of the judiciary, publicly challenging the church’s moral authority was inconceivable. To do so was to challenge the very relationship binding Irish national identity and Catholicism. This is the context in which the state consistently supported the religious orders in the operation of their Magdalen institutions. It repeatedly sought ways to funnel diverse populations of women into the nuns’ care and thus helped to maintain and perpetuate the congregations’ expansive enterprise. The state also provided the religious orders with direct and indirect financial support (Dáil Éireann 83, 7 May 1941; Hearn 2004, 100–101; Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999, 289–90). This partnership between church and state encouraged a transformation in Ireland’s Magdalen asylums: they adopted a punitive and recarceral function that increasingly supplanted their original rehabilitative and philanthropic mission. The state’s complicity in this transformation goes beyond turning a blind eye, or failing to intervene and protect the constitutional rights of countless citizens. The state, as I underscore in this chapter, was an active agent and willing partner in the operation of the nation’s Magdalen laundries.

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UNMARRIED MOTHERS The Irish Free State, from its earliest days, worked with the Catholic hierarchy to establish a bifurcated, two-tiered, institutional response to the “problem” of the unmarried mother and her illegitimate child. This institutional system was conceived so as to effect absolute segregation between two classes of fallen women—those deemed “first offenders” and thus open to spiritual reclamation and those deemed “hopeless cases” and perceived as sources of moral contagion. The first tier of the infrastructure effecting this segregation would consist primarily of newly established mother and baby homes operated by Catholic sisterhoods, funded by the state and local authorities, and providing assistance to the first class of unmarried mother. The Magdalen asylums, always presumed to be appropriate institutions for the second class of women—those deemed in need of incarceration and/or self-protection— constituted the second tier. Below I demonstrate how the discursive shift enabling this two-tiered response originated in private church-state negotiations, was affirmed publicly by prominent clergy in influential publications, and ultimately was inscribed officially and adopted as state policy. Within six months of the Irish Free State’s founding on 7 January 1922, the Cumann na nGaedheal government received an indisputable signal from the Catholic hierarchy asserting not only its position as the nation’s moral authority but also its expectation that the state would remunerate Catholic organizations providing public assistance. In June 1922 Dublin’s Catholic archbishop, the Rev. Edward Byrne, entered into negotiations with the department of local government regarding a new “scheme” for “affording assistance to unmarried mothers.”6 Byrne had recently federated the city’s Catholic charities engaged in rescue work, and by September 1922 this federation submitted a detailed plan for the minister’s consideration. The federation’s memorandum insists that the problem was largely an urban one, as so many unmarried mothers “drift to Dublin . . . to secure concealment.” It also identifies two major concerns. First, too many first-time unmarried mothers found their way to the “Dublin Workhouse” where they accounted for the majority of illegitimate births. The stated issue, in this instance, is that these women were “not segregated” from more hardened sinners, including criminals, prostitutes, and repeat offenders. First-time offend-

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ers, therefore, were exposed to moral danger. This leads to the second issue. The memorandum insists that the majority of unmarried mothers sought relief through various Catholic charities rather than the workhouses (now referred to as “County Homes” under the new Free State administration). In most cases, these charitable organizations received no “Government Grant.”7 The hierarchy was now demanding to be paid equally for the same work conducted in public and private institutions. The federation’s proposed reforms, formalized by the Ministry for Local Government in a draft heads of bill dated October 1922, laid the foundation for the infrastructure of religious-run mother and baby homes that were to operate in Ireland from 1922 until the 1970s.8 The bill outlines the core principles for a “national system” of residential institutional provision: it would be severed, as much as possible, from the “Poor Law system”; it should be developed “with the co-operation of a religious order or orders”; it would require four separate funding sources, the national government, the local authorities, the religious or charitable organizations, and the individuals concerned; and, finally, it would accommodate appropriate divisions to meet the needs of “different classes, such as cases of first occurrence, cases suitable for Homes, cases suitable for Charitable Societies assistance and cases for further assistance and supervision in returning to ordinary life.”9 The rehabilitative function of the nineteenth-century Magdalen was thus siphoned off to the new mother and baby institutions. This emphasis on segregation of different classes recurs in a second undated memorandum, “Unmarried Mothers,” obviously related to the earlier one. It too lobbies for state funding and supports its proposal with details of women entering the Dublin workhouse over a five-week period in 1922. Moreover, the memorandum offers a concrete alternative to the county home, suggesting that first offenders should be encouraged to enter an auxiliary institution managed by the Sisters of Charity at Pelletstown, County Dublin. Here the unmarried mother was guaranteed a safe environment; the “quiet control and influence of the Nuns are beneficial.” The nuns arranged a “situation” for the mother after her release. She could continue to visit her baby, and she was expected to “pay out of her earnings” for the child’s upkeep. This solution, in turn, enabled the mother to “return home,” “safe in her secret.” The first-time offender, then, deserves every opportunity to avoid the social stigma attached to illegitimacy: “they are entitled to take their

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place in ordinary life without any disability attaching to them as a result of their offence.” They should, according to this memorandum, be met in society as “ordinary citizens,” not as social “outcasts.”10 Even as the negotiations between church and state were proceeding in private, a number of prominent Catholic social thinkers were publicly addressing the problem of the unmarried mother. Writing for the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Rev. M. H. MacInerney and Rev. R. S. Devane also promoted a two-tiered institutional response to the problem of the unmarried mother. MacInerney’s articles on “Souperism” evoke the nineteenth-century sectarian threat posed by Protestant rescue organizations proselytizing among Catholic unmarried mothers seeking “to hide their shame at all costs” (MacInerney 1921, 140). The “loss to the faith,” moreover, was twofold: the mother who converts in return for assistance and relief and her child who is boarded out and grows up in a Protestant home. The lack of Catholic rescue homes represents, for this cleric, the most significant gap in the fledgling nation’s relief infrastructure (MacInerney 1922, 246–47). The impact of MacInerney’s first article proved immediate and far-reaching. In his “Postscript on the Souper Problem,” published in 1922, the cleric indirectly claims responsibility for the opening of Ireland’s first mother and baby home: “the Mother-General of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary—a Sisterhood whose members are nearly all Irish, and who have twenty-two houses in Great Britain . . . had written to say that her Sisters were eager to undertake rescue work in Ireland, on the lines indicated in my article” (1922, 248). The first of three such institutions, the Sacred Heart Home, opened at Bessboro, County Cork, later the same year. Sixty-five mothers and their children were accommodated in this institution at the end of 1928 (Saorstát Éireann 1930, 13). Reverend Devane, who would play such a significant role during the Carrigan Committee, joined MacInerney’s campaign advocating for the establishment of distinct residential institutions for unmarried mothers and their children. Also writing in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record in 1924 but focusing more particularly on the young and abandoned unmarried mother who resorts to prostitution, Devane outlines three specific classes of women: “(1) Those under twenty-one; (2) the semiimbecile and the mentally deficient; (3) the perverse who lead such a life by preference” (1924b, 181). Each class, moreover, requires a different institutional response. From Devane’s perspective, the Magdalen asylum

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fulfills the needs of all three. Addressing the first class, Devane highlights the nation’s lack of a “Female Borstal,” a situation that results in young women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one being committed to the female prison, where they must “associate with the ordinary riff-raff found there” (182). In a direct echo of the federation memoranda, Devane seeks to avoid this mixing of the “redeemable” and “unreformable” sinner. He urges a mandatory committal to a Borstal institution operated under “strong religious influences” (182–83). But no Borstal for women existed in Ireland. Consequently, the courts repeatedly placed women on probation, and after 1960 on remand, if they voluntarily agreed to enter one of the nation’s Magdalen asylums. Turning his attention to the second class, Devane states that “mentally deficient” unmarried mothers should be “committed to a Good Shepherd Home” (183; original emphasis). First and foremost, these women belong in a Magdalen asylum because they need “protection” from themselves rather than imprisonment for crimes that they are “at most” only “partially guilty” (183). Reflecting contemporary attitudes, Devane considers these women “mentally deficient” because they have more than one unmarried pregnancy. Moreover, he underscores both the readiness of the Good Shepherds to accept this population of women and the state’s obligation to repay the nuns for an expense it otherwise would be required to meet: “Why should not the State provide in the Good Shepherd Home, to some extent, for those for whom it provides in the prison? It is really [sic] waste of public money to imprison those incorrigibles and mentally deficients, and it is time we adopted a more sane and economic method of dealing with this problem” (183; original emphasis). With regard to the third class, prostitutes, Devane strongly advises that those found guilty in the courts should be punished with a prison sentence. Those amenable to “reformation” should have the option of a “committal to a Good Shepherd Home.” If the woman proves “refractory” to the religious regime, she should revert to her original prison sentence “with the addition of hard labour ” (184; original emphasis). From Devane’s perspective, this procedure not only affords the opportunity of spiritual reform and reclamation but also safeguards the public from recidivist crime.11 The Irish Free State formally addressed institutional provision for unmarried mothers as part of the Commission on the Relief of the Sick

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and Destitute Poor, Including the Insane Poor (1925–26). The commission’s Report replicates precisely the Catholic Church’s scheme for a two-tiered institutional response. It carefully delineates “two classes” of unmarried mothers: “(1) those who may be considered amenable to reform and (2) those who for one reason or another are regarded as less hopeful cases” (Saorstát Éireann 1928, 68). Treatment for “first offenders,” it is suggested, should “necessarily be in the nature of a moral upbuilding” and combine “firmness and discipline” on the one hand with “sympathy and charity” on the other (68). The report calls for a series of newly funded residential institutions dedicated exclusively to “first-offenders” (68). The Bessboro home was one such institution. The Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary would eventually open similar institutions at Sean Ross Abbey, Roscrea, County Tipperary (1930–69), and at Manor House, Castlepollard, County Westmeath (1935–71). All three homes received a capitation grant from the local authority for every woman accepted into their care, and for the newborn child after its birth. Moreover, each received a government grant toward the building and equipment of maternity hospitals attached to these institutions.12 Three additional institutions were operated directly by the local authorities, although managed once again by Catholic female religious.13 Finally, the Legion of Mary, a Catholic lay organization founded by Frank Duff in Dublin, operated a hostel in the city to assist unmarried mothers during their period of confinement and also helped to arrange employment opportunities thereafter. By 1945 the state could provide institutional assistance for 653 unmarried mothers and upward of 1, 416 infants at any given time (see Appendix, table 2.1). The commission’s report suggests that the institution should have the power to detain first offenders “for a period not exceeding one year” (1928, 69).14 During their stay, the expectant mothers could expect to fulfill unpaid domestic duties and care for their infants after their birth. They would also receive religious training in preparation for “a useful and respectable life” (Saorstát Éireann 1930b, 13). Upon release, the women would return home if possible. Alternatively, the institution would arrange a position of employment, typically domestic service. In accordance with the Board of Health regulations, formalized through the Registration of Maternity Homes Act, 1934, all unmarried mothers were expected to contribute financially to the care of their children (Saorstát Éireann 1927a, 69; Saorstát Éireann 1934, sec. 15). Alternatively,

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the children were boarded out with foster mothers, or eventually transferred to an industrial school. After the passage of Ireland’s Adoption Act in 1952, these children could also be made available for adoption at home and abroad (Éire 1952; Milotte 1997; Maguire 2002; Conway 2004; Wilson, Lordan, and Mullender 2004). Segregating “first offenders” from “hopeless cases” was a principal objective in establishing the nation’s mother and baby homes. Secondarily, the church and the state sought the absolute removal of unmarried mothers from the county homes.15 Both classes of unmarried mothers, however, continued to apply for assistance from these secular institutions. This trend suggests a class prejudice operating within the mother and baby institutions. There is some evidence to suggest that the religious orders prioritized middle-class women and only accepted “respectable” lower-class women in trouble (Earner-Byrne 2004, 161; Luddy 2001, 799). The county home on the other hand could not turn away destitute women. Moreover, these public institutions afforded greater freedom of movement and lacked the levels of surveillance increasingly characteristic of the religious-run homes (Luddy 2001, 799–802; McAvoy 1999, 257 –61). Facing the choice between institutions, some women would always select the county home. The Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor attempted to circumvent this element of choice, recommending mandatory incarceration for women applying for assistance a second time: “there should be power to retain for a period of two years” (Saorstát Éireann 1928, 69). Likewise, the commission stipulated that in instances of a third or subsequent admission the Board of Health should have the power to “retain for such period as they think fit, having considered the recommendation of the Superior or Matron of the Home” (Saorstát Éireann 1928, 69). Signaling mandatory periods of detention in this manner was tantamount to endorsing the practice of transferring women from state-funded mother and baby homes into the unregulated Magdalen institutions. This policy indemnifies society at large against the anticipated expense of a future pregnancy resulting in yet another illegitimate child. The Magdalen, in this instance, preempts recurrence of “sexual immorality” by first criminalizing and then incarcerating the unmarried mother. The Irish Free State’s two-tiered institutional response to unmarried mothers was operating smoothly by 1933. And the Department of

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Local Government openly acknowledged the Magdalen’s role in the state’s policy: “With regard to the more intractable problem presented by unmarried mothers of more than one child, the Sisters-in-Charge of the Magdalen Asylums in Dublin and elsewhere throughout the country are willing to co-operate with the local authorities by admitting them into their institutions. Many of these women appear to be feebleminded and need supervision and guardianship. The Magdalen Asylum offers the only special provision at present for this class” (Saorstát Éireann 1933, 129).16 As this official report suggests, the state depended on the religious congregations to contain the problem of “intractable” unmarried mothers; the laundries represent the “only” available institutional provision for this class. The state rationalizes the detention of these women by deploying the discursive tropes—“feeble-minded” and “need supervision and guardianship”—set in play by the Dublin federation memoranda and echoed by MacInerney and Devane. The report offers no explanation as to the nature of the “special provision” afforded to these penitents. Reflecting the culture of deference to Ireland’s Catholic Church at the time, it equates the women’s welfare and the asylum’s religious character as synonymous and simply assumed.

I N FA N T I C I D E C O M M I T TA L S If unmarried mothers represent one distinct category of women entering Ireland’s Magdalen laundries after 1922, then women charged in the death of their newly born infants represent another. And as with the former group, the state was instrumental in facilitating the latter’s “voluntary” confinement in these institutions. The Infanticide Act (1949), legislated for the state’s involvement in this process, and like the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935), it reflects the patriarchal and paternalistic nature of the nation-state. This legislation infers that women kill newborn children because of their momentary mental incapacity at childbirth and the onset of lactation. It discursively diminishes women as less than responsible agents, suggesting that they cannot be held fully accountable before the law. Medical expertise transformed these women in the court’s eyes; rendered momentarily insane, they became mentally rather than morally defective, and hence they required not punishment but protection. The courts insisted, therefore, that these mentally de-

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fective women “voluntarily” commit themselves to religious-run institutions, including Magdalen asylums. But this legislative and judicial wordplay again presents a curious anomaly: the same women are simultaneously seen as not choosing to kill their infants and choosing to enter a Magdalen asylum. Deemed mentally deficient in the secular courts, the women are handed over to religious-run institutions whose mission is spiritual and moral reform.17 This arrangement enabled church and state to contain a significant contradiction to the national imaginary, the Irish mother who kills her baby. Ireland’s hegemonic partnership, in the process, again elided male culpability in single motherhood, illegitimacy, and infanticide. Infanticide was nothing new to Ireland. 18 Neither did it emerge directly in response to specific legislation. 19 It is hardly surprising, however, that such deaths should occur in a society that proscribed contraception legislatively, cultivated widespread ignorance of human sexuality, and stigmatized unmarried mothers for transgressing the nation’s moral proscriptions.20 In the debates leading up to the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935), in particular, those addressing Section 17, which banned the sale or importation of contraceptives, a number of politicians presciently linked the proposed ban on birth control and infanticide (Dáil Éireann 53, 28 June 1934, 1246 – 51; Seanád Éireann 19, 6 Feb. 1935, 1252–55; Barrington 1987, 190; Clancy 1989, 206–33). In the decades after political independence, politicians and ultimately the courts were confronted with infant mortality, including infanticide, as a recurring social phenomenon. Society demanded an official response because avoidable child death was becoming increasingly unacceptable.21 But Irish society viewed illegitimate and legitimate children in starkly different terms, and tolerance for infant mortality reflects this bias. The number of illegitimate births increased slightly throughout the early decades of the Free State, from 2.6 percent of all reported births in 1921–23 to 3.5 percent in 1933–34 to a peak of 3.9 percent in 1945–46 (Éire 1946, xvi). In contrast, rates for illegitimate infant mortality were considerably higher: well into the 1930s, the illegitimate child remained almost five times more likely to die before its first birthday (See Appendix, table 2.3; Clear 2000, 126). The report of the Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor, Including the Insane Poor, identified a number of factors as contributing to these deaths, including poverty, malnutrition, and a general

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ignorance about child care, but highlighted society’s intolerance for unmarried mothers and the stigma attached to illegitimacy: The illegitimate child, being the proof of the mother’s shame is, in most cases, sought to be hidden at all costs. What frequently happens is that the mother, or the mother’s family, . . . make[s] arrangements with some one to take the child. . . . These arrangements are often made or connived at by those who carry on the poorer class of maternity homes, and the results to the child can be read in the mortality rates. If a lump sum is paid or if the periodical payment lapse, the child becomes an encumbrance on the foster mother, who has no interest in keeping it alive. (Saorstát Éireann 1928, 73)

In response to this situation, the commissioners recommended legislation to govern the licensing, inspection, and regulation of all maternity homes. The Registration of Maternity Homes Act (1934) stipulated mandatory reporting of infant mortality, including cases at the various residential mother and baby institutions (Saorstát Éireann 1934). These homes too were established in an attempt to stem the troubling trend in illegitimate infant mortality, but the fact that 60 of the 120 children born at Sean Ross Abbey in 1930 died within the year again intimates a failure in the state’s health care provision that adversely and disproportionately impacted illegitimate children (cited in Luddy 2001, 806).22 The first three decades of Irish independence also witnessed a significant number of women appearing before the courts on charges related to the death of a newborn. In the majority of these cases, a district court judge reduced the initial charge of murder to one of “concealment of the birth” of an infant, in accordance with the Offences against the Person Act (1861) (Great Britain 1861, sec. 60, subsec. 4). The state’s Statistical Abstracts underscore that offenses including “murder of an infant under 1 year,” “abandonment of a child under 2 years,” and “concealment of a birth” were relatively constant throughout the 1930s; the combined total for any given year averaged sixty offenses (see Appendix, table 2.5). However, in circumstances when the coroner’s report stated unequivocally that a live birth had taken place and the infant had been willfully put to death, the woman was charged with murder and the case was heard as

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a capital offense before an all-male jury in the Central Criminal Court.23 This court’s Trial Record Books for 1926–64 reveal at least 211 instances of women charged with murder, concealment of a birth, and, after 1949, infanticide (see Appendix, tables 2.6–2.10).24 Between 1940 and 1946, when the Emergency Powers Act (1939) placed travel restrictions on Irish women, the records indicate at least fifty-five such cases.25 Moreover, infanticide persisted at a steady level in the immediate postwar years.26 In the face of such statistics, John A. Costello’s Inter-Party Government felt compelled to introduce infanticide legislation.27 From its inception, Ireland’s Infanticide Act (1949) had more to do with a recurring procedural problem in the state’s judicial system than with increased numbers of women charged with a crime. The Department of Justice’s “Memorandum for the Government” makes abundantly clear that judges were increasingly frustrated with lessening the impact of a capital case when women found guilty of murdering a child and sentenced to death had the sentence commuted and the charge reduced to “concealing a birth.”28 Likewise, the attorney general urged the government to introduce legislation similar to the British Infanticide Act (1938) in order to alleviate the logjam of inappropriate capital cases.29 The department’s memorandum reveals, moreover, that a committee of judges had been commissioned as early as 1939 to “consider and report on the law and practices relating to capital punishment” and that they too recommended the introduction of infanticide legislation closely mirroring the British precedent.30 Finally prepared to take action based on these recommendations, the department outlined the established practice in Irish trials: Under the existing law an unmarried mother (to take the most usual type of case) who wilfully kills her child is guilty of murder and liable to capital punishment unless she establishes a defence on the ground of insanity. Modern medical opinion strongly favours the view, however, that a woman, although not insane, might suffer from such disturbance of mind in such circumstances that she would not be fully responsible for her actions. . . . In the majority of cases the charge of murder is reduced to a charge of concealment of birth and in the few cases in recent years in which women have been convicted of the murder of infants the sentence of death has been commuted.31

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As the memorandum makes clear, Irish courts actively sought ways to reduce a murder charge to one of “concealment of birth.” All twelve women sentenced to hang since 1922 had their sentences commuted to penal servitude for life.32 To avoid recurrence of the problem, the proposed legislation discursively altered the nature of the crime in specifically gendered terms: “the balance of her mind was disturbed by reason of her not having fully recovered from the effect of giving birth to the child or by reason of the effect of lactation consequent upon the birth of the child” (Éire 1949, sec. 1, subsec. 3, c). This discursive solution alone would not solve the procedural dilemma, however. The Justice Department redrafted the bill and inserted two additional provisions targeting the judicial logjam.33 The act would now empower a local district court justice, after preliminary examination of the evidence, including medical testimony, to alter the murder charge to a new one of infanticide and to send the woman forward for trial on that lesser charge. It would also empower a jury to bring in a verdict of infanticide even in cases in which the woman was charged with murder.34 The combined impact of these provisions not only reduced the number of women appearing before the Central Criminal Court. It also ensured that juries in the higher court would always have the option of finding the defendant guilty of the lesser crime. The revisions solved the procedural dilemma; they were accepted by the cabinet, and on 9 March 1949, the Infanticide Bill, 1949, had its first reading in the Dáil (Dáil Éireann 114, 9 Mar. 1949, 1004). The ensuing debate reveals that Irish politicians, like the civil servants and the judiciary, focused solely on the procedural dilemma and thereby constituted infanticide as a crime stemming from women’s mental incapacity and reproductive biology.35 Concurrently, they elided male culpability in the birth and focused responsibility for the infant’s death solely on the mother. Taking their cue from General MacEoin, minister for justice, deputies from all parties supported the proposed legislation because it would “eliminate, in appropriate cases, the pronouncement of the death sentence in these cases in which everybody knows that the sentence will not be carried out” (Dáil Éireann 115, 28 Apr. 1949, 265). The consensus opinion recognized that the established law was “an anachronism” (Dáil Éireann 115, 28 Apr. 1949).36 Various deputies revealed rather jaundiced perceptions of the relationship

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between childbirth and women’s mental capacity. Gerry Boland, T.D., announced definitively that in cases of child murder, “you will find that the woman was in a frenzy or that her mind was disturbed” (Dáil Éireann 115, 28 Apr. 1949, 268). Numerous speakers betray acceptance of the general “practice” whereby a judge sends “these people to some suitable home or bind[s] them over for a period of 12 months” (Dáil Éireann 115, 28 Apr. 1949, 270).37 In all their deliberations, the deputies avoided any discussion of the social realities confronting unmarried mothers. No one acknowledged the psychological impact involved for a young woman facing the birth of an illegitimate child alone or contemplating incarceration in one of the “homes” to which these politicians refer. Likewise, but perhaps not surprisingly, none of these male politicians broached men’s culpability in infanticide cases. Ireland’s Infanticide Act (1949) passed into law and made child murder almost exclusively a woman’s crime.38 Only one dissenting voice rose in the Dáil to speak against the proposed legislation.39 Maj. Vivion de Valera, a backbench politician and son of the Fianna Fáil party leader, rejected the Infanticide Bill on the basis of personal religious conviction: “We are dealing with unlawful killing—murder. . . . I would recognise that the crime is murder, murder in God’s law or natural law” (Dáil Éireann 115, 28 Apr. 1949, 275–77).40 But de Valera’s principled objections also betray pointed political opportunism. His more pragmatic concerns lie with the legislation’s origins in the British Infanticide Act of 1938: “I would be very careful in matters of this nature in following English precedent. I would not be too happy blindly to subscribe to anything resulting from the traditions of English liberal thought on this matter” (Dáil Éireann 115, 28 Apr. 1949, 276). In one fell swoop, de Valera not only attacked the sitting coalition government for not guarding the national interest from the contaminating stain of “English liberal thought.” He also signaled his willingness to purchase the stamp of national independence regardless of the cost in terms of suffering to Irish women. De Valera’s concluding remark is telling: “In cutting away from following the line taken in another country we will be showing that we in this country still recognise the dignity and the importance of human life from the moment of conception to the grave” (Dáil Éireann 115, 28 Apr. 1949, 282). Defending the “dignity” of “human life,” in this instance, underscores de Valera’s deference to the

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Catholic Church and discloses his nativist anxieties regarding the nation’s postcolonial condition. Moreover, like the discourse of his male colleagues in the government, the judiciary, and the civil service, the official discourse throughout the process of legislating for infanticide calls attention to the integral relationship between the symbolic value assigned to motherhood by the constitution and the state’s use of institutions, including “homes” like the Magdalen laundries, to conceal mothers found guilty of infanticide. Who exactly were these “frenzied” women charged with murder and infanticide? How did they fare when confronted by a judicial system more concerned with procedural embarrassments than individual culpability? What became of these women once they entered one of the “homes” referred to on the floor of Dáil Éireann? The individual case files from the Central Criminal Court contain the answers to some of these questions. Defendant witness statements suggest that Irish women killed their newborn infants for a variety of reasons. Most women were poor or destitute, and many were unmarried and abandoned by their male partners; invariably these women lived in absolute fear of the social stigma attached to illegitimacy.41 In the majority of cases, the women had very little formal education. Repeatedly they claim a large degree of ignorance with respect to human reproduction, pregnancy, and childbirth. These assertions recur throughout the women’s statements. AMR confessed that she did not understand she was pregnant: “I took a terrible pain and my baby fell from my womb to the floor on its back. It cried for a couple of minutes. I lifted it in my arms, and I baptized it” (CCC, Apr. 1946, #1). It is noteworthy that AMR’s statement complicates her assertion of ignorance: she knows that the baby fell from “the womb.” Moreover, one could suspect her of eliciting sympathy by adding, “I baptized it.” It is important, however, to add that these statements, in the main, were transcribed by the local Gárda sergeant or detective and signed by the accused. Obviously, there is no way to determine the level of mediation, advice, or coercion that may have taken place in the interview and transcription process. Moreover, the court-appointed medical officers’ reports repeatedly confirm the women’s supposed ignorance. Dr. T. Murphy, the medical officer assigned to Mountjoy Prison, notes in his examination of MMcD:

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From examination it appears that this girl was completely ignorant of the dangers connected with childbirth and also with some of the essential physical facts. For instance she knew nothing of the after-birth and it was only the presence of the protruding umbilical cord that induced her to send for a doctor. . . . [H]er behaviour on that night is consistent with such gross ignorance. (CCC Kilkenny, Oct. 1948, #1)

In this instance, the woman’s “ignorance” leads not only to her pregnancy—“the essential physical facts”—but also directly to the discovery of her crime. In the process, the expert testimony implies that in medically uncomplicated scenarios the unmarried mother might absolutely conceal the death of her illegitimate infant. Confronted with the reality of a newborn child, unmarried mothers sought to deny its existence by continuing the denial that they were pregnant in the first place. Afraid that the crying infant would awaken the world to her shame, and thereby instigate society’s punitive response, many women asphyxiated their children by stifling their cries in a desperate attempt to maintain the semblance of respectability (see, e.g., CCC Dublin, May 1964, #7). MJW, charged with the murder of her child in 1949, confessed: “The baby was born in the bed, and I didn’t want my father or mother to hear it crying. I decided to conceal it by putting it in a box, but before putting it into the box I squeezed it with my hands to choke it. After squeezing its neck it didn’t cry and it was not crying when I put it into the box” (CCC Offaly, July 1949, #1). In many other cases, the asphyxiation was of an even more symbolic nature and involved filling the infant’s mouth to suppress its cries. MMcD confessed that her “one fear . . . was that her brother, T_____, would hear the child cry and be angry with her for the trouble she had brought on the family.” Consequently, she carried her newborn infant out into a field and stuffed grass into its mouth (CCC Kilkenny, Oct. 1948, #1). Male family members, in particular, posed the greatest threat to these women. That said, these family members rarely seemed motivated to seek retribution publicly against the child’s father; in most cases, the woman refused to name her sexual partner. The absolute sense of isolation felt by unmarried mothers in an intolerant society remains the defining characteristic of this testimony.42 In the process, these statements evince the nation’s sexual double standard that elides men’s

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culpability and revictimizes the female victims of male abandonment and abuse. The case files also betray how the medical experts testifying at trial discursively reconstituted the women as mentally rather than morally defective. Most experts pointed to the women’s lack of education to intimate mental deficiencies that in turn explained their crime. Medical professionals frequently noted that the accused is “of sub-normal intelligence,” is “not capable of learning anything,” or possesses a very low “educational standard” (CCC Donegal, Nov. 1947, #1). A district maternity nurse, addressing the court in AM’s case, announced “her health seemed to be quite normal, except during and immediately before the birth she was rather hysterical” (CCC Carlow, Jan. 1953, #1). The court-appointed medical officer added, moreover, that “she is slow in replying to questions and although she can read and write her educational standard appears a little below average. Her mood is one of suspicion and apprehension which may account, to some degree, for the apparent slowness in cerebration” (CCC Carlow, Jan. 1953, # 1). In a different case, the same medical officer employed similar terms: “I found her childish in manner, anxious to co-operate and she replied to questions willingly and without hesitation. . . . In my view this girl is mentally immature and I regard her as being Mentally Defective” (CCC Kilkenny, Oct. 1948, #1). The implied displacement from educational deficiency to mental illness is disturbing, but it neatly parallels the conflation in the governing legislation of woman’s presumed mental incapacity and her biological excesses. Moreover, the discursive shift —in the legislation and in expert testimony—enables a strategic response on the part of the state; because these mentally deranged women are not criminals per se, they are in need of protection, specifically, protection from themselves. By this discursive sleight of hand, the state not only undermined the woman as individual subject and therefore as citizen of the state; concurrently, it neutralized the political ramifications of her crime. The Infanticide Act (1949), endorses the containment of women embodying the ultimate contradiction to the constitutional and symbolic definitions of “Mother Ireland”—the mother who kills her newborn infant. And, as with other legislative vehicles that inscribed Ireland’s architecture of containment, the existence of the Magdalen laundry provided the state with a ready institutional response for such women.

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Because the courts judged infanticide a crime of diminished mental capacity, it is hardly surprising that the women’s prisons were deemed inappropriate sites of incarceration. However, of the 211 cases examined in this study only 5 women were sentenced to a mental hospital; in one instance the defendant suffered from epilepsy (see Appendix, table 2.7). Forty-eight women, including the 12 sentenced to death and ultimately receiving penal servitude for life, did serve prison sentences.43 A further 28 women were found guilty but received a suspended prison sentence on entering into a personal recognizance with the court and agreeing to keep the peace for a probationary period, typically two years. In many of these cases, the woman was placed in the care of her father, brother, or, in at least two cases, her husband. In the majority of cases, 86 of the 211, the woman was found guilty and given a suspended prison sentence and placed on probation on “voluntarily” agreeing to enter a religious-run home. In a small number of cases, the woman entered the Protestant-run Bethany House in Rathgar, Dublin (see Appendix, table 2.8). Twenty-six women entered Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta Street, managed by the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul (see Appendix, table 2.9).44 Although not a Magdalen asylum, Our Lady’s Home accepted women on probation and on remand from the courts. It also operated a commercial laundry in which the inmates worked without pay. Fifty-four women found guilty of concealment of a birth and receiving a suspended prison sentence entered one of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums, more than any other institution (see Appendix, table 2.10). Consistent with the unquestioning attitude toward the Catholic Church at the time, these women passed seamlessly from direct state jurisdiction into the control of the religious congregations operating the “homes.” None of these women, it should be said, were directly sentenced to one of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries. Until 1960 no statute existed by which a judge could legally remand a woman in that manner. Rather, the women “voluntarily” agreed to enter these institutions.45 According to the committal orders, the women themselves “enter[ed] into an agreement” with the court and agreed to “immediately enter” the nominated institution for the court-suggested term. As a result, seventeenyear-old AMR agreed to enter High Park Convent in Drumcondra on 24 April 1946 and remain there voluntarily for eighteen months. Her committal order reads as follows:

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8 May 1946 Central Criminal Court . . . 24th April 1946 The People v. AMR I certify that the above named entered into a Recognizance in open Court this day in the sum of £5 that she would go to High Park Convent, Drumcondra, Dublin, and remain there for 18 months from that date and to obey the Rules and Regulations of the said Institution. IT WAS ORDERED BY THE COURT that the accused be taken charge of by Miss Elizabeth Carroll, Probation Officer, for the purpose of accompanying the accused to the said convent. Clárathóir Chóndae —Circuit Court Office, Green Street, Dublin.46

The emphasis on the voluntary nature of these committals is, if anything, amplified in the case of twenty-three-year-old MMcD who agreed to enter the Gloucester Street Asylum after receiving a suspended twelvemonth prison sentence: Green Street TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

Central Criminal Court, 12th October 1948 The People v. MMcD that the above-named entered into a Recognizance in open Court this day in the sum of £5.0.0. binding herself to GLOUCESTER STREET CONVENT, DUBLIN and to remain there for 12 months from this date (or any other Institution to which she maybe transferred therefrom) and to obey the Rules and Regulations of the said Institution. IT WAS ORDERED BY THE COURT that the Accused be taken charge of by Miss Elizabeth Carroll, Probation Officer, for the purpose of accompanying the Accused to the said Home. DATED this 8th day of November 1948 I CERTIFY

CLÁRATHÓIR CHONDAE47

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Both committal orders emphasize the defendant’s individual agency; the women “enter” into an agreement, they “go” to a Magdalen asylum, and they “remain” at said institution willingly. Ironically, the same women rendered “mental defectives” and intellectually “immature” by the politicians, judges, and medical experts are simultaneously presumed competent to enter into these legal contracts. The women are expected, moreover, to “obey” the rules and regulations of the religious congregations operating these homes (e.g., CCC City of Dublin, 14 Jan. 1941, #1). Breaches in behavior could and did lead to transfers from one Magdalen asylum to another; typically the more hardened cases ended up at Gloucester Street or the Good Shepherd’s Limerick Asylum (e.g., CCC Waterford, June 1931, #1; CCC Tipperary, Nov. 1943, #2). The women were warned, moreover, that expulsion would result in reinstatement of the suspended prison sentence. In this sense especially, the Magdalen asylum functioned as an alternative to the state prison, and the courts understood these institutions as primarily recarceral and inherently punitive.48 Indeed, the prison authorities actively facilitated these committals, and again this fact is underscored in both examples above. The state’s probation officer accompanied the women and discharged her at the relevant institution. The court stipulated, moreover, that the authorities meet the expense incurred in travel to and from the institution.49 Finally, the case files reveal that the religious congregations actively sought these committals: the mother superior wrote directly to the court or to the relevant county registrar communicating the institution’s willingness to accept the woman in question.50 This arrangement between the courts and the convents always operated at the pleasure of the individual mother superior. Once inside the Magdalen, the courts and the prison authorities surrendered their authority over these women. There is no record of inspection or follow-up. There is no evidence to suggest that the same probation officers who escorted the women on the journey to the institution ever returned to check on their status. There is no way to verify with any certainty that each and every one of these fifty-four women left the Magdalen asylum when her sentence elapsed. In facilitating the “voluntary” committal of women found guilty of infanticide to the Magdalen asylums, the state exposed these citizens

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to the vagaries of religious institutions still dominated by a nineteenthcentury regimen. If the same rules applied in the 1950s that applied in the 1890s, and the Sutherland interview that opens this chapter suggests they did, then it was necessary for a relative, friend, or employer to claim each woman from the Magdalen home. Moreover, the stigma attached to confinement in these institutions, a stigma that rendered women fallen at best and prostitutes at worst, made it increasingly difficult for some inmates to entertain being accepted back into their families and communities. The religious congregations, moreover, were still encouraging inmates to become lifelong “Consecrated” penitents in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

YO U N G WO M E N

ON

REMAND

The Criminal Justice Act (1960) provides further evidence of church-state complicity in confining young women to Ireland’s Magdalen asylums. On face value the relevant section does not refer to these institutions by name, but given the persistent elision of their existence in political and judicial discourse, this fact alone is hardly surprising (Éire 1960, sec. 9, subsec. 1). The purpose of the legislation was to amend criminal law administration. Specifically, Irish judges required more alternatives when remanding young offenders awaiting trial in the courts. Introducing the bill in the Dáil on 28 June 1960, the minister for justice, Oscar Traynor, outlined the provisions addressing the problem at hand: Sections 9 to 11 deal with the proposal to authorise the Courts to remand young offenders in custody, with their consent, otherwise than to a prison. At present any person of the age of 17 years and upwards, who is remanded in custody, must be committed to prison. As a result, many young persons, including first offenders, are remanded to prison who are subsequently adjudged not to deserve a sentence of imprisonment at all. . . . While every care is taken to segregate prisoners in appropriate categories, any period spent in prison may have a harmful influence. (Dáil Éireann 183, 28 June 1960, 562)

The solution to this dilemma appeared much more controversial for “youths” (i.e., boys) than for “girls.” The ensuing debate spent signifi-

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cant time addressing the problems of using St. Patrick’s Institution, located next to Mountjoy Prison, as a remand home for young men. The Department of Justice outlined its concern with this institution in its “Memorandum for the Government,” on which Traynor relied heavily when speaking in the Dáil: “It has been suggested that such youths should be remanded in custody to St. Patricks, North Circular Road, but it would be impracticable to separate them from the convicted prisoners and Borstal detainees and, so long as this situation persists, the Minister thinks it would be unwise to accept the suggestion.”51 The principal objection to St. Patrick’s is the inability to segregate youths on remand from more experienced criminal populations and thus avoid the potential for cross-contamination.52 When the discussion turned to young female offenders—“girls”— Minister Traynor expressed no similar discomfort with the proposal to remand them to a Magdalen laundry rather the women’s prison. His colleagues in Dáil Éireann appeared equally at ease with this arrangement. Such unanimity no doubt reflects the deference Irish politicians were expected to pay members of the Catholic hierarchy, and perhaps especially to Dublin’s all-powerful archbishop, Rev. John Charles McQuaid. As Traynor announced in the Dáil, “I acknowledge, with grateful thanks, the assistance of His Grace the Archbishop of Dublin who has made arrangements that St. Mary Magdalen’s Asylum, Sean MacDermott Street, Dublin, will accept Catholic girls who may be remanded in custody” (Dáil Éireann 183, 28 June 1960, 562). The legislative and political assumption underscored here is that a Magdalen home offers young women protection and the opportunity for reclamation and reform. And young female offenders at St. Mary’s would be less likely to encounter the hardened criminals, prostitutes, and delinquents populating the women’s prisons. But the Sean MacDermot Street Magdalen, also known as the Gloucester Street asylum, replicated precisely this admixture of female offenders—“convicted prisoners and Borstal detainees”—that rendered St. Patrick’s unsuitable for young men.53 The long-established secrecy attached to these institutions paradoxically resulted in politicians enacting legislation that produced the very effects they were attempting to legislate against. Politicians might, one could argue, feign ignorance of this situation, but the Department of Justice and the court system were aware of the mélange of “undesirables” now congregated in the Gloucester Street convent.

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The issue of remand homes for young women had long been a concern of John Charles McQuaid. Within two years of becoming archbishop he had outlined three specific areas of concern related to juvenile delinquency, among which the need for separate institutional provision for young female offenders was a priority.54 The Department of Justice responded to this latter concern almost immediately, proposing legislation and drafting heads for the Criminal Justice (Female Offenders) Bill, 1942. The department’s explanatory memorandum points to the objectionable fact that young women, especially first offenders, are remanded in the “common prison.” This practice exposes young female offenders to “habitual criminals, whose after influence will be disastrous.” The proposed legislation would remedy this situation by enabling the minister for justice to certify “certain residential institutions or houses” as legal places of detention for female prisoners. This certification, moreover, would bestow on these institutions the same “meaning” for detention orders as applies under “the Prison Acts.” As the memorandum clearly states, these new provisions would formally regulate the “makeshift practice” of female offenders voluntarily agreeing to “stay in a convent for a fixed period.” The courts could now “compel” these offenders to “remain in the convent” under penalty of a prison sentence.55 The Criminal Justice (Female Offenders) Bill, 1942, represents a significant attempt on the part of the state and the Catholic hierarchy to fill a long-standing gap in the nation’s institutional infrastructure, specifically, the need for a Borstal institution for young women.56 In this absence, the courts relied instead on religious institutions to accept women on remand and on probation. Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta Street, long fulfilled this state need, in much the same manner that it also accepted women on probation in infanticide cases. In return for accepting female prisoners, the state provided Our Lady’s Home with a grant of £50 dating back to 1885 when the institution was under lay control.57 By the early 1940s, however, the Department of Justice’s inspector, reporting on her visit to this institution, lobbied strongly that the home should receive a capitation grant of 15/- per woman per week. Based on this report, the Justice Department wrote to the Department of Finance to support the claim, acknowledging the indispensable service rendered: “There is no doubt that most excellent work is being performed in the home and if it and similar institutions were not available

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the State would probably have to provide and maintain a borstal or other similar institution for females. State should therefore give the Home some financial assistance.”58 The notable point here is that if the state is willing to subsidize Our Lady’s Home, it should also be prepared to support the “similar institutions” fulfilling the same function but not receiving any subsidy. And, in anticipation of Finance’s request for further information, Justice forwarded a list of homes providing the same service that also outlined the number of women involved (see Appendix, table 2.11). The list includes five Catholic Magdalen asylums, and this again suggests the well-established practice of Irish courts facilitating “voluntary” committals to these religious institutions. One crucial aspect distinguished the Henrietta Street institution from the Magdalen asylums, and it was a distinction that the proposed bill would struggle to accommodate. Because Henrietta Street accepted state funding, it always consented to state oversight and inspection. Thus the prospect of now obtaining capitation grants under the conditions stipulated by the proposed legislation presented no great difficulty. The Magdalens, on the contrary, only accepted women at the pleasure of the individual mother superior; the congregations adamantly resisted all forms of state inspection or regulation. They would always object to the new legislation stipulating that certified remand institutions should “come under State control in much the same manner as Reformatory and Industrial Schools.”59 In the end, the proposed bill failed to deliver a solution to the court’s problem. Despite McQuaid championing the use of Magdalen asylums as state-funded remand homes, the nuns’ intractable defense of their independence proved insurmountable. The Dáil debate for the Criminal Justice Act of 1960 suggests that the earlier failure in 1942 did not inhibit Archbishop McQuaid from advocating for the use of Magdalen homes as remand institutions for young female offenders. On this occasion, however, it would appear that the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, the congregation operating the Gloucester Street Asylum, exerted pressure on the powerful cleric. The archbishop, in turn, brought pressure to bear on Eamon de Valera, recently reelected Taoiseach after a general election in early 1957. De Valera returned to his office at the conclusion of a courtesy visit to McQuaid on 23 March 1957 and dictated the following note: “His Grace spoke about young offenders—girls particularly. Could there be an

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arrangement made by which they could be remanded to a Home kept by the Sisters in Gloucester Street?”60 The matter was referred to the Department of Justice in April, which proceeded to draft an official position paper that was returned to the Taoiseach’s office on 6 May. The position paper outlines at some length Gloucester Street’s status: The Institution in Gloucester Street is not a Remand Home, nor is it a Reformatory or an Industrial School. It is a Convent, with a laundry attached, which older girls (over 17) may have to undertake to attend as a condition of their probation. They may refuse to attend, in which case they will be sent to Mountjoy. . . . In other words, the Institution serves as an aid towards rehabilitating girls who are put on probation by the Courts, with this condition attached, as an alternative to sending them to prison. Occasionally girls a little under 17 may be sent there on probation from the Children’s Court, but that seldom happens. There are two other Institutions of the same kind in Dublin, one in Henrietta Street and the other in Harcourt Street.61

Evidently, when the state needed to know the nature and function of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries this information was readily obtained. The task of satisfying the archbishop’s expectation of state support, however, proved more complicated. Indeed, the minister for justice was “not clear” as to what precisely the archbishop anticipated. But, in an attempt to placate the powerful prelate and to ensure that de Valera was adequately prepared with possible options, the Department of Justice communicated three alternative uses for the Gloucester Street institution. First, it might “be recognised as a remand home for juveniles,” although two such institutions already existed in the city.62 The second possibility was outlined in more detail: To receive a grant towards the cost of maintaining the girls sent to them on probation (i.e., primarily adult girls). This is possible as another similar institution (Henrietta Street) is given a grant by this Department of 15/- per week per girl. But, the number of girls sent to Gloucester Street is very small both absolutely and in proportion to the total number kept there: it is primarily a Magdalen Home which takes in girls who find themselves “in trouble.” A grant on the same basis as Henrietta Street would be of little or no value to the Convent.63

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This second option duplicates precisely what the Criminal Justice (Female Offenders) Bill, 1942, proposed. Fifteen years later, however, the right to inspect and regulate institutions in receipt of capitation grants was likely to prove equally unpalatable to the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge. What is striking, moreover, is the peculiar emphasis on the absence of monetary benefit to Gloucester Street from any such arrangement. The Department of Justice’s response nevertheless insinuates the government’s willingness to endow financially a commercial enterprise operated by a religious order under the auspices of Dublin’s powerful archbishop. Justice’s third suggestion reinforces this latter impression, namely, that Gloucester Street “become a remand home for adult girls.” Obviously referring to the long-standing absence of a female Borstal, it continues, “There is no such home at present: Mountjoy Prison serves the purpose.”64 The Criminal Justice Act (1960) provided the legislative authority for this third alternative (Éire 1960, sec. 9, subsec. 1). The Irish state, admittedly under pressure from Archbishop McQuaid, agreed to underwrite financially a religious institution that insistently resisted the government’s powers of inspection and regulation. Under the provisions of this act, young men and women on remand in Ireland were equally likely to encounter a dangerously mixed population amid their fellow inmates, but only the young female offenders on remand were placed beyond state supervision and control. Three years after de Valera’s visit to McQuaid, on the day the criminal justice act became law in 1960, Ireland’s minister for justice wrote to the archbishop informing him of St. Mary Magdalen Asylum’s new status as a remand home for “young girls charged with offences.” By return mail, McQuaid thanked the politician for the “courtesy in allowing [him] to see the text” and assuring him that the legislation “will be very helpful in dealing with young girl offenders.”65 What remains noteworthy about the act as published, however, is that the words “St. Mary’s,” “Magdalen,” and “Gloucester Street” are nowhere to be found. By contrast, it identifies St. Patrick’s institution by name as the remand home for young men. The legislation elides all mention of the predetermined alternative to imprisonment for young women, an elision consistent with the state’s occlusion of all involvement with the Magdalen laundries. Gloucester Street is carefully written out of the official judicial system and euphemistically incorporated under the term “remand

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institution.” In the process, Section 14 of the Criminal Justice Act (1960) and its provision that the minister for finance would meet the expenses incurred as a result of remanding young women in this manner, remains conveniently oblique (Éire 1960, sec. 14).

TRANSFERS FROM INDUSTRIAL R E F O R M AT O RY S C H O O L S

AND

Each of the aforementioned categories of women entered Ireland’s Magdalen institutions as a result of actions deemed “immoral” and/or “illegal” by politicians, judges, and society in general. The young women who were transferred to these asylums from the nation’s industrial schools breached no such interdiction. These young women were unquestionably innocent of all crimes or social and moral transgression. And yet many were still reinstitutionalized, illegally moved from one religious-run home to another, absent any consideration for their constitutional rights as citizens of the state. The transfer of these young women again demonstrates the interconnectedness of the different institutions operated by Ireland’s various religious congregations, and in some cases the same congregation (see Appendix, table 2.12). From the nuns’ perspective, the young women transferred from the industrial school embody the preventative function of their rescue mission, operating in Ireland’s Magdalens at least until 1970. At the same time, however, the community of penitents in these voluntary homes included an assortment of other less obviously innocent women, including “hopeless cases,” “infanticide cases,” and “remand cases.” That the congregations persisted in rationalizing the protection of industrial school girls in this same environment seems incongruous at best. But the industrial and reformatory school children also represent the one source of referral to the Magdalen over which the nuns maintained most control. In this context, I conclude this chapter by suggesting that these transfers to the Magdalen asylum adopted a preemptive rather than “preventative” hue as the twentieth century progressed. In part, this reflects the nuns’ increasing need for young workers to maintain their institutional infrastructure; the commercial laundry always existed side by side with the religious mission. The industrial and reformatory school referrals were certainly more likely to be a transitory population; sur-

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vivor testimony suggests that most of these women left the homes by their midtwenties. That they were confined in this manner in the first place signals a serious contradiction in the state’s discourse of child guardianship. Children were formally committed to the nation’s industrial schools by a court hearing that rendered each individual a ward of the state; ultimate authority for each child lay with the minister for education. Children entering the reformatory schools also underwent court proceedings. Most of these children were considered juvenile delinquents after being found guilty of petty crimes, including shoplifting. In both cases, young women from the industrial and reformatory schools belonged to a category quite distinct from the Magdalen asylum’s so-called voluntary penitents. The Children Act, 1908— with minor amendments provided by the Children Act, 1941, the Children (Amendment) Act, 1949, and the Children (Amendment) Act, 1957 —dictated strict guidelines under which the religious managers of these homes were responsible for each child’s welfare (Great Britain 1908, sec. 58; Éire 1941, 1949a, 1957). Moreover, the state and local government authorities, and implicitly the taxpayer, paid for the upkeep of these young children through a capitation grant system. The rationale for industrial and reformatory schools, legislatively inscribed, was that they provide protection and educational and vocational training in order to effect a preparatory and/or remedial influence prior to the young person’s anticipated return and assimilation into mainstream society. In an industrial school this discharge typically came in and around the child’s sixteenth birthday and for those sentenced to reformatory schools some two years later —coincidentally the ages when the state ceased to contribute to their upkeep.66 That any of these children were transferred beyond the remit of the legislation governing industrial and reformatory schools, and that they were further institutionalized in a Magdalen laundry, represents an abdication of responsibility on the state’s part. The Department of Education, moreover, was always aware of this illegal practice. Education was ever sensitive to public misperception regarding the children in the various residential institutions under its control. When the Carrigan Report (1931) implied a direct correlation between young women leaving the nation’s industrial schools and increased instances of prostitution, the department’s inspector for girls’ schools

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was charged with conducting an exhaustive survey to refute the allegation.67 At stake, as Margaret O’Neill’s report suggests, was the reputation of the minister for education, who was “in effect, the legal guardian of the young persons” in question. O’Neill took nine months to complete the report, in which she provided statistics for the 3,594 girls who left the “Saorstát Industrial Schools from 1920–1930” and demonstrated that only “58 became either unmarried mothers (55) or were led into immoral life.”68 Moreover, O’Neill attached supporting statistics from “Magdalen Homes and Kindred Institutions” that responded to her request for information about former industrial school girls in their care (see Appendix, table 2.13). According to this survey, only eleven women resided in various Magdalen institutions because they had fallen sometime after leaving an industrial school. This statistical evidence certainly refutes as unfounded the Carrigan Report’s easy conflation of industrial schools and every other population of institutionalized women, including prostitutes, unmarried mothers, and juvenile offenders. But O’Neill concludes her extensive report by adding the following “NOTE ”: Some Refuges take “for Protection” girls whose weak mentality and want of competent guardians is perilous. A number of such girls committed to Industrial Schools and having no other safe place to go have been placed for their protection in these institutions. It is the unvariable custom of the Communities in charge of the schools to keep up correspondence and send small presents occasionally to encourage these weak minded or unstable girls to stay in safety.69

The Department of Education was not only aware that the industrial schools transferred young girls to the Magdalen but also accepted the stated rationale and implicitly condoned the practice. Evidently, there existed a twofold criterion governing such cases: girls of “weak mentality” who have “no other safe place to go.” Moreover, O’Neill tacitly acknowledged the likelihood that some of these young women, who came of age in the care of nuns in one set of institutions, might be “encourage[d]” to remain for the rest of their lives in the “safety” of another institution, also operated by nuns. The collusion here between church and state is striking; the Magdalen exists as the convenient solution by which to contain the state’s potential problem, that is, a young

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girl, formerly a ward of the state, getting pregnant and becoming a further charge on the taxpayer. Equally disturbing, however, is the unwillingness of Irish society to fulfill its obligation to these wards of the state. O’Neill’s memorandum begs a frightening question: How many women lived and died in a Magdalen asylum after being committed, as a ward of the state, to an industrial school? The practice outlined by O’Neill in 1933 continued unabated and unquestioned, at least until the publication of the Reformatory and Industrial Schools Systems Report, 1970. Commissioned in 1967 by Donough O’Malley, minister for education, and chaired by Judge Eileen Kennedy, the committee was charged with surveying and making recommendations regarding the industrial and reformatory school system (Éire 1970, vii). The ensuing report, popularly known as the Kennedy Report, was scathing in its criticism of the established infrastructure, and Judge Kennedy proved a courageous advocate for institutionalized children, asserting that “the present institutional system of Residential Care should be abolished” (6–7). The Kennedy Report conclusively demonstrated Ireland’s established practice of institutionalizing destitute and deprived children and linked this fact to the system possessing few redeeming features. Calling for a complete overhaul, the report asserted that the “present system” and its rules and regulations “do not conform with modern thinking in the field of child care.” In addition, it claimed that children were being cared for in a “haphazard” and “amateurish” manner by “untrained” and “inadequate” staff in unsanitary conditions that lacked stimulations and companionship (13). Focusing on the “institutional nature” of the care, it added that children were deliberately “depersonalised” by being made to sleep in communal dormitories, eat in refectories, and wear institutional clothing (15). The report claimed that children experienced “emotional scars of a deep and abiding nature” and suggested that “if the needs of the deprived child are to be adequately catered for and if he is to receive the love and care which are necessary for his development, then every effort must be made to eliminate the institutional aspects of all schools or Residential Homes. This applies to the psychological as well as to the physical aspects of institutionalism” (16). Two specific aspects of the report are pertinent to the Magdalen laundries.70 First, in its discussion of girls’ reformatory schools, the

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Kennedy Report demonstrates explicitly the illegal committal of young women in Magdalen homes. At the time there were two reformatories for girls in Ireland: St. Joseph’s, run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Limerick on the same grounds as that convent’s Magdalen asylum; and St. Anne’s, run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge at Kilmacud in Dublin, the same religious congregation that operated both the High Park and Gloucester Street asylums (see Appendix, table 2.12). The committee noted that St. Anne’s was consistently not fulfilling the purpose for which it was originally established; despite its stated mission, it was “reluctant to accept girls who are known to be practising prostitution or who, on conviction for an offence, are found to be pregnant” (Éire 1970, 37).71 And yet, the report reveals, St. Anne’s received notional payment for forty girls on a capitation basis of £4.6.6. per child per week regardless of the number of girls detained there. When the committee members visited St. Anne’s they found “only three girls on the rolls . . . committed by the courts as delinquent” (38). In effect, the state was subsidizing a religious institution for a service it refused to perform. St. Joseph’s reformatory in Limerick, meanwhile, refused absolutely to accept girls known to be sexually active or engaged in prostitution. The Kennedy Report does not infer a correlation between the rejection of young girls deemed to be “sexually immoral” at these reformatories and the fact that both congregations also operated Magdalen asylums that, historically, were dedicated to serving precisely that population. It does, however, suggest that the policy at both institutions contributed in an unconstructive manner to the dilemma facing the judicial system and discussed in a slightly different context in the previous section, namely, where precisely to remand young female offenders. The report reveals for the first time that the courts relied heavily on Ireland’s Magdalen asylums in the absence of alternative residential institutions: In some cases, these girls are placed on probation with a requirement that they reside for a time in one of several convents which accept them; in other cases they are placed on remand from the courts. A number of others considered by parents, relatives, social workers, Welfare Officers, Clergy or Gardaí to be in moral danger or uncontrollable are also accepted in these convents for a period on a voluntary basis. From enquiries

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made, the Committee is satisfied that there are at least 70 girls between the ages of 13 and 19 years confined in this way who should properly be dealt with under the Reformatory Schools’ system. (39)

This statement offers incontrovertible evidence that the state abdicated responsibility for very young women, committing them into the care of the religious congregations operating Ireland’s Magdalen homes. Moreover, the report makes explicit the other sources of voluntary referral— “parents, relatives, social works, Welfare Officers, Clergy or Gardaí”— that simply deposited young women into the nun’s care. In 1970, finally, the Kennedy Report acknowledges the precise nature of these institutions; they exist so that Irish society, including but not limited to church and state, might contain a wide array of problem women. In the process, the report also renders the state complicit in the exploitation of young girls as a free labor force in a commercial, if charitable, enterprise. The women in these institutions, irrespective of how they were committed, continued to work, unpaid, in the convent laundry. And Judge Kennedy displayed the courage of her convictions in criticizing the practice in uncompromising terms: 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. A girl going into one of these institutions may find herself in the company of older, more experienced and more depraved women who are likely to have a corrupting influence on her. In most cases the nuns running these institutions have neither the training nor the resources to enable them to rehabilitate these girls and to deal with the problem. . . . There are generally no proper facilities for the education of these girls many of whom are thought to be retarded; there is a lack of qualified and specialist teachers and the training provided is not geared to getting the girls back into society as quickly as possible as useful citizens. It was noted that as no State grants are made for these purposes there is, consequently, no State Control or right of inspection of these institutions. (39)

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The Kennedy Report dismantles the discursive machinery by which church and state justified the Magdalens’ existence and excused their continued operation outside and beyond all forms of accountability. It exposes the very concept of voluntary committal to be haphazard and illegal; indeed, it signals the probability that the practice is unconstitutional. It asserts that institutionalizing young women for long periods, first in an industrial or reformatory school and then in the Magdalen asylum, not only produces but also simultaneously affirms a cultivated ignorance, and this it contends is detrimental to the women’s maturity and social integration. It reveals the incompatibility of the Magdalen’s preventative function and the “corrupting influence” of the diverse population contained under the one roof. It renders problematic the state’s use of these institutions for women on probation or remand, pointing to the asylum’s religious rule that favors lifelong residency. It condemns the religious congregation’s denial of educational and vocational training; the discursive trope “mental defective” no longer exempts a constitutional right guaranteed to all citizens of the state. Finally, the Kennedy Report complicates the religious congregations’ defense against state regulation and inspection; not accepting capitation grants for “voluntary” cases does not obviate the nun’s accountability for women in their care. The Kennedy Report also reveals, although more obliquely, the illegal transfer of industrial school children to a Magdalen institution. Initially this critique is established by way of statistics. The report recognizes the fact that the 2,202 children in government-approved industrial and reformatory schools for the year 1968–69 does not reflect the total number of children in care at that time. Some 1,357 additional children are “Boarded-Out and at nurse.” Another 658 children are resident in “Institutions (other than Industrial schools) approved by the Minister for Health.”72 And finally, some 617 children are resident in “Voluntary Homes which have not applied for approval” (see Appendix, table 2.14; Éire 1970, 12). These “Voluntary Homes” are never identified. Likewise, no further information is provided for the 617 children concerned. However, that the homes have “not applied for approval” evokes the Magdalen asylums’ resistance to all forms of state inspection and regulation. Moreover, Margaret O’Neill’s 1933 report establishes a precedent suggesting that the transference of “preventative” cases from the industrial schools to the Magdalen asylums is precisely what the Kennedy Report is criticizing.

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This illegal process of intrainstitutional traffic consisted of nuns escorting, literally, young women to a Magdalen asylum purportedly because they deemed the “girl” immature and thus ill prepared to enter society.7 3 Unlike the young women in reformatory schools, these children were committed as “wards of court” rather than remanded to care.74 The Children Act, 1908, carefully outlined the nature of their committal; it stipulated the students’ dietary needs, the hours and curriculum for literary education, the type of industrial training, the process for regular Department of Education inspection, the rules governing a child’s release at sixteen, and the expectation that the religious orders arrange an employment opportunity to ease the young person’s transition into society. This, at least, was how the system was supposed to work. A quite different story emerges, however, from the recent wave of adult survivor memoirs published in light of the still-emerging child physical and sexual abuse scandal associated with the nation’s industrial and reformatory schools (e.g., Doyle 1988; Touher 1991, 1994; Matley 1991; Tierney 1993; Drennan 1994; Fahy 1999; O’Malley 2005). These memoirs establish a narrative documenting the long-established practice of transferring children from the industrial schools to the Magdalen laundries—a practice first exposed by O’Neill in 1933, admitted to in 1955 by the Sister of Mercy in the Sutherland interview, and obliquely criticized by the Kennedy Report in 1970. One of the first critical assessments of Ireland’s industrial schools focused on St. Joseph’s Orphanage, a state-licensed institution owned and operated by the Sisters of the Poor Clares in Cavan Town.75 While the initial sections of Mavis Arnold and Heather Laskey’s Children of the Poor Clares (1985) considers the tragic fire in 1943 that claimed the lives of thirty-five young girls, the latter sections focus on adult survivors who came of age in the same institution after it was rebuilt. Throughout the series of interviews, there are references to the significance of the Magdalen laundry in the young girls’ lives. Ann-Marie, born in 1947, recalls that just the mention “Gloucester Street” was enough to frighten rambunctious teenagers into silence.76 This association suggests the cultivation of a tactical hierarchy between these institutions, “Gloucester Street” signifying a horrendous end-point in the young lives of industrial school children. Ann-Marie also recalls a journey to the dreaded Gloucester Street in the company of “Mother Anne” when she was only ten or eleven:

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All the girls had their hair chopped short like as if they were boys. . . . They were working so hard at the laundry that the sweat was coming down their faces and there was steam everywhere. Mother Anne said to me, “I don’t want you to talk to Philomena O’Brien in case you disturb her”—she was one of the older girls they’d sent there—but I didn’t see her anywhere, I’d say they had her locked away. We sat and had tea with the nuns and I remember them talking and saying that Phil was unsettled. (Arnold & Laskey 1985, 97)

No record remains as to how or why Philomena O’Brien was transferred from Cavan to Gloucester Street.77 According to the Children (Amendment) Act, 1957, the only legal reason for the release of a child from an industrial school before her sixteenth birthday was so as to enable her to “attend a course of instruction at another school, either as a boarder or as a day pupil” (Éire 1957, sec. 6, 7). It is hard to imagine that Philomena O’Brien’s laundry work at Gloucester Street would qualify as a course of vocational training and development. Many children already received exactly this type of training on a daily basis in the laundries at the various industrial schools.78 Arnold and Laskey’s study remains noteworthy in that they incorporate an interview with Sister Angela, a trained social worker at the Gloucester Street asylum, who presents the religious order’s perspective on the Magdalen’s function in Irish society.79 The interview is especially pertinent to this discussion, therefore, because it interrogates the rationale informing the transfer of children from industrial schools to Magdalen homes. When asked the crucial question as to whether women in general came to the laundries voluntarily or whether they were transferred, the “authoritative,” “intelligent and competent” Sister Angela relies on dissimulation: “Well, that’s debatable. What is voluntary and what is being sent? There was no legal provision by which they were sent and there was no legal provision by which they stayed.” When Arnold and Laskey ask whether the care provided at Gloucester Street was ever custodial, Sister Angela again prevaricates: “No, completely voluntary, in the sense that they did not have to come or have to remain. . . . [E]arlier the criteria for the treatment of girls was preservative and protecting, preventing them from becoming delinquent. It was never punitive, though in those times there may have been punitive aspects” (Arnold and Laskey 1985, 145–46).

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One of the inmates who likely encountered these “punitive aspects” was Therese Dwyer, the only former Cavan student who Sister Angela remembered, and then only because she had tried to burn the Gloucester Street institution to the ground. When asked to recall what legal stipulation authorized the transfer of such children to the laundry, once more Sister Angela is vague. Ultimately, she makes reference to the 1957 legislation and to “a clause which permitted children to be sent away for special courses and special education.” What she does remember about such cases is that “their grants . . . were transferred by the schools” (147). There is only one possible interpretation of Sister Angela’s response— that Gloucester Street functioned as an alternative reformatory school accepting industrial school transfers for much of the twentieth century. But, again, there is one crucial difference between these two types of institutions. The Magdalen laundries, despite accepting the transfer of state capitation grants in such cases, never opened themselves up to official inspection by the Department of Education. Rather, they remained completely autonomous; they resisted all forms of accountability to the courts, politicians, and taxpayers. In the process, young Irish women became the victims of state inaction, societal indifference, and, to a certain extent, church avarice.

CONCLUSION This partial history of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums in the twentieth century identifies two distinct, yet conflicting characteristics of these institutions as they continued to operate between 1922, when Ireland gained political independence, and 1996, when the nation’s last Magdalen laundry closed its doors. First, the nineteenth-century Magdalen continued to operate without significant reform throughout this period—rendering these institutions an anachronism by the 1920s when similar homes in Britain and Northern Ireland were closing or changing their mission to rehabilitate unmarried mothers (McCormick 2005, 377). Second, there was significant change in the Magdalens’ mission across the same period, suggesting that they assumed an expanded function after political independence. Whereas in the nineteenth century these institutions were primarily philanthropic and rehabilitative, after 1922 they increasingly became recarceral and punitive. Their accommodation

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of an increasingly diverse population of women signifies this change in orientation. The evidence underscores the fact that church and state colluded in facilitating the confinement of these women. The state always presumed the availability and appropriateness of the Magdalen as a place of confinement. Nonetheless, these institutions operated outside of all government regulation and inspection. As a result, generations of Irish women were abandoned to asylums that operated under a penitential regime of prayer, silence, and self-effacement; that exploited the inmates as unpaid workers in commercial laundries; and that as recently as the 1990s still supported lifelong detention. The state, in other words, was an active agent and willing partner in these church-run institutions. The first section of this book comes to a close having explained the existence and purpose of Ireland’s architecture of containment. It challenges the secrecy and silence that shrouded the collusion among church, state, and society in effecting, and then effacing, Ireland’s containment culture. More specifically, it establishes irrefutably the constitutive contribution of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries in the nation’s architecture of containment. In part 2 the focus switches from historical to cultural analysis and the extent to which contemporary cultural representations have rescued the story of Ireland’s architecture of containment from the nation’s chosen forgetfulness. Recent cultural representations augment the partial history offered in part 1 in that they too redress the historical vacuum perpetuated by the religious congregations that continue to deny researchers access to their records. Literary, documentary, film, and artistic reenactments also represent the collusion among church, state, and society in the operation of these institutions. Moreover, they reimagine the previously marginalized and intentionally excluded members of the national family— women confined in the Magdalen—and thus facilitate the emergence of an alternative postnational narrative of Irish identity. But it would be a mistake to suggest that Ireland’s creative artists were unaware of the Magdalen laundries prior to the premiere of Patricia Burke Brogan’s play Eclipsed (1992), which I consider in the next chapter.80 A brief consideration of an earlier theatrical performance refutes and yet complicates any such contention. Máiréad Ní Ghráda’s Irish-language play An Triail (On Trial) opened to critical acclaim at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1964.81 This literary work anticipates by almost thirty years the potential to reimagine Ire-

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land’s architecture of containment in cultural representation. It also reveals the limitations of artistic confrontation at a time of literary censorship and a still-dominant church-state hegemony. Ní Ghráda’s courtroom drama retells the story of Maura Cassidy, young, pregnant, and abandoned by family, friends, and the father of her newborn child. Retracing the protagonist’s life after her death, the play depicts how she was forced to leave home, how employers exploit her and social workers fail her, and finally how she enters an institution for unmarried mothers. Utterly abandoned, Maura Cassidy kills her baby and herself by turning on the gas oven in her small apartment. Ní Ghráda avoids sentimental melodrama; her Brechtian storytelling evokes pity for the protagonist but combines it with terror at her final desperate act. Two aspects of this play foreshadow the subsequent chapters in this book. On the one hand, the dramatist secularizes the “House of Refuge for Unmarried Mothers”: despite the play’s obvious commitment to social realism, neither priests nor nuns appear onstage; a “Matron” manages the home of refuge and its commercial laundry (Ní Ghráda 1966, 32– 35). Writing in the early 1960s, Ní Ghráda betrays a line beyond which she feels unable to cross, suggesting that the church’s position in Irish society was still unassailable. The play’s final scene, on the other hand, demonstrates the courage of Ní Ghráda’s convictions. The dramatist presciently exposes the collusion of societal forces contributing to the protagonist’s final desperate act, and thereby anticipates the role played by more contemporary cultural representations in excavating Ireland’s architecture of containment. In anticipation of what is to come, therefore, I close this part with that final scene. Maura’s Voice: I killed my child because she was a girl. Every girl grows up to be a woman. . . . But my child is free. She’ll never be the easy fool of any man. She is free. She is free. She is free. Scene: Graveyard. (Tolling of bell. Entire cast assembles. Counsel addresses audience). Counsel for Defence: We have placed the facts before you in so far as they have been ascertained. No other verdict was possible save that of murder and suicide. But you, you who know all the facts, you who know the whole story, what is your verdict? Who, in your opinion, is guilty?

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Mother:

Don’t ye be looking at me. I’m not at fault. I gave her a decent respectable upbringing, sparing no toil and no sacrifice. What more could I do? (She turns away). Sean: She shamed us. She shamed us all. I had to give up the priesthood. I couldn’t go back to the college with the shame she brought on us. (He turns away). Liam: Betty broke off our engagement. She couldn’t face the publicity, with the whole story ripped up in the newspapers. (He turns away). Manager: I set her to work cleaning the lavatories. But someone has to clean them or we’d have the Factory Inspector down on us. (He turns away). Mrs. Morris: I couldn’t keep her in the house. What would the neighbors say? (She turns away). Social Worker: I did my best for her, but she would insist on keeping the baby. (She turns away). Johnny the Van: She broke the rules of the game. Everyone should observe the rules of the game. (He goes). Women: She was a strange distant woman. ’Twas a lonely life she had a lonely funeral after she was dead. ’Twas a sad funeral. The two of them in the one coffin. The two of them going out of life together without plumes or a hearse or anything. (The women turn away). Molly: She was loyal to the end. She never told the name of the man, but took the secret with her to the grave. . . . God rest her soul and the souls of all poor sinful women. God rest both their souls! (Molly turns away). (Maura’s song is heard off-stage. Kevin enters silently. He stands for a minute at the graveside, then turns up his coat-collar and exits).

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PA R T

2

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CHAPTER

3

Remembering Ireland’s Architecture of Containment “Telling” Stories on Stage, Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed and Stained Glass at Samhain

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958)

TELLING STORIES

IN THE

1990S

Contemporary stories representing Ireland’s Magdalen laundries emerged in a decade that witnessed a distinct shift in the nation’s willingness to confront its recent past. Although traditionally silent when challenged with controversial social problems, Ireland began to “speak out” in the 1990s with a new openness most evident in controversies generated by the media—particularly in those focusing attention on the suffering of women, children, and other marginalized citizens (O’Toole 1994c; 1997, 156–59).1 One of the most notable examples is the 1992 case of Lavinia Kerwick, the first Irish rape victim to reveal her identity on national television as part of her campaign for legal reform. A memoir, published subsequently, details her rape, the trial, the

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suspended sentence conferred on her attacker, and her ensuing battle with anorexia (McCormack 1997; Holmquist 1997). Alison Cooper, the young woman at the center of the 1993 Kilkenny incest case also appeared on television and thereby affixed a human face to the government’s officially commissioned report (Cooper 1993; Ireland 1993; O’Faolain 1993). The 1994 television drama Family, written by the novelist Roddy Doyle, forced domestic abuse into the nation’s conscience and eventually onto the legislative agenda of Dáil Éireann (Dáil Éireann 442, 10 May 1994; O’Toole 1994a, 1994b). Finally, Louis Lentin’s 1996 television documentary, Dear Daughter, compelled the nation to acknowledge the physical and psychological abuse meted out to children in industrial schools in 1950s and 1960s Ireland. These traumatic stories were retold across a variety of media and subsequently became culturally significant events in mainstream Ireland. Moreover, their impact increased with each retelling. For example, the Dear Daughter documentary led to considerable public debate in the months after it was broadcast (e.g., news shows, appearance of victims on television and radio talk shows, and numerous print stories). The allegations of abuse were subsequently reiterated in a more compelling documentary, States of Fear (1999), as well as in a memoir by Bernadette Fahy (1999)—one of the women featured in Dear Daughter —and in a critical exposé titled Suffer the Little Children (1999).2 The cultural significance of these stories and their various reproductions is twofold: they give force to a history that Irish society traditionally prefers not to acknowledge, and they break the culturally imposed closed ranks and silence typically accompanying such sensitive issues as rape, incest, illegitimacy, and domestic, physical, and sexual abuse. These stories, together with others focusing on adoption practices, residential child care, and the Magdalen laundries, reimagine the nation’s architecture of containment. This transformation in Ireland’s expression of cultural issues represents just one among many significant changes occurring over the past twenty years.3 It is fair to describe this period as one of extraordinary social and economic change in the history of the Irish state (O’Hearn 1998; Kirby 2002). It is also fair to point to a concurrent tension in society between the more traditional pieties that characterized Irish life since 1922 and the sometimes urgent, if perhaps delayed, drive toward modernity (Kiberd 1995, 569–96; Cleary 2004, 2005). The 1990 election of Mary Robinson is widely considered symbolic of this transfor-

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mation, for the new president personified a hunger for change and an attendant renegotiation of Irish identity (G. Smyth 1997, 5–6; A. Smyth 1997; Galligan 1998, 62). In her inaugural address, Robinson invoked an open and pluralistic notion of national identity: “I want Áras an Uachtaráin to be a place where people can tell diverse stories—in the knowledge that there is someone there to listen. I want this Presidency to promote the telling of stories—stories of celebration through the arts and stories of conscience and of social justice” (Donovan, Jeffares, and Kennelly 1994, 255). President Robinson’s emphasis on the role of stories in realizing the goal of a newly “open, tolerant, inclusive” Ireland suggests a deliberate break with tradition—a reimagining of Ireland’s foundational narratives that Richard Kearney advocates in Postnationalist Ireland (1997).4 Kearney argues for deconstructing the “Official Story” of the nation-state “into the open plurality of stories that make it up.” This plurality indicates a “political or ethical community . . . where identity is part of a permanent process of narrative retelling” and where “every citizen’s story is related” and thus exists in a state of dependency with others (Kearney 1997, 63–64).5 Kearney’s definition of postnationalist Ireland invites, I suggest, a reevaluation of stories of institutional abuse emerging in recent years.6 Simultaneously, it reinscribes those victimized by Ireland’s official story—including survivors of Ireland’s industrial and reformatory schools and the Magdalen laundries—in a new national narrative. Victims’ stories invoke a history Irish society prefers not to acknowledge. If the emergence of stories representing institutional abuse signals in part a transformation leading to a postnational society, then the subversive force of such narratives warrants further interrogation. Certainly, recent narratives, both in the media and in cultural representation, challenge the ideological forces shaping the official version of Ireland’s past. However, because these revelations are informed by individual memory or depend on individual testimony, they frequently raise concerns about “false memory” and the role of individual memory vis-àvis “empirically based realist historiography” (Walker 1997, 803, 806; see also Foster 2002; Gilmore 2001; Henke 2000; Alcoff and Gray 1993). Faced with this dilemma, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur argues for a twopronged critical response that is tantamount to an ethics of memory.7 He suggests opening up “the archive by retrieving traces which the dominant ideological forces attempted to suppress,” thereby initiating

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“a critique of power” that gives voice to those who were abused and intentionally excluded (Ricoeur 1999a, 16).8 As I suggested in the introduction, creating and maintaining Ireland’s national identity necessitated the formation of a narrative selective in what it chose to remember and who it chose to forget. Given the conservative Catholic nativism of postindependence Ireland, the construction of a plot to reflect national identity—the official story of who “we” are—did not incorporate, for example, illegitimate children, unmarried mothers, and other penitents in the Magdalen asylums. Such an exclusionary narrative permeates both the modes of discourse by which the nation-state maintained its architecture of containment and the hegemonic forces fostering a conspiracy of silence regarding Ireland’s restrictive moral culture. But, as Ricoeur also argues, narratives are helpful precisely because it is always possible “to tell in another way” (1999b, 9).9 The exercise of memory allows those who were previously excluded, marginalized, and forgotten to tell their own histories and to assert their own identities.10 Narrative, as a result, provides the common link by which individual and communal identity can continually be revised, and this ongoing revision reflects a postnational society in formation. Because such revision can also lead to “confrontation between opposing testimonies,” Ricoeur posits the ethical alternative of extracting the “exemplarity” of events, which is directed toward the future rather than the past and regulated toward justice. Justice must go beyond being just to victims and survivors; it must be equally just to the perpetrators and, most important, just toward new institutions that will ensure no repetition of the past in the future (Ricoeur 1999b, 16). Telling stories of Ireland’s architecture of containment fulfills not just a duty to remember but also a duty to tell (Ricoeur 1999b, 10). Stories ensure that the traces and archives of the past are preserved. And they contribute to what Hannah Arendt calls a continuation of “action” (quoted in Ricoeur 1999b, 10). Such action involves the ability to forgive the traumas inflicted in the past and to learn from the past in order to effect better practices for future generations.11 “Action,” in other words, counteracts cultural amnesia while cultivating an amnesty for the past. In the same way, telling the stories of Ireland’s architecture of containment maintains the relationship between the present and the past, and in the process, Ireland today becomes heir to previous social and political practices carried out in the name of the nation-state. Contemporary

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Irish society is, consequently, ethically constituted to action by this inheritance: the telling of these stories makes institutional abuses part of the national heritage. Finally, there is a duty to remember these aspects of Irish history because it helps to keep alive the memory of Irish women and their children who were marginalized, dismissed, and forgotten by an oppressive and exclusionary narrative of national identity. Irish writers have played a major role in instigating the narrative retelling of the nation’s Magdalen laundries. Prior to documentaries, television dramas, or full-length feature films, authors including James Joyce, Austin Clarke, Mairéad Ní Ghráda, John Broderick, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and especially Patricia Burke Brogan explored the lives of the women trapped within these institutions. Likewise, contemporary Irish novelists, including Mary Leland, Patrick McCabe, Marita Conlon McKenna, Emma Donoghue, and Ken Bruen, focused attention on the confinement of marginalized women in Catholic convents, including asylums and mother and baby homes.12 The cumulative effect of their imaginative texts, appearing concurrently with cultural representations of the nation’s industrial and reformatory schools (e.g., Bernard MacLaverty, Paddy Doyle, and Patrick Touher) and adoption practices (e.g., Dermot Bolger, Fionnula Batts, and June Goulding), rendered the nation’s Magdalen asylums visible and accessible, even as these literary works deconstructed the hegemonic agenda suppressing their existence. Writers both challenged the state’s restrictive practices and contradicted its narrative of abstraction. If as Ricoeur suggests “fiction gives eyes to the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and to weep” (1984, 188), then this collection of literature retells the abuses and failures in the nation’s institutional care system. Several works have explored the story of the Magdalen laundries in depth, but two dramas by Patricia Burke Brogan proved especially important for rupturing the secrecy that shrouded this aspect of Ireland’s past.

F R O M S H A D O W T O S P O T L I G H T : S TA G I N G T H E M A G D A L E N L A U N D RY I N E C L I P S E D ( 1 9 9 2 ) Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed rescues Ireland’s Magdalen women from the amnesia at the center of the nation’s nativist history (1994b). 13 Although rarely acknowledged as such, Eclipsed first introduced the

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Figure 3.1. Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed (Galway 1998). The play underscores the daily regimen of work and prayer in the Magdalen laundries. Reproduced with permission from Patricia Burke Brogan. Photograph by Sarah Fitzgerald.

tropes by which other contemporary retellings have narrativized the Magdalen experience. Burke Brogan’s play imagines a diverse penitent community—the daily regimen of work and prayer, the disciplinary regime that includes punishment and abuse—exposing the patriarchal relationship between nuns and the Catholic hierarchy and the women’s endless desire to escape (see fig. 3.1). More than any other contemporary representation, Eclipsed narrates a story that liberates these women from derisory discourses of criminality and mental instability while manifesting the results of institutionalization on their daily lives and consciousness. The play’s five penitent women, confined for a variety of reasons, belie the easy assumption that Magdalen women

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were invariably fallen. More significantly, Eclipsed dramatizes the strategies employed by these women to resist and survive their incarceration, to become active agents in their destiny. The play foregrounds Irish society’s collusion in these institutions—not only because it abandoned women to the nuns’ care but also because it took advantage of the economics of these institutions by patronizing their commercial laundries. Finally, Burke Brogan forcibly targets the Catholic Church’s collusion with the state-supported sexual double standard that institutionalized women for falling foul of society’s moral proscriptions. On Burke Brogan’s stage both groups of women, the “sinners” and the “saintly,” make manifest the internalization of a mechanism of social control inscribed by the nation’s architecture of containment. While ostensibly a work of fiction, Eclipsed is informed by its author’s personal experiences in the early 1960s. As a novice Sister of Mercy, Burke Brogan was ordered to provide “holiday relief” at the Galway Magdalen asylum, making her a participant in and a survivor of the story she tells.14 Unlike so many women who never escaped the confines of these institutions, Burke Brogan renounced her vocation, left the convent, and chose a more traditional, secular, married life. She admits that these experiences mobilized her to write about the women—all the women—she met in the Galway convent decades earlier. Searching for answers to explain and thereby understand the cruelty of the past, Burke Brogan envisaged her play as a poignant corrective to Ireland’s official history and the perpetual elision of Irish women from that history: “I wrote the play to give these women a voice. I was one of the few who entered the laundry, who came out again and could speak up. Why did we do it? I don’t know. It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a long time, and I’m still in dialogue” (quoted in Dempsey 1993). Her play challenges the dominant, if one-dimensional, critique of Catholic religious congregations as solely responsible for the abuses in Ireland’s Magdalen laundries. From her perspective, “the nuns were also imprisoned, and did not see clearly either” (quoted in Dempsey 1993, 1). This insight informs Eclipsed and her later play, Stained Glass at Samhain (2002), making both works distinctive among contemporary cultural representations. Depicting both Catholic nuns and Magdalen women as part of a mechanism of social control, she contends that the former were as dehumanized in this containment culture as the penitents abandoned to their care. Burke Brogan does not excuse or condone systematic

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institutional abuse. But she complicates its representation in a wider social, political, and religious context. The theatrical value of Eclipsed lies precisely in its attempt to initiate critical dialogue with the past. In looking for answers to explain historical injustices against women, the plot stages in starkly realistic terms the intimate relationship between past and present, demanding that the audience acknowledge the laundries’ real-life victims. In its depiction of the institutional effect of the Magdalen on current and previous religious and penitent women alike, the play calls on the audience to acknowledge its collusion in facilitating their incarceration. The construction of this theatrical bridge between present and past in each performance enables those women who in real life no longer can walk across it to appear onstage. In this sense, Eclipsed transcends mere dramatic fiction and assumes the status of ritualized commemoration. Burke Brogan’s play performs rather than fossilizes history. The play’s opening and closing scenes dramatize this connection between past and present. These modern-day scenes frame the intervening historical flashbacks focusing on the “Penitent women in Saint Paul’s Laundry, Killmacha, 1963” (1.1.5).15 This strategic device, although dramatically unwieldy, emphasizes the Magdalen’s two most notable legacies for contemporary Irish society. The opening scene presents Nellie-Nora, a former penitent, still obviously marked—“with draggingslipper-walk”—by a life spent in various religious institutions, leading a young well-dressed woman into the dungeonlike basement that was once the laundry. Nellie-Nora personifies the communities of former Magdalen women still resident in convents throughout Ireland whose institutionalized lives leave them incapable of returning to the outside world (O’Kane 1996; Culliton 1996). The visitor, Rosa, on the other hand, personifies the many Irish and Irish American adult adoptees who return from abroad in search of a birth mother and an identity of origin. With the confidence born from a foreign upbringing and the animated fashion of her colorful dress, Rosa’s unique presence onstage incites the audience to recognize the unaltered anachronism of the laundry space.16 For the play’s duration, Rosa is the only character onstage that reflects the modern reality recognizable to the audience. In the dank, dusty, and antiquated subterranean world, she is compelled to pursue the only available clues to her past: a name and an address discovered in adop-

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tion papers. She depends on Nellie-Nora’s lived experience and knowledge to help her navigate the past contained within these walls. Ironically, it is the older woman who knows where the light switch is, and in the midst of the cobweb-filled environs, she directs Rosa to the old laundry basket containing the discarded archive of the laundry’s former existence.17 Herein, Rosa finds pre–Vatican II nuns’ habits, a box filled with old black-and-white photographs, and ultimately the battered ledger of names of the women who once worked at St. Paul’s Laundry. Digging for her past, Rosa awakens the ghostlike presence of the laundry’s former residents. As she reads the messages scribbled on the backs of photographs—messages to Elvis, messages to the fathers of children, messages to children themselves—the penitents from 1963 announce their presence in the shadowy confines of the purple muslin drapes that effect the onstage temporal dislocation between past and present. The figures emerge more vividly as Rosa reads from the ledger their names, their crimes, and the identities of those responsible for their committal to the Magdalen laundry: Rosa:

Dempsey, Mary Kate—a boy, James. Signed in by her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Dempsey. O’Donnell, Betty Ann—a girl, Agnes. Signed in by her parents. McNamara, Cathy— Voice of Cathy: Twin girls, Michele and Emily. Signed in— Rosa: Langan, Nellie-Nora— (Rosa turns to Nellie-Nora as Nellie-Nora exits.) Rosa: Nellie-Nora? Woman’s Voice: A stillborn boy. Signed in by her employer, Mr. Persse.— Rosa: Mannion, Julia— Voice of Juliet: A girl, Juliet. Signed in— Rosa: Prenderville, Mandy— Voice of Mandy: A boy, premature, stillborn. Rosa: Murphy, Brigit— Brigit’s Voice: A girl, Rosa. (Searches and finds baby-photograph in chocolate box.) Rosa:

( puzzled ) Brigit Murphy—a girl, Rosa?—My Mother!— Penitent? (1.1.5)

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Rosa’s desire to know the past of which she has been ignorant exposes her to Ireland’s effaced structures of confinement. She is confronted with that past’s realities: her mother’s identity as penitent, her own illegitimate birth, and the probability that her mother’s family abandoned her to the Magdalen laundry. As Rosa is faced with the task of incorporating these realities into her established identity onstage, Burke Brogan’s Irish audiences are similarly challenged to incorporate past and present identities. Having identified with Rosa’s modern perspective from the start, the spectators too must revise their established social and cultural identity to acknowledge their complicity in effecting and then effacing this aspect of the nation’s history. Burke Brogan’s play makes concretely present and legible real female bodies, the very bodies the laundries were designed to make invisible. Initially drawn as stereotypes, each character eventually evokes compassion by her specific circumstance and actions. Brigit, the rebel, secretly pines for Rosa, her adopted daughter, and is determined to escape so as to inform John-Joe of his child’s existence. Nellie-Nora, the lost soul, maintains her faith in the Catholic Church rather than confront the legacy of her rape and her employer’s perverse sexual exploitation.18 The hopeless romantic Mandy—in love with all men but especially Elvis Presley—substitutes the safety of a cultural icon for the man who abandoned her to self-abort her pregnancy in a vain attempt to escape incarceration. Cathy, the archetypal self-sacrificing mother, longs to see her six-year-old twins—also institutionalized in the nearby “orphanage.” Juliet, the seventeen-year-old sacrificial lamb, recently transferred from the same industrial school, welcomes her arrival at St. Paul’s. Here, ensconced among the community of women in which her own mother worked and died, she nonetheless believes herself to be in a safe haven from men’s predatory sexual attacks—“no babies for me” (1.4.21). Juliet’s story in particular reveals the interconnectedness of the various institutions constituting Ireland’s architecture of containment. Eclipsed emphasizes communal friendship rather than individual isolation among the Magdalen women. The four main characters, cut off from outside assistance, share the same plight and assist each other in times of duress. The play restores the women’s integrity and human spirit even as it enacts the enervating impact of institutionalization on their daily activities. Onstage the penitents survive the institutional

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regime because they subvert the religious rule governing their confinement, especially the rule of enforced silence that would isolate them from each other.19 Their mutual reliance touchingly manifests itself in NellieNora’s creation of an imagined window to facilitate Mandy’s fantasy of Elvis coming to rescue her: Mandy:

Any sign of him, Nellie-Nora?

(Nellie-Nora runs down centre, and stands on chair, her back to audience. She balances old cracked mirror towards imaginary window as she tries to see the outside world in response to Mandy’s query.) Mandy: (excitedly) Is he here yet? Nellie-Nora: Aahk! The window’s too high up, Mandy! There’s no light! The glass is too thick! It’s like the bottom of a jam-jar! This mirror’s cracked too! Shh!—I thought I heard something!— Maybe it’s himself! No!—No! (1.3.7 –8)

Poignantly, even in the realm of fantasy Mandy’s window on the real world remains ever out of reach. Nevertheless, the women devise a Hollywood wedding and honeymoon trip to Paris for Mandy and Elvis, literally playing dolls as they redress the laundry manikin to stand in for the groom (1.6.35–41). Fantasy may also take a satiric form as when Brigit mockingly impersonates both Mother Victoria and the Bishop. Her first concession as “Bishop Brigit”—itself a subversive appropriation of Ireland’s foremost woman saint—is to throw open the imagined pantry revealing “plenty of cream-cakes, roast beef, French Wine—and Port!” (1.3.11).20 These female characters supersede not only their restricted diets but also their austere institutional attire by applying lipstick left behind in laundry pockets (2.3.57 –59). Denied contact with all aspects of normalcy, the characters latch onto objects with which they have no real connection: photographs discovered in dirty clothes substitute for an abandoned child or a lost lover. Ironically, the perverted logic of the Magdalen asylum demands that the women, incarcerated purportedly for bringing illegitimate children into the world, survive institutionalization by becoming childlike. Detached from their biological infants, they in turn are infantilized by the religious sisters who serve the contradictory roles of mother and

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prison warden. In the process, the Magdalen institution is revealed as perpetuating itself through the internalization of an ingrained ideology that disavows embodied female sexuality. Inescapable realities pervade the facade these women create, and the character Brigit Murphy is the only one to acknowledge this fact. As the catalyst moving forward the central action of the play, Brigit exposes and subverts the institution’s power structure. Sarcastic, sometimes cruel, she is determined to understand how and why the system works and confronts the sexual double standard that justifies the confinement of women in institutions while allowing men to walk away from their responsibilities (2.3.54).21 She knows firsthand that love is a “trick” (1.3.18) and that “women are fools” for protecting men and keeping their identities secret (1.4.25). Neither can she forget that her brother signed her into St. Paul’s before his own marriage ceremony (2.6.76); like her illegitimate baby, Brigit too is a material piece of evidence compromising the family’s respectable name and thus threatening its economic advancement through marriage. Brigit’s unflinching realism deflates the other penitents’ communal escapism. As Mandy writes yet another letter to Elvis, Brigit levels the fantasy with a dose of Irish social realities: Brigit:

And now the address! Your address, Mandy? Your address?

(Brigit snaps letter and reads.) Brigit:

Mandy: Brigit:

Saint Paul’s Home for Penitent Women! Home for the unwanted. The outcasts! Saint Paul’s Home for the women nobody wants! . . . How do you think that sounds? What’ll he think? Ha? You’d be finished with him! Finished forever and ever! (sobbing) No, Brigit! No address! Elvis will find me! Elvis will find his Mandy! Nobody wants you! Nobody wants any of us! (1.6.34)

Brigit’s outburst evinces her frustration at the hopelessness of Mandy’s phantasmic venture, and on a deeply personal level, it betrays recognition of her individual dilemma. Brigit’s determined retort propels her to increasingly disrupt the laundry operation and expose the nuns’ hypocrisy to her more broken and complacent companions.

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Because Burke Brogan sees the nuns as the products of the nation’s containment culture as well, she invites her audiences to consider them in relation to this mechanism of social control. Indeed, she insists that they were as dehumanized in this culture as the penitents abandoned to their care. As part of the broader societal mistreatment of women, religious women are portrayed onstage as enjoying little recourse to question or alter an imposed patriarchal order that is identified most closely with the local bishop. Sister Virginia, a white-veiled novice and the play’s protagonist, interrogates the rigidity and hypocrisy of the religious rule as she questions the rationale informing the confinement of the penitents. Her qualms are dramatically rendered when she falters while reciting the “Credo”— the affirmation of her faith. Although professing her belief in God, Sister Virginia struggles to equate the treatment meted out to the women in the laundry with Mother Victoria’s distorted insistence on “Blind Obedience” to her religious vows: Sister Virginia: . . . I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth and in Jesus Christ His only Son Our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary— Voice of Brigit: Keys, Sister! My John-Joe is getting married next week! He doesn’t know about our baby! Sister Virginia: Creator of Heaven and earth and in Jesus Christ His only Son Our Lord who was conceived— . . . Sister Virginia: Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate was crucified, died and was buried— (Sound of Cathy’s breathing during asthma attack.) Voice of Mandy: It’s Cathy! She’s chokin’, Sister! Voice of Nellie-Nora: A kettle! Steam! Hurry, Sister! Hurry! . . . Voice of Mother Victoria: Mandy thought she could leave if she wasn’t pregnant, so she tried to perform an abortion on herself! Sister Virginia: He descended into Hell. The third day He arose from the dead. Voice of Mother Victoria: We give them food, shelter and clothing. We look after their spiritual needs. No one else wants them! (1.5.30– 31)

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Caught between the Christian impulse that inspired her vocation— “I thought I’d be working for the poor”—and the blind acceptance demanded by Mother Victoria’s insistence on the rule—“A vow of Obedience, Sister! Blind Obedience”—the challenge for Sister Virginia, and for the audience, is to respond to her innermost fear: “Am I being brainwashed? Will I become dehumanised too, if I stay here long enough?” (1.5.31). Eclipsed demonstrates that even in this microcosm of society, those seeking reform are confronted with an institutional rigidity ever resistant to change. The confrontation, when it comes, places the two religious women face to face in the central dramatic conflict of the play. Mother Victoria, metonymically representing the patriarchal order that underwrites her beliefs, embodies the cruelty inherent in Ireland’s architecture of containment. Her treatment of the penitents indicts the state’s presumption regarding nuns’ inherent expertise in caring for so-called aberrant and mentally defective women, and consequently further censures society’s abdication of responsibility for these women’s welfare. In attempting to compel the young novice toward unquestioning acceptance, she embodies the violence that such cruelty begets. As a result, Mother Victoria is herself as much victim as victimizer. Unlike the naive and sensitive Sister Virginia, the stoic reverend mother cares more for the bishop’s “Carrickmacross lace” vestments than for Cathy’s deteriorating health. She thinks of the bishop’s monthly check from the laundry’s profits before noticing Juliet’s anorexia. She demonizes Brigit for using bleach as a weapon, failing to recognize a mother’s ache to be reunited with her adopted daughter. In responding to Sister Virginia’s admission of spiritual doubt, Mother Victoria exposes the inflexibility that shapes her religious outlook: When I was nineteen, I had the same thoughts! I wanted to free the penitents —mothers of some of the women in the laundry now. You see, this weakness to the sins of the flesh stays in the blood for seven generations! When you take Vows, Sister, you’ll receive Grace and Understanding. . . . Doubts, Sister! We all go through those dark nights!— . . . Do not question the System! You want to change the Rule, the Church, the World! YOU MUST START WITH YOURSELF! Change yourself first! Get rid of Pride! Obey the Rule, Sister! Remember —WE ARE ECLIPSED. But Blind Obedience will carry you through! (2.1.45–47)

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Mother Victoria is the enforcer in this power system. Locked inside the rule that gives her life significance and internalizing the order’s distorted values, she is propelled to inculcate her junior charge with the same blind acceptance. Breaking Sister Virginia’s will fulfills the selfpropagating cycle of violence against the individual spirit, and ultimately that violence will violate future penitents in the laundry. It also betrays the superior’s internalized self-surveillance. The authoritarian underpinning of Mother Victoria’s compulsion rationalizes itself in perpetuity by identifying the biologically determined futurity of sexual wickedness and maternal sin. Worn out from its constraint of seven generations of lust, the mechanism of social control begins to fray and, onstage at least, reveals its inherent contradictions.22 Mother Victoria’s spiritual and historical misogyny betrays her fastidious loyalty to twin obligations: individual supplication before the rule of obedience and the profitable operation of the laundry in the service of the patriarchal church hierarchy. Both impulses cast in shadow her presumed vocation and obscure her ability to recognize her complicity in Ireland’s containment infrastructure. The challenge for the audience, however, is not simply to side with the fresh-faced novice over the battle-weary superior. They must see what Mother Victoria remains blind to, namely, that her “eclipse” is not just of pride but also of her humanity. Moreover, they must acknowledge their own complicity in abandoning countless penitents to Mother Victoria and the generation of religious she represents. Beyond reclaiming and making visible the history of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums, Eclipsed asserts the need for a continuation of action that might prevent a repetition of the past in the future. Through Sister Virginia’s contentious exchange with the rebellious Brigit, Burke Brogan suggests that it is not enough to expose society’s complicity in exploiting the penitent women as human washing machines; not enough to condemn societal hypocrisy for concealing Nellie-Nora’s rape by Mr. Persse. To achieve the necessary continuation of action within the play, Sister Virginia must exercise the courage of her newfound convictions (see fig. 3.2). She must choose between “Blind Obedience” and her conscience. Cathy’s death—she is suffocated in a laundry basket while attempting to escape to her twin daughters—fortifies Sister Virginia’s wavering principles. Much to her superior’s horror, Virginia acknowledges the penitent women as “our Sisters in Christ” (2.4.64). She writes

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Figure 3.2. Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed (Galway 1998). Sister Virginia must exercise the courage of her newfound convictions. Reproduced with permission from Patricia Burke Brogan. Photograph by Sarah Fitzgerald.

to the bishop, “patron of this laundry,” inviting him to visit; naively she believes that he will allow the mothers to visit their children in the orphanage and improve the women’s diet and working conditions (2.4.65–66). Renouncing Mother Victoria’s attempt to pronounce Cathy’s death “accidental” (2.5.72), Sister Virginia finally defies the rule and trusts her individual inclination. As she prays for Cathy’s soul, the curious conflation between the Hail Mary— with its emphasis on the Virgin Mother of God—and the condition of the unmarried mothers in the laundry induces her to surrender the keys to Brigit. But if Virginia expects gratitude, Brigit is not in a forgiving mood and far from giving thanks challenges the young nun one final time:

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Ye’re the ones that are dead, Virginia! Dead inside yer Laundry Basket Hearts!

(Shouts as she runs through audience and away.) Brigit:

Yer Laundry Basket Hearts! (2.5.73)

Brigit’s admonition discloses that which the now-secularized “Virginia” still struggles to understand: if she remains in the convent, the dehumanizing practices will suffocate her just as they did Cathy. In the staging of the scene, Brigit’s exhortation, “Yer Laundry Basket Hearts!” is repeated to the secular audience as she makes her escape through the theater. Burke Brogan warns against the price of public inaction in the face of the seemingly insurmountable challenge of reforming Ireland’s architecture of containment: their humanity will be compromised and their souls suffocated. Symbolically, at the end of the play the tentative novice joins the mentally deranged Mandy once again enfolded in the purple muslin drapes that now shroud the living dead. Consigned to the realm of inaction and madness, both women configure the destiny awaiting a society that fails to admit responsibility for its history. The play’s conclusion carefully avoids compartmentalizing responsibility for the past, urging instead an ongoing process of commemoration, self-reflection, and continued action. In doing so, it closely mirrors the central motivations that brought Patricia Burke Brogan to write Eclipsed in the first place: I’m trying to understand why this should happen. And why I was part of a society as I grew up which condemned women to that sort of life and to that sort of a rejection. And as the nuns were silent for a long time I hope they come out and talk more. It’d be good for them. It’d be good for all of us. (Washing 1993)

Burke Brogan insists on the liberating effect of opening up Ireland’s forgotten past for discussion, whereby one might learn from newly exposed historical injustice how to transform the present. Thus the action of the play reverts to the present and to Rosa’s discoveries in the laundry’s forgotten archive. Rosa thinks she has found what she was looking for,

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her mother’s name in the ledger and a scrawled message—“My baby, Rosa”—on the back of an old photograph. But Nellie-Nora soon deflates her momentary optimism. The ledger entry is incomplete. There is no family address listed, and Nellie-Nora knows that the photograph was just one of many found in the pockets of dirty laundry: “Brigit adopted that paper-baby. She let on it was you!” (2.6.76). In a moment of tender restitution, even the rebellious Brigit Murphy is revealed as vulnerable to the comforts of fantasy. Rosa persists in her questioning: “Why did she ever come here?” “Where did she go?” “John-Joe? Is he my father? Do you know his last name, his address?” “Do you think he’s still there? Do you think she’s alive?” and “Did Brigit talk about—going—to look for me?” (2.6.76). But Nellie-Nora is incapable of providing the answers she seeks. All she can offer is an assurance: She always wanted to find you, Rosa! It broke her heart giving you up like that. You can be certain she tried! You can be certain she spent the rest of her life lookin’ for you! (2.6.77)

Nellie-Nora’s memories are all that remain as compensation in Rosa’s frustrated search for her identity. As she “crumples” across stage to the dusty laundry basket and the memories it contains, the venerable woman becomes for Rosa the literal embodiment of her mother’s victimization. The young woman’s search must continue, and for now she can only repossess the archive (an incomplete ledger) and the artifacts (appropriated photographs) and hurry away through the audience. Nellie-Nora is again left behind, this time to turn the light out on the past. But before she does so, she looks out after Rosa, and implicitly out on the audience, again connecting them to the “old laundry workspace” and the stories surrendered there. Both Rosa and the audience now have access to these stories. They have witnessed the past elided therein. The ethical challenge remains how they act on their newly acquired sense of the nation’s history. In the end, Eclipsed proclaims that there is a duty attached to remembering an elided past, repossessing the archive of history, and ultimately taking action. In fulfilling this responsibility, Ireland’s eclipsed women emerge from the shadows of official history and are commemorated in a public act of mourning. Burke Brogan chooses not to leave

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these obligations to chance. As the lights again fade the laundry into darkness, the music of Handel’s Messiah compels the audience to appreciate the task at hand: Despised, rejected. Rejected of men. A man of sorrows. A man of sorrows And acquainted with grief. (2.6.77)

Burke Brogan recognized, as early as the play’s first performance in February 1992, the incriminating consequences of Irish society continuing to ignore its obligation to these women. As the audience is enveloped in darkness, the eerie silence is broken one final time by Sister Virginia’s ghostly voice: In 1992, to make place for a building development at St. Paul’s Home, the remains of Mary Kate Dempsey, Mary Jane O’Sullivan, Kitty O’Hara, Julia Mannion, Betty and Annie Gormley, Ellen McAuley, Cathy McNamara and three hundred other unnamed penitents were exhumed, cremated and reburied outside in Killmacha cemetery. Mandy Prenderville has not left the local Mental Institution since 1963. (2.6.78)

Some eighteen months before the actual exhumation of 155 sets of human remains from the High Park Magdalen asylum in Drumcondra and their reburial at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, Eclipsed made manifest to its audiences the ultimate danger of sitting in the dark (O’Kane 1993; O’Toole 1993; O’Louglin 1993; Raftery 2003; Humphreys 2003). Even before the past caught up with the present in the mass media, or before life imitated art, Patricia Burke Brogan enacted the consequences of avoiding responsibility for the nation’s history. In this sense, her dramatic resurrection of Ireland’s Magdalen penitents, like her insistence that all the play’s women were victimized by the institution’s containment culture, was not only appropriate but timely as well. Her play stands as the ultimate indictment of a society that would forget again the Magdalen laundries, reconsigning the women to anonymity and casting them once more on the ash heap of history.

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C O N C L U S I O N : R E S TA G I N G T H E M A G D A L E N L A U N D RY I N S TA I N E D G L A S S AT S A M H A I N ( 2 0 02 ) Ten years after the premiere of Eclipsed, Patricia Burke Brogan revisited the convent laundry in Stained Glass at Samhain.23 She was motivated to do so by two specific aspects of the Magdalen story as it emerged in the intervening decade. Contemporary cultural representations, including documentaries, television dramas, feature-length movies, and the accumulation of journalistic, television, and radio reports that these productions led to, invariably depicted the Magdalen penitents as victims of a patriarchal church-state hegemony in the past and the religious congregations as the embodiment of those abusive practices in the present. From Burke Brogan’s perspective, such representations dangerously simplify the nation’s history; a newly confident and progressive society was creating its own version of the story that affirmed an absolute separation between Ireland past and Ireland present. The decade separating her two dramatic treatments of the Magdalen laundries also witnessed an unprecedented backlash against the Catholic Church in Ireland and an attendant decline in its social and political power (Kenny 2000, 295–309; Fuller 2002, 237 –68). This decline was fueled, in equal part, by embarrassing disclosures of priestly infidelities (Broderick 1992; Hamilton and Williams 1995), revelations of clerical pedophilia and an entrenched policy of concealment on the part of the Catholic hierarchy (Moore 1995; Murphy, Buckley, and Joyce 2005), and allegations of widespread physical and sexual abuse of young children in the nation’s industrial and reformatory schools (Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999). Burke Brogan suggests that post–Celtic Tiger Ireland found an easy and convenient scapegoat in the newly tarnished Catholic Church, thereby excusing state collusion and evading familial and communal complicity in the operation of the nation’s Magdalen asylums. Stained Glass at Samhain complicates both these responses by staging multiple and conflicting interpretations of the Magdalen story. Because she understands the imperative to be just to the victims, just to the perpetrators, and just to new institutions that will ensure no repetition of the past in the future, Burke Brogan’s representation of the Magdalen story defies a modern society’s desire to lay blame exclusively at the convent door. Beyond exposing a broader social and political cul-

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pability, she refuses to surrender women’s faith and spirituality to contemporary Ireland’s rejection of institutionalized Catholicism. In retelling the Magdalen story from a religious point of view, Burke Brogan encourages a more complex understanding of the past and a shift of emphasis from simple condemnation to reconciliation. Stained Glass celebrates the survival of women’s spirituality beyond the narrow confines of religious vocations, rescuing something Burke Brogan sees as a valuable resource buried in the past that might help contemporary society ensure a brighter future. Stained Glass at Samhain revisits St. Paul’s Convent and Magdalen Laundry in the early 1990s as the buildings are being demolished. “Property developers” literally threaten to encase the story of the Magdalen asylum in concrete; their preparations for a proposed multistory car park necessitate the exhumation of former penitents buried anonymously within the convent grounds. Unlike the earlier play, the Magdalen women are not physically present but are remembered in storytelling. Their graves disturbed in the name of progress, the women’s disappearance is rendered dramatic onstage by a row of puppets, “dressed as consecrated penitents,” sitting on a long bench. The puppets stand in for communities of former Magdalens still dependent on the religious congregations in various convents throughout Ireland, but they lack the physical and psychological realism of Nellie-Nora’s portrayal in Eclipsed. In rendering them as puppets, Burke Brogan emphasizes their mute witnessing as their story is retold by others and poignantly criticizes contemporary representations that too easily caricature a real-life survivor community. In retelling the story of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, Stained Glass privileges the religious perspective on these institutions. Sister Luke, a ghost figure who appears at Samhain, the traditional Celtic season when “boundaries between the living and the dead dissolve” (2003, 1), returns to recount her time as “Superior in Killmacha Magdalen Laundry” (1.3.6). As she did in Eclipsed, Burke Brogan deploys this onstage interpreter figure to mediate between past and present, between the story as it is told onstage and the patrons in their seats (Grene 1999, 5–23). As a liminal character, Sister Luke blurs temporal demarcations; she embodies a threatened history and articulates a story that remains threatening to the present. Demoted for subverting the patriarchal “Central Powers” that govern the convent, she relates how she paid the

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penitents from the laundry profits, improved their diet and fashion, and allowed them to work outdoors in the gardens. But Sister Luke averted punishment by feigning insanity—jumping out of the convent’s top window to escape the dehumanizing rigidity of the religious rule— and in the process purchased for herself the freedom to see clearly and speak openly: “I can say whatever comes into my head” (2.5.60). The“mad” nun thus exposes the inherent madness of the system she abhors. Sister Luke:

And here we are in Killmacha Magdalen Laundry!—

(Stands behind row of consecrated penitents.) Can’t you see the consecrated penitents sitting on that long bench. Crooning lullabies and cradling their rag-doll babies. . . . You never thought about it that way?—But you must know! No excuses! No! You’re not too young!—You sent your own dirty filthy clothes to them! To be scrubbed! (1.7.16) 24

Stained Glass complicates contemporary Irish society’s scapegoating of nuns for abuses in the Magdalen asylum, expanding culpability to incorporate an economically progressive Irish society as well as a traditionally patriarchal and exploitative church-state hegemony. Her corrective to one-dimensional and hypocritical criticism of Ireland’s female religious rescues them from derisory dismissal in an increasingly secular and international society. Burke Brogan dismisses as hypocrisy society’s concern for children in the third world, “popping pennies into black-baby-boxes,” while at the same time denying unmarried mothers in the laundries access to their “babies from the orphanage, their páistí gréine [illegitimate children]” (1.2.5). Likewise, she reminds her audience that many in society unwilling to sacrifice their own time to help those in need stigmatized Irish nuns who renounced their vocation. In Burke Brogan’s return to the Magdalen story, she distinguishes between individual spirituality and institutionalized religion. If Eclipsed targeted “Blind Obedience,” Stained Glass targets “Central Powers.” Central powers are at once patriarchal, in the person of the bishop, and

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international, in the constant allusions to the Vatican as governing local institutional practice. Burke Brogan implies that a global church, like the newly global Irish economy, distorts more forgiving indigenous traditions.25 The play heralds a native religious alternative, a predevotional revolutionary Irish Catholicism, where a less rigid enforcement of Catholic tenets sat more easily alongside Celtic animistic beliefs. Burke Brogan again associates such beliefs with the figure of St. Brigit, a female bishop in the early Irish church, who embodied both pagan and Christian belief systems. The alliance between the global and the patriarchal threatens women’s religious practices and belief. Onstage, nuns have little agency; they either blindly follow orders from on high or leave religious life. Even the novices are already “deaf or indifferent. Minds caged in their starched coifs” (1.5.13). Only Sister Luke navigates a path between these alienating forces; her enabling guise of madness subverts and verbally challenges her superiors, she flaunts her agency in the face of immovable obstacles, and she cultivates a similarly questioning attitude in the young novice who watches over her. Unlike Sister Luke, who finally admits that social pressure kept her in the convent (2.5.63), the young Sister Benedict is warmly greeted by her family on renouncing her vocation in 1990s Ireland—suggesting society’s altered relationship with the Catholic Church. Moreover, Father James, who seems to promise a more generous and accommodating institutional church, supports her decision, realizing that “there are so many kinds of vocation” and that the “Holy Spirit” might have other plans for Sister Benedict (1.11.36). This complexity again challenges the caricaturing of Catholic clergy in contemporary Ireland, and it remains the play’s most courageous statement: Burke Brogan’s representation of these characters and their circumstances enables the audience to respect Sister Benedict’s decision to leave the religious congregation without demeaning Sister Luke’s desire to remain in it. Likewise, spectators are encouraged to deplore the equally contemptuous Bishop and Mother Victoire, more concerned for his “soft-boiled egg” than for the women under their care, but also to extend their criticism to include the role of the property developers, who callously exhume the bodies of the Magdalen dead. Burke Brogan’s dramatic enactment also promotes remembering the laundry’s painful stories of suffering and abuse. These stories facilitate understanding and ease the pain inscribed in the very landscape

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the property developers threaten to encase: “No birds sing here. Stones and bricks twitch, try to release their trapped horrors. The pain held in the earth” (1.1.3). Opening up the past through narrative retelling remedies because it releases this pain. Onstage, the builder’s freshly dug trench and the recently exhumed graves threaten this excavation of the past: the trench is scattered with artifacts from the old laundry, including boots, linens, and starched guimpes, and the graves surrender vestiges of the dead Magdalen women. Sister Luke rescues these artifacts to write her book about the former penitents, using discarded guimpes for her manuscript and soot from the soon to be demolished laundry chimney as her ink. The site and the remnants of the women’s experiences are no longer just an archaic stage set but are transformed into the actual material for communicating their stories and countering their historical elision.26 Maura Ber’s dissertation complements Sister Luke’s memoir in Burke Brogan’s project of narrative retelling. Maura is not only a graduate student in social history at Harvard University but a Magdalen survivor who escaped the convent with Sister Luke’s assistance when only a teenager. She returns to St. Paul’s to collect “stories about the laundries” to complete her academic research. Although her study offers a different perspective, Burke Brogan intimates the dangers inherent in detached scholarship that either ignores or exploits the survivor community. Consequently, Ber needs Sister Luke to mediate with her fellow survivors, women who “won’t talk” about their past. Sister Luke understands that survivors are entitled to “pretend it never happened.” But she also insists that their pain is very real: “It’s always there deep down. Like a dark stain” (2.1.41). And yet she also believes in Maura’s equal claim on making the past accessible. Therefore she brings Maura to the recently opened grave where she identifies Katie’s medal, an artifact emblematic of all the exhumed penitents. Using a tape recorder to document Sister Luke’s memories, Maura’s thesis becomes the antidote to chosen forgetfulness. She asserts, “Katie’ll never be just a heap of dust. I’ll see to that. Her story will be published in my thesis” (2.1.45). Stained Glass at Samhain suggests how Ireland’s Catholic religious could assist reconciliation for past injustice by participating in the project of narrative retrieval. Burke Brogan criticizes the religious congregations for remaining silent about the Magdalen laundries, and implies that they remain in thrall to a patriarchal church hierarchy by not re-

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leasing their records or offering a comprehensive apology for abuses in the past. Sister Luke personifies the reinscriptive impulse. She is writing her own ghostly memoir and facilitating Maura’s dissertation. She also encourages the young chaplain, Father James, to complete his study of biblical women who “ministered to Christ during His public life,” a response to the traditional elision of women in Catholic theology (2.6.66). And she understands that narrating her own painful family history is the necessary first step in drawing the exemplarity from the past. She relates how her vocation was inspired by her father’s abandonment of his young pregnant lover in Northern Ireland. Sister Luke knows that she sees “the ghost of that woman from the North in every fair-haired penitent in The Laundry” (2.3.55). But she also understands that her attempt to compensate for the “sins of the father” was misguided and led to a miserable life within the confines of the convent. Moreover, her sublimation of self perpetuated the initial act of containment—her father’s denial of twin sons—that caused so much pain and suffering. Consequently, she must claim her nephew, the grandson of her father’s affair, and take pride in his accomplishments as a poet: “My photograph is displayed there beside a photograph of my nephew, the poet. Both in silver frames.—Alleluia! Alleluia” (2.7.65). Stained Glass at Samhain recognizes that much has been lost in the face of revelations of institutional abuse, church scandal, and economic development. Symbolically, Sister Luke’s favorite stained-glass window depicting “the Mother of God, . . . Mary Magdalene and the women lamenting the dead Christ” (1.1.4)—the onstage emblem of women as witnesses—disintegrates in the face of these destructive forces. But the dramatist contends that destruction is not necessarily an end in itself. Indeed, Sister Luke gathers the pieces of shattered glass—“The colours are so gorgeous. . . . See how the light shines through them”—in the firm conviction that together with Father James she will make a “Resurrection Window” (2.7.65). And a resurrected church requires new female witnesses that will forcefully construct a new understanding of the past. At the play’s end, Sister Benedict returns as Bridgit O’Brien, a business executive heading the family’s international publishing house. In her secular position she will publish Sister Luke’s book on the Magdalen as well as Maura Ber’s academic thesis. In her new vocation she indeed supports the emergence of a more complex representation of

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the Magdalen laundries and all the women confined therein. On Burke Brogan’s stage the formerly silenced women are now in charge of circulating the stories of the past. Equally important, Maura returns at the play’s end to attend the dedication ceremony for a new convent museum. The museum augurs an open, accurate, and documented retelling of the different aspects of the convent’s history. Bridgit O’Brien also visits Sister Luke’s grave in the newly restored convent cemetery (the property developers were denied permission to exhume the nuns’ bodies). In the play’s concluding action, Bridgit publicly acknowledges “SISTER LUKE CAREY ,” proudly adding her name to the small iron cross that heretofore marked her anonymous grave (2.7.66). This act of nomination is symbolic of the many Magdalen grave sites in Irish cemeteries that call out for a similar naming project. The act of publicly acknowledging Sister Luke recuperates her distinctive and dissenting voice from the past, and in the process it finally lays her ghost to rest. In the end, reconciliation demands not only acknowledgment of abuses of the penitents in the name of their social and spiritual salvation but also the salvation of the silenced and distorted histories of those other victims of church, state, and family.

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CHAPTER

4

(Ef)facing Ireland’s Magdalen Survivors Visual Representations and Documentary Testimony

All these ladies here have been with us for many years. We are all old friends. And now we are growing old together. I have known some of these ladies for fifty years. I came here over fifty years ago. Life was hard at the time, but we worked hard together . . . as a team. And, we always had good food . . . hadn’t we? Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen (1998)

Ireland’s last Magdalen laundry closed its doors in October 1996. Two years later a French documentary team obtained unprecedented access to the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge’s Gloucester Street asylum where approximately forty former penitents remained in the nuns’ care. Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen depicts these women in the convent’s chapel, actively participating in the Catholic mass, and receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion. Viewers also see women in their individual rooms surrounded by personal belongings ranging from a musical keyboard to an array of dolls and teddy bears. Still others congregate in a communal kitchen, sharing a cup of tea and washing up. The

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documentary also includes a visit to a recreation room wherein a dozen or so elderly women engage in singing and dancing. The effects of a lifetime of institutionalization are most evident in these women; some are confined to wheelchairs, some are propped up on daybeds, and others betray signs of diminished capacity. Sr. Teresa Coughlan, a former mother superior of the convent, leads the recreation activities; she announces the lyrics to “Dirty Old Town” and “The Wild Rover,” claps hands in time to the songs, and dances with the one woman able to leave her seat. This scene, awkward but not evidently choreographed, presents a very different image of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries from those that appeared in visual representations over the past fifteen years. At a time when the Catholic Church’s reputation is under assault in the Irish media for abusive institutional practices in the past, this documentary underscores that the nuns are still providing for women abandoned to their care decades earlier. However, the scene’s benign mood changes notably when one of the filmmakers asks the former mother superior whether these women were once “Magdalens.” Responding initially in French, Sister Teresa assumes a corrective posture, “Nous ne disons pas Magdeline ici,” before asserting that they are “les femmes” and then switching back into English and claiming that they are “the women . . . ladies, residents.” The term “Magdalen,” she asserts, is from the past and is never used in the convent. As the women watch in the background, Sister Teresa defends her objection in terms of friendship (“We are all old friends. And now we are growing old together”) and equality (“we worked hard together . . . as a team”) and rationalizes the treatment of the women in terms of the social and economic deprivations of the past (“Life was hard at the time”). Ultimately, she seeks confirmation from these women of her rationalization of conditions in years gone by, in which the nuns always provided “good food.” She turns toward the women who are still dependent on the convent for their care, arches her eyebrows in expectation, and solicits a response. Only one person in the room responds affirmatively. Women who only moments before were talking openly turn silent when asked to verify a version of the past patently at odds with their lived experience. In doing so, these still-institutionalized survivors transform the silence that history has imposed on them into an act of resistance to rewriting the past.

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P O S T N AT I O N A L I S T I R E L A N D I N F O R M AT I O N : D O C U M E N TA R I E S A N D T H E M E D I A Documentary film, more than any other genre of cultural representation, facilitated the historical retrieval of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries from the nation’s chosen forgetfulness. During the 1990s, four television documentaries relayed the story of this peculiarly Irish institution.1 An array of national audiences, including Irish, British, French, and American, were confronted with visual testimony to this aspect of Ireland’s past. Washing Away the Stain (1993), a BBC Scotland production, emerged in response to the success of Patricia Burke Brogan’s play Eclipsed in Edinburgh. Sex in a Cold Climate (1998), a Channel 4 production, was the latest in a series of challenging social history documentaries from Steve Humphries, a respected English filmmaker.2 The same year, Nicolas Glimois and Christopher Weber produced a Frenchlanguage documentary, Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen (1998).3 Finally, CBS’s signature news magazine, 60 Minutes, produced a segment titled “The Magdalen Laundries” (1999), which responded to the public outcry in Britain and Ireland after the Humphries’ documentary aired some months earlier. Foreign media organizations produced all four of these films. None of them aired on Irish television. No Irish media organization to date has produced a documentary film focusing on the nation’s Magdalen laundries.4 Despite offers from the British producer, RTÉ television, the state-sponsored national broadcasting organization, repeatedly chose not to schedule Sex in a Cold Climate, the one film that provoked widespread response on the nation’s radio airwaves and in print journalism (Goldstone 1998; Donnolly 1998a, 1998b; McElwee 1998; Sutcliffe 1998; “The Magdalen Scandal” 1998).5 RTÉ’s unwillingness to engage the Magdalen story in this manner is particularly striking. Throughout the 1990s the organization’s Independent Production Unit commissioned challenging documentary films on a wide range of social and historical issues, including the nation’s industrial schools (Dear Daughter 1996), male sexual violence (Male Rape 1996), and the civil war (Ballyseedy 1997) (Pettitt 2000, 218). Indeed, a number of cultural critics point to Louis Lentin’s Dear Daughter, the 1996 documentary that investigated claims of widespread physical abuse of children at Goldenbridge industrial school run by the Sisters of Mercy, as

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signaling a decisive break between RTÉ and the Catholic Church, which traditionally exerted significant influence on television programming (Pettitt 2000, 219–20; Barton 2004; Inglis 1998, 228–29; 131; O’Flynn 2004, 49; O’Brien 2004, 230; Gibbons 2005, 215; Savage 1996). The media, as a result, assumed new prominence, becoming Irish society’s social conscience and taking the moral high ground from which to expose the underbelly of the once-dominant church’s institutional power (O’Brien 2004, 232). Two years later, when RTÉ aired Mary Raftery’s three-part documentary, States of Fear, this break between the media and the church seemed complete. Raftery’s systematic study of abuse and exploitation of children in the nation’s residential institutions signaled RTÉ’s willingness to also target the state’s culpability in past institutional abuses (Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999; Smith 2001; O’Brien 2004, 235). Given the Irish media’s newfound independence, it seems strange that RTÉ would be unwilling to investigate what the Irish Times referred to as the “Magdalen Scandal” (“Magdalen Scandal” 1998). The absence of an Irish-produced documentary focusing on these institutions remains baffling. One is left to ponder what it is about the women confined to the Magdalen laundry that disqualifies them from the Irish media’s penchant for exposing church and state hypocrisy, abuse, and exploitation. The foreign documentary filmmakers were not deterred by the absence of an established history, the reluctance or unwillingness of survivors to provide testimony, the difficulty of researching these secretive institutions, or the uncertainty regarding archival film footage and photography. Each of the four documentaries features interviews with former Magdalen penitents, is underpinned by broad-ranging historical research, and offers compelling evidence of physical abuse and exploitation by members of the religious orders.6 The films have in common the use of a mediating voice-over to provide the overarching contextual narrative, but this invariably gives way to compelling personal narratives of survivors. The testimony of survivors is subjective, and in no instance does it appear scripted. Washing Away the Stain and Sex in a Cold Climate, in particular, combine dramatized reconstruction sequences, slow motion, and affective music to evoke the painful memories of abandonment, exploitation, and abuse. Monochrome sequences to signify the past alternate with color sequences focusing on the surviving witnesses in the present (Pettitt 2000, 219).

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All four films also draw on a rich reservoir of archival images, both still and moving, that are removed from their original filmic context and employed as narrative resources within the new story structure.7 Archival material functions ethnographically as visual evidence of the way Irish life used to be. Simultaneously, these images illustrate a didactic argument that is primarily established by the authoritative voiceover (Bell 2004, 88–89). The most compelling archival film footage appears in Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen and the 60 Minutes segment. As Sunniva O’Flynn (curator of the Irish Film Archive) explains, Fr. Jack Delaney originally filmed this footage sometime in the 1930s on the grounds of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge convent in Gloucester Street, Dublin. Delaney’s film depicts the nuns and the penitent women engaged in religious ritual and participating in recreational activities. The film is unique in that it records real-life historical Magdalen women; it depicts their uniforms, hairstyles, ages, and general appearance.8 The producers of Les Blanchisseuses juxtapose compelling extracts from this film to contemporary footage of former Magdalen women in the same convent some sixty years later (O’Flynn 2004, 49–50). Prior to the release of Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters, these four documentaries cumulatively established the corpus of what many in contemporary society knew about Ireland’s Magdalen institutions. The films broke silence on a secretive past not available in official versions of Irish history. They redress, in part, the historical void perpetuated as a result of the religious orders’ denying access to their records of women entering the Magdalen asylums after 1900. In addition, they confront society with the collusive role it played in the maintenance of these institutions and challenge the Catholic Church and the Irish state with disturbing accounts of physical and emotional abuse and economic exploitation. Television documentaries allowed this to happen in a publicly accessible manner, and consequently, they helped to erode Ireland’s architecture of containment by representing the survival of the very women it was erected to negate. Ultimately, these visual representations, and the various print and radio journalism reports they provoked, provided a forum for survivors of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries to bring their traumatic experiences out from the shadows of historical silence and societal shame and onto the screen of the nation’s collective conscience. By facilitating the emergence of repressed stories in Ireland’s official history, the

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four documentaries evoke contemporary Ireland’s desire to move from a national to a postnational society. They make manifest the struggle to move from an exclusionary to an inclusionary ideal of national community.9 As such, these visual representations are significant from a therapeutic perspective. They challenge a narrative of state abstraction with personal testimony. They empower survivors — those contributing to the films but also those who continue to live in secrecy and silence—to affirm their existence as part of the national family.10 Written out of the collective memory in the past, these women’s stories are crucially constitutive in an ongoing process of healing and identity formation. Mary Norris, one of the survivors testifying in the 60 Minutes segment, demands this right to be acknowledged: “It’s very important that people believe it, that they know that this is the truth. I didn’t go through all . . . through all this, for people to just say, ‘ah, sure that was another time’ ” (“The Magdalen Laundries” 1999).11 The women speaking in these documentaries demand to be acknowledged as more than the embodied traces of a controversial bygone era. They are the survivors of Ireland’s architecture of containment, and thus they have a claim on the nation to acknowledge and to provide redress for abuses in the past.

D O C U M E N TA R I E S , T R A U M A ,

AND

S U R V I V O R M E M O RY

Janet Walker, in her recent book Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (2005), considers the challenge posed by survivors’ testimony in recent Holocaust historiography as a model with which to combat allegations of “false memory” in contemporary American sexual abuse cases (see also Walker, 1997). Resisting the temptation to answer denials of recovered incest memory with what Michael Frisch calls the “supply side” approach to public history, Walker criticizes the overdetermination of traditional historiography when confronted with traumatic personal memories of past events.12 Rather than fight empirical prejudices by countering with names, dates, and facts, she argues for a different approach: Empirically based realist historiography, even if it were possible, is not the most appropriate mode for certain historical representations because it cannot adequately address the vicissitudes of historical representation

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and memory. . . . We have an ethical and political obligation to remember, acknowledge constantly, and deal with the aftermath of traumatic events. At the same time, though, we must recognize that these events are subject to interpretation as they are experienced, reimagined, reported, written down, and visually communicated. Here lies the paradox of memory and history: there is a dire need to write histories of trauma and/or traumatic histories with regard to the relationships among experience, memory, and fantasy; but memory is friable, and as David Thelen has argued, “The struggle for possession and interpretation of memory is rooted in the conflict and interplay among social, political, and cultural interests and values in the present.” The challenge Friedlander throws down is to integrate the so-called “mythic memory” of the victims within the overall representation of the past without its becoming an “obstacle” to “rational historiography.’ ” (Walker 2005, xviii, citing Thelen 1989, 1127; Friedlander 1992, 53)

Walker’s objection to a purely empirical historiography is particularly relevant in a discussion of the role documentary films have played in reclaiming the elided history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries.13 With the emphasis they place on survivors’ testimony, and the likelihood that traumatic experiences have exaggerated individuals’ memories, these visual histories are no doubt contaminated by the “vicissitudes” of partisan rereading.14 The challenge, therefore, remains how to recognize them as texts that adhere nevertheless to historical reality. Presented with this dilemma, Walker looks to Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s work on oral testimony and the Holocaust and their major contention that a fallible memory may speak to a historical truth (Felman and Laub 1992). At a convocation of historians that focused on Holocaust testimony, Laub heard professional colleagues dismiss a certain survivor’s memory of events at Auschwitz because the woman was verifiably incorrect in one particular detail.15 Walker concurs with Laub’s unconventional interpretation of the survivor’s contribution to history: She was testifying not simply to empirical historical facts, but to the very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination. . . . She saw four chimneys blowing up in Auschwitz: she saw, in other words, the unimaginable. . . . And she came to testify to the unbelievability, precisely, of what she had eyewitnessed—this bursting open of the very

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frame of Auschwitz. . . . Because the testifier did not know the number of the chimneys that blew up . . . , the historians said that she knew nothing. I thought that she knew more, since she knew about the breakage of the frame, that her very testimony was now reenacting. (Felman and Laub 1992, 62–63)

In this case, the testimony registered a truth or reality that was at once empirical and subjective. It is precisely the quality of exaggeration that preserves in this memory the true import of the events. Walker uses the lessons of Laub’s findings to suggest ways to interrogate filmic representations of rape and incest survivors’ memories of their traumatic experiences. I want to suggest a similar parallel in the four documentaries representing Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, particularly in their reliance on eyewitness survivor testimony. Like the work of Laub and Walker, the analysis in this chapter resists judging the authority of survivors’ accounts according to whether they concur with or contradict the partially constructed legislative and judicial histories outlined earlier in this book. Each of the testimonies discussed here contributes something unique to a better understanding of the direct experience of living within these institutions. That these testimonies often repeat or overlap confirms crucial aspects of the Magdalen experience not verifiable by empirical historical evidence. In this sense, they augment what little the archive betrays. To begin this analysis, however, I want to focus on a number of instances that demonstrate the “vicissitudes of historical representation and memory” but that nevertheless speak to the historical significance of individual testimony however flawed or imprecise it may be. Phyllis Valentine, born in 1940, was reared in the Sisters of Mercy industrial school, Ennis, County Clare. Her testimony in Washing Away the Stain (1993) is replete with crucial details, including the reason she was transferred at fifteen to the Magdalen asylum in Galway, also operated by the Sisters of Mercy.16 She spent eight years working in the laundry before being released in 1964 at the age of twenty-four. As she recalls, “If you were pretty, they were frightened you’d get into trouble. I think they felt I’d get into trouble. . . . They used to call it falling away when you’d get pregnant. That’s what the nuns used to call it, and you’d go to the big house and that was the end of you” (Washing 1993). This survivor’s account corresponds with historical evidence of transfer between in-

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dustrial schools and the Magdalen outlined in chapter 2. Similarly, it is consistent with Juliet, the fictional character in Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed based on that author’s personal experience in the Galway Magdalen in the early 1960s. Valentine personifies the “preventative” function of these institutions that operated as late as the 1950s and 1960s. Valentine also testifies specifically about the fateful day she arrived at the Galway asylum. As she recollects painful memories from her childhood, she understandably speaks in a somber and pensive voice: I didn’t know it was an institution. I thought I was going to work. The nuns lied to me and so did the priest. He told me I was going to work in a laundry. Well I was happy about that, going to work in a laundry. I’d get paid. I’d be able to see my little sister. . . . I was reared in an orphanage. I went from there to another institution. I felt that there should have been people to help me, give me a chance you know, which I never had really. It was very hard. . . . The worst thing of it was, “Why you were put in there?” “What reason were you put in there?” “Why were you kept there?” I mean, one lady told me once that she went in as a young girl and she told me I’d be there for life. I’d only been in there for about six weeks, you know, and I had just turned sixteen, and she says, “if you don’t behave they’ll never let you out. You’ll be here for life.” Those words stuck with me for years and years. (Washing 1993)

Notably, Valentine adopts the child’s perspective in retelling these formative events, a perspective that accommodates her lack of understanding at the time. The testimony thereby conveys how the imposing architecture of authority dwarfed the powerless child struggling to understand her sudden vulnerability. Valentine registers a slightly different version of the same events in Sex in a Cold Climate, broadcast five years after Washing Away the Stain. On this occasion her account is marked by subtle exaggeration that signals perhaps her understandable anger and resentment at those responsible for her traumatic experience. The testimony, in turn, is less concrete or factual and more focused on relaying her feelings: I went, with the nuns and the priest, and we went to Galway. And I shall never forget the day for as long as I live, these big, big gates opened. All

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you could see were these bars on the windows, big high walls. And I went in through this gravel path. Two or three nuns came out, and a priest came out, well he was a bishop, I think, . . . he had a red robe on, and he came out to meet me, and I was brought in this long, long corridor. (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998)

Almost Gothic in its stylized detail, this retelling of substantially the same event brings new elements of her memory to mind, and as the emphasis shifts so too do more deeply repressed aspects emerge. However, while it is probable that nuns and a priest accompanied Phyllis on her journey, it is very unlikely that a priest greeted her at the home or that a bishop would condescend to visit the Magdalen laundry. It is even less likely that the bishop would do so to greet an incoming penitent. As suggested in Eclipsed, the bishop may have gladly accepted the laundry’s commercial profits. He may even have sent his “Carrickmacross lace” vestments to be starched and ironed by the fallen women. It is implausible, however, that he paid a social visit. Despite the incongruities, the need to assert the unforgettable nature of the experience—“Those words stuck with me for years and years” and “I shall never forget the day for as long as I live”—connects both accounts and, according to Walker and Laub, constitutes their authority. The challenge when evaluating Phyllis Valentine’s memories is to account for the effects of her traumatized youth rather than dismiss her testimony because of its effects. A very different example of the “vicissitudes” of personal memory manifests itself in the 60 Minutes segment. Josephine McCarthy, one of the two women featured, spent three years in the 1960s at the Good Shepherd Sunday’s Well Magdalen asylum in Cork. Now a woman in her late forties, McCarthy’s appearance is characterized by a fragile voice, an unwillingness or inability to face the camera, and a deep sense of sorrow and personal shame as she wanders through the overgrown grounds at the rear of the institution thirty years later. Like Phyllis Valentine, she was raised in a “Catholic orphanage.” From there, she was sent out as a “servant girl” to work with an Irish family. Her transgression was to be discovered with a man in the backseat of a car, and this was sufficient cause to believe that she was or was about to become sexually active.17 She remembers what happened next: “And the next thing I knew I was with this woman on a train to Cork and I was just brought up here. And I was just told my name was Phyllis and that I worked in a laundry.”

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Forcibly separated from her identity and symbolically reborn with a biblical alternative, “Phyllis” endured a daily routine of prayer, meals, and labor. In particular, she remembers the hours worked in the laundry: “[Y]ou’d have to hand wash, scrub, you’d have no knuckles left, ironing, you’d be burned. It was just hard work . . . very hard work.” It is also evident, though she could not look at the camera when saying so, that the whole experience scarred her later life: “It’s made me feel a horrible, dirty person all my life” (“The Magdalen Laundries” 1999). One of the most telling moments in the segment comes as the presenter, Steve Kroft, and the two women walk through the decaying complex of buildings and make their way toward the rusting corrugated roof on the old laundry shed. Mary Norris guides Kroft down a steep embankment to look through the shattered windows onto the disused laundry floor below. As the camera surveys the debris of old baskets, folding benches, and discarded machinery—even as the perspective accentuates the subterranean nature of the confines—Kroft is heard in a voiceover asking McCarthy if she wants to come down for a closer look. The camera pulls back and captures Josephine hesitating, remaining somewhat aloof. When Kroft repeats his request, McCarthy, in a singular exhibition of rigid determination, looks away and responds, “I can see it in my mind.” Not only does this moment capture the traumatic reverberations of the survivor’s youthful experience; it simultaneously captures the irrelevance of the very concrete materiality with which Kroft wants her to engage. Thirty years of reliving this past has erected a sufficiently concrete psychic impression of the experience, and the mind is a place neither the camera nor dilapidated ruins can edify. The aforementioned examples provide some indication of the inherent vagaries or exaggerations of traumatic testimony, but in no way do they, or similar examples provided by other women in the documentaries, invalidate their contribution to the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries. Quite the contrary, it is precisely the quality of exaggeration or selective recollection that gives these memories their resonance as lived experience. More significantly, both examples expose the limitations in methods of assessing personal testimonies. The tendency to undercut Valentine’s accuracy because of her different accounts fails to see testimony as an ongoing retrieval, a process of working through traumatic memory, a need to continually shape one’s story. Likewise, McCarthy’s testimony evinces the gap between the documentary’s

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emphasis on physical remains and what remains inside the survivor’s mind. Steve Kroft failed to appreciate that from McCarthy’s perspective, the visit to the Sunday’s Well convent was not “a return” to the site of confinement: she never left it. The superior truth lies not in the concrete remnants but in the lived and relived experience of the mind.18

C O N TA I N I N G I L L E G I T I M A C Y A N D I N C E S T : T H E M A G D A L E N ’ S “ V O L U N TA RY ” P E N I T E N T S Survivor testimony like that of Valentine and McCarthy is both empirical and subjective. It also suggests the need for viewing television documentaries in new ways, hearing testimony so that it can augment the emerging history of the Magdalen asylum in twentiethcentury Ireland. The recollections of Christina Mulcahy and Martha Cooney form the basis of Sex in a Cold Climate. Their stories also dramatize two of the most typical conditions for which Irish women were committed to these institutions, namely, unmarried motherhood and sexual abuse. As such, they are representative of the vast majority of the so-called voluntary committals to Ireland’s architecture of containment in the postindependence era. Their testimony is an important augmentation to the still-incomplete legislative and judicial history outlined in chapter 2. Christina Mulcahy was the eldest of the nine women who appeared in the four documentaries.19 Born in 1918 in a small village in County Galway, she became pregnant and gave birth to an illegitimate baby boy in a mother and baby home when she was twenty-two. Mulcahy’s account of her wartime relationship with a soldier demonstrates the level of sexual ignorance cultivated in Irish society as a result of Ireland’s containment culture. In a fluttering voice tinged, even now, with guilt and shame, she admits, “I didn’t know anything about the facts of life and I didn’t know whether I would conceive or . . . so I stayed with him. . . . And I met him again then. . . . And that was the time I got pregnant.” Although she still hoped to marry the father of her child, Mulcahy’s stay in the mother and baby home “ended her chance” with him. The nuns censored their letters and dissuaded visitation between the father and his newborn son. The institution’s punitive climate is tellingly revealed in the final separation between mother and infant.

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Only in recollecting this specific event does Mulcahy make evident her raw, pent-up anger: He was only ten months old when suddenly she said to me one day, “As soon as you’re finished in the nursery, come to my office and you’re going home today.” . . . And I was breast-feeding the baby at the time, and I said can I go back and say goodbye to the baby. “What does he know about anything—go back and upset him. You’re not going back, there’s a car waiting.” And I said, “No time to say goodbye?” “No time to say goodbye.” (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998)

Despondent as she was at losing her child, she was even less prepared for her family’s reception when she approached their cottage. Only then was she fully to understand the stigma attached to giving birth to an illegitimate child in a society where the perception of sexual immorality threatened a family’s respectable character: My father came to the gate and two little brothers and a little sister. And they stopped. And he said to me, “What do you think you want?” And I said, “I want to come home.” “You’re not coming into this house! You’re not coming into this house. You’ve disgraced us! You’re not right in the head. You can’t be right in you’re head and bring a child into this world, and you deserve punishment.” (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998)

Christina Mulcahy was publicly judged insane by a society that willingly sacrificed the individual in order to protect her relatives’ status in the community. Her testimony evinces how patriarchal Irish culture resorted to the discourse of mental illness to justify its institutional response to nonconforming women. Her penance was quickly rendered private, however, as the family immediately signed her into the Galway Magdalen. Mulcahy’s initial perception of the Sisters of Mercy was shaped by their insensitivity to the fact that she was still lactating and their disdain regarding her concern for her son. The nuns immediately set about the process of moral and spiritual transformation: “My clothes were confiscated and I was put into this brown . . . this old brown coarse material” (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998). Martha Cooney, although younger than Christina Mulcahy, was similarly victimized by Ireland’s prevailing culture of sexual morality and

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societal respectability. In addition to her appearance in Sex in a Cold Climate, Cooney conducted a live telephone interview with the Pat Kenny Show on RTÉ Radio 1 in the days immediately following the television broadcast (“Magdalen Laundries: Martha Cooney” 1998). Martha Cooney was born in 1927 and grew up on a farm near Athlone, County Roscommon. When Cooney was four her mother died, and two aunts helped to raise her while her father attended to the family farm. Cooney’s account of her vulnerable motherless childhood is conveyed purposefully with equal measures of dignified resolve and acerbic derision: When I was 14, I was sent to a cousin to help on the farm, and he took me to a farm fair, and he had a lot to drink and on the way home, he indecently assaulted me. And I told a cousin what happened. And the cousin reported the matter, and they got rid of me very quickly. The biggest sin in Ireland— well apart from having a baby in them days without being married— was to talk. You never let the neighbors know, and . . . get rid of you, there’s no talk, there’s no scandal, and they weren’t sure, so that was the safest bet. Away to Dublin, you see! (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998)

Another of Cooney’s cousins worked with St. Vincent de Paul—a Catholic charitable organization—and it was through his connections that she was signed into the High Park Magdalen asylum in Drumcondra. She would remain in this institution for four years, revictimized for falling victim to incestuous male violence. Like Christina Mulcahy, Cooney was immediately inculcated into the asylum regime. Her clothes were removed, and she too was dressed in an “ugly, drab . . . uniform.” She remembers the effect this had on her as a young teenage girl: “They were shapeless and they were meant to make you look as ugly as they possibly could.” Like Josephine McCarthy, she remembers the hard toil of the laundry: We worked all the time, and the work was very hard because we had to bend over the big sinks, washing, scrubbing, you know, collars and cuffs, and we ironed very, very heavy starched altar linen and surplices that the priest wore. And I got varicose veins from the ironing at fifteen. And I was told that that was a very privileged job to do. (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998)

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Despite her youth, she joined the rest of the Magdalen community— unmarried mothers, women found guilty of infanticide, “hopeless cases,” “mental defectives,” and elderly lifelong penitents—in their symbolically purifying labor. Cooney recalls how the nuns insistently reinforced the penitents’ “wickedness,” justifying the washing of dirty linen as a manifestation of their need to purge the soul. They were constantly encouraged to identify with Mary Magdalene: as the biblical sinner “was forgiven, so we would be forgiven in time.” Contrary to the nineteenthcentury description of the regime at High Park outlined in chapter 1, Martha Cooney remembers “just work and prayer and silence and atone for the sins, and how wicked you were.” She remembers absolutely no recreation during the years she was incarcerated (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998). The four documentaries evoke what seems like a totally crushing regime of power. And yet the survivor testimony details evidence of resistance, a resistance already evident in the survivor’s choice to speak out. The documentaries challenge conventional perceptions of Ireland’s Magdalen women by emphasizing their refusal to submit fully to the harsh institutional regime that shaped their daily lives. As a result, these films complicate the emerging narrative of Magdalen institutions in twentieth-century Ireland; they undermine the viewer’s ability to see these women as passive victims continually on the receiving end of societal and institutional cruelty.20 After six months of being incarcerated against her will in the Galway Magdalen, Mulcahy rebelled forcefully and demanded to see her son. Not only did she stop working; she also refused to enter the laundry. Her tenacity proved vital when a nun threatened to attack her with a leather belt, and Mulcahy rose up and threatened in return: “You lift your hand to hit me and I’ll kill you. All I want is to see my child. That’s all I’m asking.” After a later incident when her account of a priest’s threatened sexual abuse was dismissed, Mulcahy boldly refused to attend mass or the sacrament of confession. Her punishment on this occasion was both physical and psychological. Her hair was shorn tight to the scalp, more deeply marking her marginalization; in the Magdalen community, she became not only a fallen woman but also an unrepentant penitent. Dehumanized in this manner, she remembers the nun’s attempt to capitalize on her momentary disadvantage. The deep psychological impact of this nun’s verbal assault is

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evident in the vitriol with which Mulcahy recalls the words: “Oh, your life isn’t worth living now, you’ve fell from grace, your respectability is gone, and you’d better make up your mind to stay here for your life” (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998). The documentary testimony is particularly valuable in recording the effects of the Magdalen experience that persist after release or escape, a perspective not available through empirical historiography. Of the nine women participating in the documentaries, only two made a successful escape from the laundry.21 Christina Mulcahy fled the convent yard as cattle were making their way in. She was fortunate in having a friend live close by and therefore was able to find immediate refuge. Her friend, tellingly, had no idea of her circumstances or that her family had signed her into “that madhouse down the road.” Mulcahy’s decision to leave Galway immediately and move to Northern Ireland speaks to an awareness of the very real danger of being returned to the asylum if discovered. Subsequently trained as a nurse in the North, she eventually married and raised a family, but even after fifty years her traumatic experience betrays itself: I lost shame and respect and pride and everything that came with it. Every girl that has a baby out of marriage is a fallen person, they have no luck, they lose their respect. I didn’t tell my family, I didn’t tell anybody until I told them six months ago, and that was it. I suffered badly through all of that. (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998)22

The switch to the present tense midway through her concluding remarks underscores what the testimony otherwise suggests—that the impact of losing her son and being institutionalized in the Magdalen laundry continued to shape her self-perception throughout life. Martha Cooney was released from High Park when she reached eighteen; a cousin by marriage interceded on her behalf and signed her out of the laundry for fear that others in the family would learn the circumstances of her incarceration (“Magdalen Laundries: Martha Cooney” 1998). Remembering the day of her liberation brings the only genuine smile of happiness Cooney exhibits during the documentary. This rekindled joy proves fleeting, however, as it gives way again to an acknowledgment of the social realities that greeted a former Magdalen in the outside world and the choices she made as a result of her traumatic past:

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On the day of my release, it was a wonderful exhilarating feeling I suppose you’d call it. And in the afternoon Jim came for me and took me out and I was free. . . . I was wondering whether I’d be able to make it on my own. . . . Everything, everything was different, the spaces, and come and go as you pleased, whatever. It was wonderful. . . . All I wanted to do was to do a job and be independent. But I have never wanted to marry or make a commitment to anybody because I never wanted anybody to have power over me or to chain me ever again. (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998)

For Martha Cooney, two aspects of the experience persist as its lasting legacy. First, she identifies the grave injustice inflicted on women by society. Second, she points to the knowing hypocrisy of “them holy nuns” and the sense that the penitent women were made to see themselves as sinners when in fact they “were more sinned against” (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998). Despite the obvious scorn for a society that betrayed her as a child, Cooney’s concluding remarks in her radio interview also suggest an ability to understand if not condone the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge at High Park: “I suppose you pity them. They couldn’t have known any better. There must be something sadly lacking in anyone who could do that to another human being. . . . Women’s inhumanity to women.” Moments like this demonstrate the manner in which survivor testimony is not bound by the historians’ obligation to use only empirical evidence. Testimony opens up the complexities of insights and judgments on the past. A documentary history, in this sense, is able to expand on what counts. Consequently, although Martha Cooney asserts that Ireland’s treatment of women in the nation’s Magdalen institutions exists as “one of the sins crying to heaven for vengeance,” she also recognizes that she allowed anger and bitterness to fuel a self-imposed exile and isolation in later life. At the end of her live interview on RTÉ radio, still unable to make the gesture of reconciliation herself, Pat Kenny spoke on her behalf and invited the younger generation in her family to get in touch with her. She acknowledged that the cousins, nephews, and nieces who must exist somewhere were blameless for what happened to her, and she hoped that reestablishing communication would assuage the gulf of loneliness bred by violence and abandonment in the past (“Magdalen Laundries: Martha Cooney” 1998).

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THE ILLOGIC OF PREVENTION: T H E M AG DA L E N A N D T H E I N D U S T R I A L S C H O O L The four documentaries also shed light on the interconnectedness of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums and the nation’s industrial and reformatory schools. Phyllis Valentine’s experience already speaks to the transfer of young girls between these supposedly separate and distinct institutions. The historical documentation for these practices outlined in chapter 2 is enriched by survivor accounts. Aileen, one of the women appearing in Washing Away the Stain, spent two years in the Good Shepherd’s Magdalen asylum in Cork in 1969–70. Even in 1993 she still struggles with the legacy of her experience, a struggle manifest in her decision to maintain her anonymity by remaining in silhouette while on camera and by withholding her surname. The documentary genre facilitates this intermediate testimony, speaking out but only from a position of anonymity. Aileen’s experience evinces the distorted morality underpinning Ireland’s containment culture. She explains how, as a two-week-old infant, she was placed in an orphanage. Her unmarried mother was sent to a Magdalen home because Aileen was not her first illegitimate child. Later in life, Aileen was transferred to an industrial school, and later again, at sixteen, she was sent to the Good Shepherd’s Magdalen asylum in Cork. Not only did Aileen understand that she was made to suffer for the sins of her mother, she recalled the following conversation with the industrial school inspector who twice transferred her within Ireland’s institutional maze: I remember him saying, “You get more like your mother every day,” and then he says, “If you don’t stop talking to the men,” he says, “I’ll have to put you away.” And I says to him, “Why? What am I doing wrong?” and I wasn’t even going outside the door. He says, “Your mother had you outside of marriage so we’re not giving you that opportunity.” (Washing 1993)

In the documentary genre living discourse becomes part of the story. This valuable information on the impact of how Magdalen women were spoken to and described by others cannot be verified in empirical historiography. The remembered conversation underscores the violence of language itself, and this verbal abuse seems as psychologically damag-

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ing as any of the physical hardships the women had to endure. The testimony of someone who lived in the system verbally challenges the official history of abstract rules and regulations that prohibited transfer of children between institutions. Her account is corroborated by Burke Brogan’s dramatic representation of the way religious congregations rationalized these transfers in moral terms, claiming that the sin of lust passed through seven generations of women before it abated. Aileen’s recollections of the inspector’s comments introduce evidence of the prevailing ideological myth that this generational contamination theory was justification for particularly cruel institutional practices. The separation of unmarried mothers from their children, ironically undermining the constitutionally revered maternal bond, was especially cruel when both resided within the same religious compound but in different buildings.23 Mary Norris and Josephine McCarthy, in the 60 Minutes segment, suggest that unmarried mothers confined to the Sunday’s Well Magdalen could routinely hear their children in the adjacent industrial school but were barred from seeing or having contact with them (“The Magdalen Laundries” 1999). The children, meanwhile, were never informed of their mothers’ proximity. Bridget Young’s testimony in Sex in a Cold Climate illustrates the cruelty that such compartmentalized institutional logic produced. Young, born in 1939, spent most of her childhood in residential care and ultimately was committed to the Good Shepherd’s industrial school in Limerick. She remembers not being allowed to talk with the Magdalen women in the adjacent building: “They were people who were devils, they were sinners.” But she did have contact with one Magdalen woman and, as Young relates, the consequences of this violation were to have serious ramifications on her childhood: She said to me, “do you have a child down there by the name of Margaret Moore.” And I said, “yes we do.” She said, “That’s my child and I don’t know what she looks like, I haven’t seen her since she was a year old.” So she was trying to make arrangements with me to bring this child up on top of the flat roof over the infirmary, . . . And I agreed I would. But I got caught that same day. One of the nuns was coming out of the chapel . . . and the reverend mother took it from there. She . . . came in with a great big rubber —black rubber —it wasn’t a belt, but it was something she had specially made for the children, to beat the children

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with, and a scissors, and an open razor. And she shaved both our heads and gave us a severe beating. And after she did that she grabbed the two of us again, and she made us look in the mirror to see what we looked like after she had finished with us. And that’s what happened. And I’ll never forget what looked back at me, totally devastating. Your forehead all swelled up. Under your chin all bleeding where she had stuck the scissors wide open. The blood running into my eyes. My eyes totally closed. And she was making us open them eyes and look in that mirror, and “you’re not so pretty now, are you?” I’ll never forget that day. And this was just because of talking to Magdalens. I was getting too friendly with the Magdalens. (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998) 24

This testimony evinces the concrete ties that bind the two buildings within a literal architecture of cruelty: the forced separation of mothers from their children suggests the institution’s ability to rationalize this level of physical and psychological violence against the same children. Young’s absolute conviction, the details of bodily brutality, and the clearly demonstrated anguish engendered by recollection confirm that she never “forgot” the experience. Moreover, Young’s memory of this moment of forced visual abuse—“look at yourself ”—parallels the psychological impact of the verbal abuse in Aileen’s recollections.

CONCLUSION: THE ETHICS

OF

R E P R E S E N TAT I O N ?

Finally, the four documentaries are significant because they raise questions about the ethics of memory in contemporary cultural representation—the significance of how this story is told in the present. The documentaries are less successful in extending their critique of society’s collusion in Ireland’s Magdalen laundries to incorporate a balanced representation of the religious congregations’ points of view. In their rush to point the finger of responsibility, the documentaries, and the media’s response to them, ignore the larger social structures that simultaneously victimized many of Ireland’s female religious.25 Given its exclusive focus on four survivors, Sex in a Cold Climate in particular left itself open to charges of demonizing nuns and priests.26 Washing Away the Stain (1993) and Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen (1998), on the other hand, afforded the Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of

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Refuge the opportunity to explain their involvement in this aspect of Irish history.27 Sr. Lucy Burton, the mother superior at the Gloucester Street convent, is unusually forthcoming in the latter documentary: I do not think we drove anyone to madness, I think we institutionalized them, which made them less able to live outside, and that was our lack of knowledge as to what an institution can do to somebody. . . . I think we didn’t free them as much as we could, that perhaps we didn’t give enough respect or enough opportunities to make their own way in life, that we didn’t support them as women in better ways. I think we didn’t, you know, fight for the respect of their families for them. (Les Blanchisseuses 1998) 28

In the earlier documentary, Sr. Noel Duggan candidly targets contemporary Irish society for again shifting culpability onto a readily available and easily identifiable scapegoat: I would think that a lot of the blame for having those women . . . would be left on our shoulders, whereas society, in general, who had those girls in there in the first place has got off lightly. And some of those families I’m sure, and I know, don’t live too far away from here, and they haven’t come forward and owned and claimed their responsibility, and we’ve had to carry it. And I feel quite a lot of hurt and anger at that. (Washing 1993)

Duggan exposes the veneer of national respectability as a carefully and conveniently constructed open secret: Washing Away the Stain asserts that it is the families of former Magdalen women, not the nuns, who still insist that their abandoned relatives, even in death, remain anonymous. The documentary adds visual impact to this charge by filming two monuments in the local cemetery, one much more recently erected, with the following inscription: “In Affectionate memory of those who died in the Magdalen Home.”29 The visual representations, in this sense at least, frustrate the cultural amnesia at play in contemporary Irish society. However, a few of the documentaries inadvertently expose the religious congregations’ resistance to a comprehensive examination of their involvement in these institutions. This chapter opens with one such instance: the Magdalen women in Gloucester Street resist Sr. Teresa Coughlan’s attempt to rewrite the past. Likewise, 60 Minutes captures

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on film the Good Shepherd Sisters’ attempt to airbrush this controversial history. Near the conclusion of the segment, Mary Norris and Josephine McCarthy lead Steve Kroft to the Magdalen burial plot at the rear of the Cork convent. Even as Kroft narrates that Mary Norris successfully petitioned the nuns to list the names of the former Magdalen women on the previously anonymous grave site, the camera pans and in the wider shot captures the addition of two new gray marble plaques on either side of an older white marble Celtic headstone. Exposure to the elements has rendered the wording on the white cross no longer decipherable. That is not the case on the newer memorials, so the 60 Minutes camera focuses on a partial list of names: Mary Loughnane, 31 December 1960 Hannah Gallaghan, 12 June 1962 Bridget Higgins, 13 December 1967 Madge Brown, 2 November 1969 Annie Nash, 24 September 1971 Elizabeth Brosnan, 16 December 1973 Annie Quirke, 16 May 1980 Hannah Horan, 9 July 1980

Margaret Gibney, 11 February 1978 Ester Curtis, 2 July 1982 Kathleen Vickers, 12 June 1983 Mary Buckley, 14 December 1983 Bridget McNamara, 5 January 1986 Rose Swanton, 15 March 1989 Clare O’Connor, 15 March 1989 (“The Magdalen Laundries” 1999)

The contemporary nature of this register collapses any neat separation of history and the present.30 As the viewer is drawn away from the visual detail and toward the implications of the ongoing discussion, the camera glances over another recent addition to the original Celtic cross. At its base, a third marble plaque, obviously new, is inscribed as follows: In Loving Memory Of Residents Of St. Marys Good Shepherd Convent Sunday’s Well 1873 –1993 (“The Magdalen Laundries” 1999)

The Good Shepherd Sisters in erecting this monument seek to dignify the women who died while confined in the Sunday’s Well convent.31 They restore the women’s birth identity for posterity and thus correct the institutional anonymity conferred by the biblical names given to all

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the penitents in these homes. The date when each woman died together with the historical span of years signal a willingness to finally uncover the scale and the contemporary nature of the Magdalen asylum’s function as part of Ireland’s architecture of containment. In the final analysis, however, the inscription distorts because it rewrites history. The nuns’ efforts to fix the past in stone cannot reverse what the viewers have been forced to see and hear in the documentaries. These “Residents” were institutionalized in the Good Shepherd convent. They were denied their legal and constitutional rights. They were detained, imprisoned, and exploited against their will. Moreover, they were forced to endure long hours of arduous work, in dangerous conditions. They received no pay. In representing them as “Residents,” this inscription callously rewrites an appalling injustice. It denies in death the freedom to choose that these women were denied in life. It obliterates their enforced labor by not referencing the laundry. It erases from historical memory the very term that rendered them invisible in life; the plaque carefully avoids any reference to their identity as Magdalen penitents. This memorial deflects the religious congregation’s culpability in the present even as it contains yet again the threatening rupture of the past. The four documentaries discussed in this chapter evince not a single history but a multiple one—a multiplicity of perspectives and metanarratives—in narrativizing the story of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries (Kearney 1997, 188). At a time when many in the Magdalen survivor community are imperiled by old age and the stigma still attached to these institutions, these visual representations weave their story of Ireland into the story of an emerging postnational society in formation. This reimagining of Irish identity will require atonement and reparation from the Catholic Church as a whole, from the hierarchy as well as the specific religious congregations.32 It will also demand the general public’s readiness to look self-critically at its complicity in ideological practices of social control, both in the past and in the present. It requires that politicians legislate—in the present—mindful of the lessons afforded by past injustices. In other words, these visual representations challenge contemporary society to draw the exemplarity from the past. Finally, the documentaries provoke the Irish media to examine its own role in perpetuating the historical silence surrounding the Magdalen laundries through “journalistic negligence and irresponsibility” (O’Brien 2004, 234)—in the past and in the present.

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5

The Magdalene Sisters Film, Fact, and Fiction

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eter Mullan’s award-winning film The Magdalene Sisters (2002) tells the stories of four young Irish women incarcerated in a Magdalen asylum.1 The film purports to take place in a convent on the outskirts of Dublin between 1964 and 1968.2 Most Magdalen penitents, like the characters Margaret and Patricia in the film, were institutionalized for that peculiarly Irish sin, perceived sexual immorality; some were single mothers, some were the victims of incest and rape, and some were considered prostitutes (Smith 2004, 208). Other women and young girls were deemed too simple for their own good or too attractive for society’s liking, such as the screen characters Crispina and Bernadette, and were hastily hidden away, supposedly to safeguard their moral purity. With no official sentence, and thus no mandated release, some of these women lived and died behind the Magdalen’s walls. In the vast majority of cases there was no judge and no jury. Throughout the past two hundred years, thousands of Irish women ostensibly purged their sins by washing society’s dirty laundry: they achieved spiritual renewal through backbreaking labor, endless prayer, and the complete effacement of individual identity.3 Ireland’s last Magdalen laundry, as these institutions came to be known, closed its doors in 1996 (Culliton 1996). In late August 2003, almost one year after Mullan’s film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and within weeks of its release in the United States, the Irish Times revealed disturbing details of the exhumation, cremation, and reburial of 155 Irish women who had lived and died at the High Park Magdalen asylum operated by the Sisters of Our Lady of

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Charity of Refuge in Dublin (Humphreys 2003). Buried between 1858 and 1984 and interred anonymously, these women were denied a proper burial and final resting place. The religious order sought and received the required state license to exhume the bodies in 1993. However, the license listed only 133 sets of remains. Death certificates, legally required in Ireland, were missing in some fifty-eight cases (Raftery 2003). It was not until 2003, ten years later, that Irish society learned about the twentytwo bodies for which the nuns could not account. Although such irregularities should have led to an immediate police investigation, Ireland in the early 1990s, on the cusp of an economic and cultural transformation popularly termed the Celtic Tiger, had little interest in digging up old ghosts. Instead, the state provided the Sisters with a hastily reissued exhumation license, and all the bodies were cremated and reinterred anonymously at Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery. Cremation, of course, destroys all trace of historical evidence, and thus no one will ever know with certainty who is buried at the Glasnevin plot (Raftery 2003). The history of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums is, then, incomplete, and the still-emerging facts are even more disturbing than the fiction of Mullan’s film.

SECTION 1 Ongoing debates within Irish cultural studies are reconsidering how the project of national identity formation in the decades following political independence mobilized the heteropatriarchal family and the Catholic Church’s ideal of sexual morality in ways that were especially oppressive for Irish women (McAvoy 1999; Backus 1999; Smith 2004). Kathryn Conrad identifies the effects of this strategic alliance between church and state: “The effects are most obviously felt by those who do not fit the model and are excluded, silenced, or punished; but all, even those who seem empowered within the system, are held hostage by it, trapped within the family cell” (2003, 4). Contemporary cinema in particular has helped to recover the elided stories of exclusion and punishment from this period in Ireland’s past, and, as Luke Gibbons suggests, “one of the reasons Irish films have looked back more in anger than nostalgia is that for those sections of society whose story has not yet been told, the past is still not over” (2005, 215; see also Gibbons 2002, 95–96).

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The Magdalene Sisters joins recent films that represent Irish life in the postindependence era emphasizing the repressive aspects of the Irish condition, the stifling eradication of individuality in the face of an indomitable church and state politics, and the relentless but often arbitrary cruelty that enforced social conformity (e.g., The Field 1990; The Butcher Boy 1997; Angela’s Ashes 1999). In representing the “dark days” of the post-1950 period, Mullan’s film performs what Ruth Barton identifies as Irish cinema’s “public function” of enabling viewers to work through the legacy of history in its more traumatic formulations (2004, 130– 33, 131). Joe Cleary similarly interprets “the obsessive return to these decades” as an intimation of a traumatic history (2000, 108). However, Cleary insists that this turn to the past simultaneously acts as a “negative validation of the present” that signifies the attainments of Irish modernization in both the economic and wider sociopolitical spheres (2000, 108). Imaging the past as stagnant and repressive affirms, therefore, the new social formation of 1990s Irish society (Cleary 2004, 231). In this sense, cultural representations of Ireland’s enervating past permit present-day detachment from and complacency about the nation’s history—responses Cleary argues are tantamount to experiencing “a lucky escape ‘from all that’ ” (2000, 108). It is precisely this sense of “lucky escape” and, more specifically, the implication of an inherent separation between past and present, between the dark old days and Celtic Tiger Ireland, that I want to examine when considering The Magdalene Sisters. We have no official history for the Magdalen asylum in twentiethcentury Ireland. Indeed, as Maria Luddy (1995) and Frances Finnegan (2001) imply, the official record of the laundries will never be complete until the religious orders make their archival records available. As the preface suggests, this historical vacuum largely explains why Ireland’s Magdalen laundries exist in the public mind at the level of story rather than history. This chapter offers a constructive reading of The Magdalene Sisters’ relationship to that history in order to explore more fully the nature of this cultural representation. At precisely the moment when the High Park exhumations, cremations, and reburials haunt society as unfinished business from the nation’s past and are repeatedly ignored, it is important to acknowledge the complexity of Mullan’s film for the history it represents and to recognize the film’s possible effect as precisely leading to action on behalf of the victims and survivors of these

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institutions. This chapter reframes The Magdalene Sisters so that the fullness of its critique comes into focus, and in the process it seeks to open up the possibility of a response to the film that is oriented toward social change. Media coverage of The Magdalene Sisters initially focused on its receipt of the Golden Lion award at the Venice International Film Festival and the ensuing condemnation—“an angry and rancorous provocation” (Agnew 2002, 1)—of Mullan’s film by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. Reviewers repeatedly posed the same questions. For what crimes were these women imprisoned? How could such incarceration occur in a modern society? What sort of communal or societal redress would the film provoke (Gordon 2003; O’Toole 2003)? The film’s American release, moreover, coincided with an ongoing two-year media frenzy that pursued revelations of clerical child sexual abuse across every Catholic diocese in the United States (Reese 2004). In Ireland the church’s moral authority was already compromised by a series of ongoing clerical sex and child abuse scandals (McGarry 2002a; Barry 2002; Savage and Smith 2003). These international scandals thus became the interpretive prism through which audiences viewed and understood Mullan’s film. The Irish religious orders’ refusal to apologize for the treatment meted out to women in their care, like their withholding of historical records, encouraged this dominant response whereby the church bore the brunt of national and international opprobrium. This response, in turn, promulgated a critical reading that muted the film’s equally significant domestic critiques of postindependence Ireland’s hegemonic social control, specifically, a patriarchal church-state politics, and of contemporary Irish society’s ambivalent response to survivors of that earlier political formation. In the film’s critical reception the church existed as the convenient scapegoat, while its previous partners in hegemony—state and familial institutions—evaded all intimations of culpability. In fact, Mullan’s critique extends far beyond the sins of the church to expose the complicity of political and social forms of repression. The first section of this chapter reconfigures the film’s broader critique by examining the on-screen representation of the family, patriarchal society, the state, and the community. The argument challenges the limited initial critical response and underscores how it leaves the film open and vulnerable to reappropriation by the forces of cultural containment: the state and

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contemporary Irish society. In exploring Mullan’s wider critique, this section reveals how the film might serve the need for social action on behalf of the survivors of Ireland’s Magdalen institutions. Given its critical success, The Magdalene Sisters did shine the international spotlight on the plight of Ireland’s Magdalen women. By telling this story through the popular medium of film, Mullan offsets the long historical silence that allowed these institutions to maintain their secrecy and invisibility. It is important to note that Mullan not only directed the film but also wrote the screenplay. In both roles he was confronted with the difficulty of navigating between the requirements of a popular cultural form with a commercial goal of successful entertainment and a commitment to the historical evidence, what little existed, that authenticated his version of the story. This negotiation between commercial genre and source material necessarily required some fictionalization of historical fact. The Magdalene Sisters nonetheless is largely inspired by survivor testimony, specifically, four women who bore witness to their incarceration in Ireland’s Magdalen institutions in the earlier television documentary, Sex in a Cold Climate.4 Mullan not only fictionalizes aspects of their testimony; he also conflates their experiences at different institutions, in different eras, and invents a meeting of the four women at the same laundry in 1964.5 In addition, Mullan’s version of Ireland’s past is partly inspired by a series of preexisting cultural artifacts, for example, a folk ballad, a historical photograph, and archival footage from inside a Magdalen institution. In restaging these historical artifacts, the film exposes the open secret of the laundries. In both instances—survivor testimony and cultural artifact—the film confronts viewers with evidence that always existed. Mullan’s representation insists that viewers now acknowledge what heretofore they had chosen to ignore but, invariably, already knew. Section 2 of this chapter evaluates the film’s hybrid nature—faithful to history and ethics and yet driven by the desire for wide popular circulation—and suggests how genre helps to explain, to some extent, the narrow scope of the film’s reception by many viewers. Fintan O’Toole argues that the recognizable cinematic tropes of Mullan’s Hollywoodstyle prison film—“unjust incarceration, sadistic cruelty, heroic endurance and eventual escape” (2003a, 6)—lessen the pain and simultaneously deaden the critique. Popular form, in this sense, limits the film’s originality even as it makes the film more entertaining to watch. No-

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where is this collision of form and content more problematic than in the film’s treatment of the nuns. Sister Bridget in particular functions as the easily identifiable villain of the piece, reduced to playing the role of prison warden at this Irish gulag. This chapter concludes by evaluating how the genre’s conventions, the use of stereotype, melodrama, and simplification, have limited the film’s critical reception to the singular focus on blaming Catholic nuns. These popularizing strategies detract from the more significant and complex aspects of Mullan’s film, for example, its interrogation of the church’s exploitative capitalist motivations in operating these laundry institutions. In this broader context I analyze the discourse of religious vocations in a still-decolonizing Ireland to underscore how the nuns on-screen, like the Magdalen penitents they imprison, are also the products of their society, a society defined by a hegemonic social control. I do so not to absolve the responsibility of the religious orders that operated the laundries but rather to underscore the need for Irish society—family members, communities, state, and church—to own the Magdalen scandal and to support calls for redress, reform, and reparation for victims and survivors. The Family Mullan’s camera knowingly challenges the patriarchal institution of the Irish family, implicating it as a responsible agent in the betrayal and mistreatment of the women represented on-screen. The film’s opening scene, in particular, enacts the cultural dynamic whereby middleclass respectability in rural Irish society permits the abandonment of a family member compromised by perceived sexual immorality. Loosely based on the testimony of Martha Cooney in Sex in a Cold Climate, Margaret, one of the characters in The Magdalene Sisters, sees her extended family commit her to the Magdalen asylum for fear that she might bring scandal to the family name, either by giving birth to an illegitimate child after being raped by her cousin or by becoming the center of unwanted public scandal. That she is the victim of a crime is immaterial; her embodiment as the object of male sexual desire necessitates that she be rendered invisible, that she be punitively held responsible for the violent sexual aggression of another. Through its treatment of Margaret, The Magdalene Sisters poignantly depicts the cultural and religious contradictions propping up middle-class respectability.

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Mullan’s critique is narrated through a tellingly acerbic mise-en-scène. Margaret’s rape occurs during a wedding banquet that brings together the extended family in celebration of the societal contract of sanctioned and sanctified physical union officiated over by the local priest. The film opens with Father Doyle performing “The Well Below the Valley,” a ballad rarely performed in traditional or folk music circles because of its sinister incestuous overtones (Planxty 1973, Album Notes; O’Connor 1991, 81–85, 119–20). The lyrics reveal that incest and infanticide were not unknown phenomena in Irish society, and document that the incarceration of women was society’s prescribed response in such cases: the young girl in the song recounts six pregnancies, two each by her father, brother, and uncle, and she details how the six infants were buried to conceal their existence. When she asks the gentleman in the song to reveal her fate, his reply anticipates the punitive response meted out to Margaret and the other women deemed to have transgressed the Irish definition of sexual morality— seven years “a-ringing the bell” and a further seven years “burning in hell.” The woman’s response in the ballad’s final line—“I’ll be seven years a-ringing the bell / But the lord above may save my soul / From burning in hell”—is equally telling; it encodes the trope of female deliverance but deliverance available only to victims of male sexual violence who passively endure punishment and penance. The ballad signifies how Irish culture has absorbed the inevitability of incest and infanticide through such stories that offer no models for possible social action in response. Entertainment and tradition, in this instance, silence the risk of any such resistance. Mullan’s visual enactment, juxtaposing Margaret’s rape and the ballad’s lyrics, insistently jolts his audience beyond such passive acceptance by critically exposing it as a form of complicity. If the priest’s performance of the ballad licenses male sexual violence, Mullan deploys Irish traditional music to reveal the family’s response to Margaret’s rape. When Kevin and then Margaret return downstairs after his assault, the céilí (traditional music celebration) is in full swing. Here the film provides viewers with two contradictory yet simultaneous narratives, one effected through sound and one through vision. As word of the sexual assault spreads among the male members of the family’s inner circle, the music renders dialogue inaudible. Simultaneously, the musical score invokes an illusion of communal harmony

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Figure 5.1. Through its treatment of Margaret, the film poignantly depicts the cultural and religious contradictions propping up middle-class respectability. Reproduced with permission from Element/ Temple Films.

through the continuing dance and celebration. Concurrent with this fiction of social cohesion, the film directs the audience’s attention to a series of glances passing across the room. Now focused on the charactersas-viewers, the viewer, in turn, perceives how the characters respond to what they know has happened to Margaret. In a telling reversal of the earlier ballad performance, Margaret rather than the priest now becomes the object of the community’s gaze and the subject of its enacted narrative. She whispers an account of the assault to a female cousin, who tells Kevin’s and Margaret’s fathers. Kevin is confronted by his father and Margaret’s father; the three men, joined by the priest, then convene behind closed doors. Kevin is removed from the scene of his crime. Margaret’s father and Father Doyle decide Margaret’s fate. Throughout this visual sequence, as the camera pans from face to face, the viewer is forced to confront the injustice enacted onscreen as we follow each character’s gaze to its object: the already marginalized Margaret (see fig. 5.1). No longer just the consumer of a cultural product (as the wedding guests consume the priest’s ballad), the

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viewer must now collaborate in it. He or she thus becomes active in this representation—by filling in what is unheard but known. In the scene just described, the seductive musical harmony is disrupted by the ballad’s lyrics as viewers begin to understand the parallels between the two plots of victimization. Traditional music’s communal harmony cannot contain the threatening dissonance at the very heart of the family—the threat presented not only by a sexually deviant daughter but also and even more so by the potential for public awareness and scandal. In this sense, the film provocatively suggests that the sanctity of the family, not Margaret herself, has been violated. By deploying music both to subsume and ineffectively to heal the rupture, Mullan establishes his critique of middle-class Irish respectability; the traditional music silences Margaret until she disappears completely the following morning when the priest transports her to the Magdalen laundry.6 Throughout her ordeal—the rape itself, and the subsequent determination of her fate—the céilí continues as the band, in a literal and figurative sense, plays on. Traditional music, customarily an agent of cultural memory, serves as an agent of cultural amnesia. Mullan, however, disrupts this effect by reactivating the music’s subversive potential, making us more aware of the ballad’s social context. These opening scenes make it clear that no woman entered a Magdalen laundry without the knowing, if passive, complicity of a family member, an employer, a neighbor, or a friend in her disappearance from the community. Patriarchal Society The Magdalene Sisters indicts familial culpability as well as a wider patriarchal social politics. More specifically, it seeks to criticize the discourse of Irish masculinity for betraying women confined in the nation’s Magdalen laundries. Patriarchal power structures and gender inequality are played out through the representation of sexuality, morality, and capitalist labor exploitation. The film signals how Irish society, men in particular, benefited from these institutions’ existence and underscores the societal inertia that adamantly refused to question their raison d’être. To remain profitable, Magdalen laundries relied on a steady supply of dirty linen. Such sources of income were secured, in part, from large church and state institutions, including hospitals, prisons, and

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boarding schools. But the laundries also solicited business from the nation’s upper- and middle-class families that never inquired as to who performed the actual labor (see, e.g., Dunne 2002–3, 74–82). The Magdalene Sisters again confronts its audience with such collaboration through a series of searing turns in its narrative. These focus on the young laundry apprentice, Brendan, who together with his older colleague transports society’s soiled linen and picks up neatly packaged bundles of clean linen for redelivery to their owners. Brendan’s opening comment, “They’re all hookers and whores that work in here,” and his colleague’s response, “You don’t look at them, you don’t talk to them,” betrays Irish society’s justification for the imprisonment and isolation of the Magdalen’s population as women guilty of sexual deviancy. And although he adopts the contemptuous attitude of the Irish male toward someone like Bernadette who “likes to give it up to the lads, likes to take the knickers off,” Brendan feels no moral constraint against offering her “two shillings if you suck my cock.” One irony, of course, is that money holds little currency in Bernadette’s world. Moreover, her virtual enslavement is emphasized, again ironically, by Brendan’s naive assumption that the inmates receive payment for their labor. The only currency available to Bernadette, and thus the only means of persuading Brendan to help her escape, is her body. Already sexualized by Brendan as “hooker” and “whore,” she trades on the only resource afforded her by Irish masculinity (see fig. 5.2). Brendan’s refusal to defy the nuns’ power in society raises the awareness of the gender inequality driving Mullan’s narrative. Whereas Bernadette is brutally punished by having her head shaved for her attempted escape, Brendan holds on to his job without penalty or punishment. Mullan’s attention to a series of male culprits in the film—including cousins, fathers, brothers, lovers, and priests—underscores how Irish discourses of sexual immorality elided male culpability and revictimized female victims. The Magdalen—both the institution and the appellation—marked the women as sexually deviant and thus denied them legal protections supposedly afforded to individual citizens of the state (see, e.g., O’Brien 1998, 186–89). Indeed, the film’s conclusion points to the mass-produced washing machine newly available in 1960s Ireland rather than to any dramatic transformation in public or political opinion as undermining these institutions.7

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Figure 5.2. Bernadette trades for her freedom with the only currency afforded her by Irish masculinity. Reproduced with permission from Element/ Temple Films.

The State In addition to exposing social complicity in the Magdalen abuses, Mullan’s film targets the long but as yet unwritten history of state and communal collusion in their operation. The film’s Corpus Christi procession scenes encapsulate state complicity, as members of An Garda Síochána escort the Magdalen penitents through the public streets. This sequence replicates an archival photograph allegedly depicting Magdalens from the Gloucester Street asylum parading down Dublin’s Sean McDermott Street in the 1960s before community onlookers (see fig. 5.3).8 Mullan’s replication in his film of this archival photograph functions as evidence against the claims that women voluntarily entered these institutions. If, as the state maintains, the Magdalen asylums were private religious institutions outside political control, why were the nation’s police used to enforce a form of imprisonment inconsistent with the judicial and constitutional rights afforded all Irish citizens?9 The historical photograph represents a striking instance of Mullan’s search for historical accuracy; it again underscores how evidence of

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Figure 5.3. Magdalen women from the Gloucester Street asylum parade down Sean MacDermott Street, Dublin, in a Corpus Christi procession. Date and provenance unknown. Reproduced with permission from Terry Fagan.

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state involvement was always available in the cultural archive but remained largely ignored. The film’s Corpus Christi procession through the bunting-decorated streets of a small country town displays the open secret of the penitents’ very public humiliation. As they move along the procession route, the four protagonists’ enjoyment at escaping the convent walls turns to shame as their facial expressions acknowledge how their temporary visibility is little more than a spectacle signaling the nun’s spiritual service to the wider community. This public humiliation also serves as a warning to the female onlookers, whose avoidance of direct eye contact with the inmates betrays an awareness of the same fate awaiting any woman who transgresses society’s sexual mores. The outdoor religious ceremony at the procession’s conclusion implodes the open secret previously enacted on the town’s streets. Here Mullan confronts audiences with their own inaction in the face of selfevident injustice, specifically, Crispina’s sexual abuse at the hands of the parish priest, Father Fitzroy. Mullan once more adapts historical evidence to frame these scenes, conflating a historic film-loving priest with the testimony of at least two of the participants in Sex in a Cold Climate (O’Flynn 2004, 49–50). In the scene of Father Fitzroy’s unmasking, Mullan takes his fictional account one step further to show how taking action against such abuse entails its own risks. Margaret both witnesses and takes action against Father Fitzroy; she instructs Crispina that Fitzroy “is not a man of God,” and she seeks Crispina’s revenge by laundering the priest’s clothes with a poisonous weed.10 Revenge seems assured when Father Fitzroy frantically disrobes and runs naked from the altar, exposing his tormented flesh. But even as the viewer, following Margaret’s lead, revels in the abuser’s public ridicule, the revenge backfires. The poisonous sores on Crispina’s thighs also betray Fitzroy’s latest sexual assault. Standing isolated and alone, Crispina remains victimized even as she impugns her attacker by shouting, “You are not a man of God!” (see fig. 5.4). The painstaking extension of this scene—Crispina repeats her accusation twenty-five times—emphasizes the contrasting silence and shocked paralysis of the other penitents, the nuns, the police, and members of the local community. As the camera pans their dismayed faces, the interruption to the ritual of the mass by the priest’s self-exposure appears so unfathomable that the congregation can neither assimilate the disrup-

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Figure 5.4. The wider community may choose not to respond or act on Crispina’s testimony, but neither can they silence her adamant repetitions, “You are not a man of God!” Reproduced with permission from Element/ Temple Films.

tion nor imagine any adequate response. Mullan’s camera again implicates the community for its willful blindness, suggesting that the witnesses to injustice existed but stood impassively by, as paralyzed as the film’s congregation awaiting a reinstated order. In this scene, the ritual of the Catholic mass, with its scripted responses, like the communal social rituals around traditional music in the opening scene, cannot fully disguise the ideological hypocrisy of the state. Yet even this most scandalous interruption of the Eucharist brings no change; despite Father Fitzroy’s crime, the church prevails. Crispina’s responsorial denunciation, “You are not a man of God,” cribbed from Margaret and inspired by Christina Mulcahy’s survivor testimony, stings the conscience of the contemporary Irish viewer because it remains unacknowledged onscreen. Although Crispina is the most direct agent for Mullan’s critique, like Margaret in the film’s opening scene, she, not her attacker, is punished. Under cover of darkness, Sister Bridget arranges for Crispina’s transfer to Mount Vernon’s hospital for the mentally insane. Knowing that the

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local community and the state’s police force have witnessed evidence of clerical sexual abuse and chosen to look the other way, Sister Bridget can guard against potential scandal with impunity. The vulnerable are simply hidden away. Ultimately, Mullan suggests that to question Irish society’s open secrets was to question the very basis on which the postindependence state came to be constructed.11

SECTION 2 The Magdalene Sisters establishes a much broader canvas of culpability than its popular critical reception has recognized and thereby challenges families, the public, and the state to acknowledge and provide redress for victims and survivors. For the film to achieve this broader impact, however, Mullan had to employ a form that would maximize circulation of his account of past injustice. Consequently, the film’s attempts at recuperating a historical record and representing survivor testimony frequently collide with the director’s mandate to orchestrate a relatively mainstream, commercially successful, feature-length film. Operating on a terrain where fiction and fact overlap, The Magdalene Sisters raises questions concerning its accuracy and authenticity. By privileging survivor testimony from Sex in a Cold Climate as the framing device for the script, Mullan’s film replicates the critical shortcoming of Steve Humphries’s earlier documentary, namely, the decision neither to solicit nor to incorporate the religious orders’ version of the Magdalen story. Significantly, the film fails to explore a crucial irony of this history—that it was abuse committed by one group of Irish women against another, in a society and during a time when women’s agency was subject to a patriarchal church and state oppression. Mullan’s film prejudices the on-screen portrait of the nuns. This bias was repeated in the critical response to the film: both present the nuns as the primary agents of abuse and, by implication, Irish nuns as singularly responsible for the historic abuse of women in the laundries. The remainder of this chapter considers how the genre of popular film contributed to this partial critical understanding. The film’s dramatic machinery, that is, its reliance on the use of stereotypes, melodrama, and moral simplification, obscures and even undermines the complexity of Mullan’s broader social critique. Here I want to reinstate that complexity

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by exposing contemporary society’s willingness to scapegoat the Catholic Church for institutional abuses in the nation’s past. To counter this tendency, I contextualize the film’s representation of religious vocations in postindependence Ireland in relation to the society from which they emerged. Villains The Magdalene Sisters reduces most of the nuns on-screen to mere stereotype. As the villains of the piece, it is enough that they appear stupid, avaricious, and sadistic in turn. At no time does the viewer sense these women’s personal feelings or motivations. The scene in which Sister Clementine and Sister Jude humiliate the penitents by having them strip naked to judge various aspects of their physical anatomy owes much to Bridget Young’s account of her childhood experience as a resident of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd’s industrial school attached to their convent’s Limerick Magdalen. In Humphries’s documentary, Young suggests that nuns “liked” to look at young girls’ bodies during their weekly bath time (see chap. 4; Sex in a Cold Climate 1998). The film incorporates this testimony into the representation of the adult Magdalen women and thereby conflates two different incarcerated populations in order to sensationalize its critique in terms of a speculative and sublimated lesbian sexuality. Whereas reviewers of the film seldom fail to foreground this scene, survivors who have seen the film cast doubt on its veracity (McGarry 2002b; Gibbons 2003). Mullan’s invention of this moment of melodrama jeopardizes the authenticity of other, factbased scenes in the film. The portrayal of Sister Bridget, the convent’s tyrannical and heavyhanded mother superior, betrays the director’s ambivalent relation to the demands of history and entertainment. Representing Sister Bridget as irrational highlights her aberrant individuality, and through such a characterization Mullan enables a reading of her abuse as anomalous and therefore unrepresentative.12 Such a characterization encourages contemporary audiences to evade a systemic critique of Magdalen institutions, one that makes evident the range of social, political, and cultural forces implicated in the abuse of the penitents. Sister Bridget’s melodramatic rhetoric as she forces the shorn and bloodied Bernadette to look in the mirror reduces the nun to an unconvincing mouthpiece of

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the hegemonic order she embodies: “Open your eyes girl . . . open them, I want you to see yourself as you really are, now that your vanity’s gone and your arrogance defeated, you’re free, free to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, so now you can look at your soul, find that which is good and decent and offer it up to God, then and only then will you find salvation.” The camera emphasizes the spectacle of the nun’s violence; Sister Bridget’s image is captured precisely in the bruised and bloodied retina of Bernadette’s eye (Murphy 2004, 11–12). Whereas this troubling scene—again based on survivor testimony (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998) —might provide the film’s emotional climax, its melodramatic oversimplification risks undermining the director’s goals. Mullan’s film moves beyond such stereotyping in depicting the entanglements of the nuns’ enterprise with secularized capitalism, specifically, the economic exploitation of their charges. As she compulsively counts rolls of banknotes and sifts through stacks of invoices, Sister Bridget is caught in a moment of political and economic transition: she negotiates the change, for example, from biscuit tins to a metal safe to secure the laundry’s profits.13 Perched on top of Sister Bridget’s newly acquired safe sits a portrait of John F. Kennedy, who was welcomed triumphantly as the embodiment of modern Catholic accomplishment during his official state visit to Ireland in 1963. This talisman cements the connection between the laundry’s inevitable modernization and the ensuing disorientations attending the transition to a more secular and transnational social and economic order. Likewise, she arranges for Father Fitzroy to bless the laundry’s newly installed electric dryers in an effort to assimilate traditional and industrialized means of production. However, here the film encodes the demise of Sister Bridget’s power; the technology she celebrates will make redundant the very workers she exploits. Mullan’s film implies, therefore, that a progressive and industrialized Irish society is unavoidable, even as it resists equating modernization with emancipation. Capitalist exploitation, like other forms of patriarchal social control, extends across and thereby connects the past and the present that Sister Bridget struggles to integrate. When confronted with the choice between the key to Bernadette’s and Patricia’s freedom or the key to the safe containing the laundry’s profits, Sister Bridget’s avarice wins out over her function as agent of the nation’s hegemonic social control. Her authority and vocation mask capital-

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ist exploitation in the guise of progress and piety. In the process, The Magdalene Sisters indicts contemporary Irish society: in differentiating progress from liberation, the film reenacts the challenges embodied by the October 1996 announcement from the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge that they were closing Dublin’s last Magdalen laundry because it was no longer commercially viable (Culliton 1996; O’Kane 1996). Coming in the midst of Celtic Tiger Ireland’s newfound economic and cultural confidence, the revelation that a community of forty women still worked in the laundry anticipated what the film seems at pains to point out: the state’s uneven development in the past and in the present (Gibbons 2002, 96). Vocations Mullan’s film is vulnerable to the pressures of popular representation that simplifies and thus naturalizes the cultural past represented on-screen. Genre, in this sense, runs the risk of shoring up the status quo—duplicating in the film’s entertainment value the conservative effects of other popular forms such as the traditional music used in the early wedding scene. Just as the film’s opening scene subverts the family’s use of such music, Mullan similarly complicates the representation of the nuns so as to redeploy a more dissident reading latent in the film’s critique. I argue, in fact, that The Magdalene Sisters contributes to a broader understanding of Ireland’s female religious in their specific cultural context, and does so without condoning the abuse committed by individual members or excusing the hierarchy and religious superiors who concealed that abuse. This rereading draws on the implied gap between the rhetoric of religious vocation and the reality of religious life in the on-screen convent. But exposing this gap is not the film’s only goal. Mullan also challenges the viewer to acknowledge and explain such a discrepancy; again, as with the music, the audience must work to decipher this more complex terrain and thus become active in the representation. The film challenges viewers to discover the parallel between the discourse of religious vocations in postindependence Ireland and the nation’s hegemonic forces of social control, such as family, patriarchal society, and state, that defined women primarily by their service in the home—service in the domestic home, of course, but also service in the religious home.14 Extending the possibilities of

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Mullan’s cultural representation in this manner disrupts contemporary society’s ability to scapegoat the church for past institutional abuse and thereby evade its own complicity in this aspect of the nation’s history. The film offers one pivotal sequence through which to dramatize the corruption of the nuns’ religious vocation. Sister Bridget’s only moment of self-deprecating humor, the solitary occasion when we see this nun as a human being rather than as a villain, comes on Christmas Day when, through the good graces of the visiting archbishop and philanthropic businessman Mr. Lannigan, the penitents are permitted to watch a film (see fig. 5.5).15 Momentarily humanized, Sister Bridget introduces the movie by declaring her “secret love” of “the fillums [sic],” before reverting to character and warning against the moral ambiguity surrounding all forms of popular culture in postindependence Irish society. Only the archbishop’s personal imprimatur vouchsafes that the movie is not representative of contemporary cinema that has “gone the way of the devil like so much of the modern world.”16 As it turns out, the choice of film—Leo McCarey’s classic Hollywood treatment of America’s Catholic Church, The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), starring Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman in the title roles of Father O’Malley and Sister Benedict — proves more troubling than the archbishop realizes. The incorporation of the 1945 film self-consciously embodies the dangers inherent in popular representations of cultural pasts. The American film centers on the fate of a young teenage girl, Patsy Gallagher, who is not that different from the young women in Mullan’s film. Like the Magdalen institution, St. Mary’s convent in McCarey’s film props up the respectable character of the Gallagher family against attacks from middle-class social prejudices.17 Offering a series of intercut scenes and voice-overs juxtaposing the American film and his own, Mullan also cuts in shots of the audience, revealing a precise seating arrangement that reflects the hierarchies of the Irish convent community. The visiting dignitaries, the community of nuns, and the more compliant and institutionalized Magdalen women face the screen. Meanwhile, the three remaining protagonists, Margaret, Patricia, and Bernadette, sit on the periphery of the main audience, gaining a sidelong view of both the projection screen and the larger community (see fig. 5.5). In effect, these three women become an audience within the audience, and in turn they guide the viewer toward Mullan’s critique. As the larger community greets the opening credits of The Bells of St. Mary’s with enthusiasm

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Figure 5.5. The seductive sentimentality that works through popular media buttresses the nuns’s absolute power. Reproduced with permission from Element/ Temple Films.

and applause, Margaret, Rose, and Bernadette’s tentative reaction tellingly signals the contradiction about to be enacted. Their response models for Mullan’s audience the need to resist the seductive powers of popular cultural representation and its distortion of complex social realities. Mullan employs The Bells of St. Mary’s to realize and thereby evaluate the gap between the rhetoric of religious vocation, embodied with quasi-angelic presence by Sister Benedict (played by a luminous Ingrid Bergman), and the reality of religious life, embodied physically by Sister Bridget (played by a shrill Geraldine McEwan). In the first scene from McCarey’s film, Sister Benedict embraces a distraught Patsy Gallagher as she gently dissuades the young girl from entering religious life: “You don’t become a nun to run away from life, Patsy; it’s not because you’ve lost something, it’s because you’ve found something.” Here

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Mullan juxtaposes the fictional mother superior, who challenges Patsy to engage in a more mature interrogation of her stated vocation, and the Magdalen’s religious community, whose intent faces betray the contradiction between their professed vocation and the inhumane treatment meted out hourly to the women in their care. For the three protagonists, the Magdalen nuns personify the antithesis of this cinematic ideal. Looking directly at Sister Bridget, the faces of the three young women, angry, disillusioned, and skeptical in turn, register the corruption of the on-screen archetype. In the process, they underscore McCarey’s popular Hollywood representation as little more than an alienating fiction. At stake here is something more than an American representation of Catholic institutional benevolence annotating its corrupt Irish equivalent (Murray 2004). Rather, Mullan’s juxtaposition of the two reverend mothers exposes the seductive sentimentality that works through popular media to buttress the nuns’ absolute power. McCarey’s idealized nun, for all her difference from Mullan’s brutal Magdalen superior, reinforces the church’s unconditional authority in the Ireland on display. Popular culture, thus, is far from innocent entertainment. Mullan’s use of the cinematic ideal exposes a problem at the heart of Irish religious vocations. Sister Benedict’s counsel to young Patsy Gallagher contradicts the dominant discourse of religious vocations. Vocations were popularly envisioned as quasi-spontaneous phenomena, what one commentator characterizes as a young woman feeling “a hand laid upon her head and hear[ing] an unearthly voice saying ‘Come follow me’ ” (O’Faolain 1996).18 In Mullan’s film, Sister Bridget personifies the impulsive vocation; in introducing McCarey’s film, she recalls how she abandoned the desire to be “a cowboy” because “fortunately, God gave me the calling.” The divinely inspired calling can, as Mullan’s film makes abundantly clear, result in the perverse corruption of spirituality that Sister Bridget and the Magdalen institution have come to represent. By interpolating The Bells of Saint Mary’s in his film, Mullan betrays the relationship between the discourse of religious vocations and postindependence Ireland’s nativist politics.19 As Yvonne McKenna argues with respect to women entering religious life at the time, “Catholicism became one of the most important ways of defining what it meant to be Irish” (2003, 299; see also McKenna 2006). The Magda-

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lene Sisters undermines the discourse of religious vocations, particularly its cultivation of female vocations, by exposing its role in the exploitation of religious women who served not only the church but also their families and the state (MacCurtain 1995, 1997). For much of the twentieth century, Catholic vocations were intricately connected with a family’s upward mobility and social aspirations. Having a priest, nun, or religious brother in the family conferred status and respectability on the home. Moreover, a vocation typically endeared a young woman to her parents by signifying the family’s social and religious conformity and prominence within parish life; it also provided opportunities for advancement to younger siblings (Magray 1998, 32–45, 74–86; McKenna 2003, 296). Entering the convent, moreover, enabled young women to avoid the precarious navigation of the nation’s discourse of sexual morality, a morality offering marriage as the only acceptable vehicle for human sexuality and holding women responsible for all transgressions of societal proscriptions. In addition, it relieved young women of the burden of motherhood (the role ordained for them under the constitution), a burden they witnessed their own mothers struggle under (Clear 2000, 46–67). Becoming a nun seemed like a safe and secure option when the alternatives for women were few—and fraught with potential dangers. The cultivation of vocations also served society in general while bolstering the hierarchy’s control over much of the nation’s institutional infrastructure. As recent scholarship suggests, by the 1950s most of the great nineteenth-century religious orders, founded on a genuine sense of spiritual idealism, had been reduced to servicing a patriarchal church and state hierarchy by, for example, running schools and hospitals and managing county homes, industrial and reformatory schools, and Magdalen asylums (MacCurtain 1995, 1997).20 The intense cultivation of Catholic vocations also signified the nativist aspirations of a newly independent nation. The first five decades after Irish independence in 1922 witnessed the emergence of what historians now refer to as Ireland’s spiritual empire: an ever-expanding network of Irish religious orders dedicated to establishing a worldwide network of Catholic missionaries (Hogan 1990; Murphy 2000; Kenny 2004, 112–22). The nation’s newly expanded spiritual empire relied exclusively on the cultivation of new vocations at home (Kenny 2000, 98–115).

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CONCLUSION The Magdalene Sisters powerfully illuminates contemporary Irish society’s obligation to the survivors of the nation’s Magdalen institutions. It courageously pans the camera lens out and documents the collusion among, and thereby establishes the culpability of, church, state, family, and community in maintaining the open secret of the laundries and the abuse of thousands of women confined therein. Irish society has yet to acknowledge its obligation or admit its culpability. This chapter challenges interpretations of the film that exclusively indict Ireland’s Catholic Church for the scandal depicted on screen. As demonstrated in The Magdalene Sisters, religious life entailed its own risks. There were no guarantees that a newly professed nun would be sent overseas to work in Africa or Asia. Similarly, possessing the talents and intelligence that might suggest a teaching or a nursing role in no way guaranteed such a posting. More likely, a member of an Irish religious order would find herself caring for children in an industrial school, managing the kitchen at the local county home, or confined to work at the Magdalen asylum.21 By exposing the gap between the rhetoric and reality of religious vocations, Mullan critiques the nation’s patriarchal church and state politics. His film reveals how both communities of women—the sinners and the saintly—operate in relation to external national, societal, and familial forces. By enacting this broader cultural complicity, the film demands a more complex response than simply making the church a scapegoat for past institutional abuses.

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CHAPTER

6

Monuments, Magdalens, Memorials Art Installations and Cultural Memory

The question “What does working through the past mean?” requires explication. . . . In this usage “working through the past” does not mean seriously working upon the past, that is, through a lucid consciousness breaking its power to fascinate. On the contrary, its intention is to close the books on the past and, if possible, even remove it from memory. The attitude that everything should be forgotten and forgiven, which would be proper for those who suffered injustice, is practiced by those party supporters who committed the injustice. Theodore W. Adorno, The Meaning of Working Through the Past (1998)

O

n 20 April 1996 a small crowd of about thirty people gathered in St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, for the unveiling of a plaque attached to a park bench to commemorate countless Irish women who lived and died in the nation’s Magdalen asylums dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century (fig. 6.1; “Magdalen Women Plaque Unveiled” 1996). Set on a small metal plate against a background of sculpted faceless heads, the inscription reads, “To the women who worked in the Magdalen laundry institutions and the children born to some members of

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Figure 6.1. The Magdalen Memorial Bench, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. Photograph by and reproduced with permission from Robert Savage.

those communities—reflect here upon their lives” (fig. 6.2). In death, many of these women were denied the common dignity of having their family names carved on a tombstone.1 Postindependence Ireland’s fixation on moral and social respectability dictated that they remain as anonymous in death as they were in life. Finally, in a 1990s Celtic Tiger Ireland bubbling with newfound economic prosperity and cultural confidence, the nation’s Magdalen women were accorded a public, if still not personal, memorial. The plaque and park bench, itself dating from the late Victorian era, now serves as the only national monument to this community of women and their place in the nation’s history.2 The Magdalen Memorial Committee coordinated the St. Stephen’s Green event: they lobbied the Office of Public Works for permission

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Figure 6.2. The Magdalen Memorial Plaque, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. Photograph by and reproduced with permission from Robert Savage.

to erect a monument, they organized the commission and production of the plaque, and they arranged the unveiling ceremony.3 Although a statement was requested from the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, nothing was forthcoming, and neither the Catholic hierarchy nor the various religious orders that operated the laundries were represented at the ceremony. The committee then invited President Mary Robinson to perform the unveiling. Long identified as a lawyer who championed constitutional rights for an array of minority communities in Irish society,

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Robinson recognized the monument as making a “historic” statement (O’Kane 1996; Culliton 1996; Gallagher 1996). Erected in a public and historically significant location, this memorial to the most marginalized Irish women would now join the pantheon of other monuments in St. Stephen’s Green, including those signifying Ireland’s participation in the British Empire (e.g., the Dublin Fusiliers Arch), as well as monuments to the great figures of Irish political and cultural nationalism, including Theobald Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Constance Markievicz, James Clarence Mangan, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce (Commissioners of Public Works 1980; Whelan 2003b; Kilfeather 2005). The Memorial Committee’s attention to the story of the Magdalen laundries and their role in the nation’s architecture of containment acted as an important and formidable corrective to years of secrecy and silence. The Magdalen memorial did not materialize in a vacuum; it represents the culmination of a three-year campaign in response to a specific event. In August 1993 family members learned that the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge were planning to exhume the bodies of a reported 133 women who died while still institutionalized at the High Park Magdalen asylum in Drumcondra. The land on which the graveyard sat was to be sold to a real estate developer to make way for a housing development. Having fallen into debt, partly as a result of speculative investments in the global stock market, the religious order was forced to part with the twelve-acre site in order to realize the requisite shortfall in funds (O’Toole 1993).4 The women’s bodies, interred anonymously between 1866 and 1984, were to be exhumed and cremated and the ashes reburied, again anonymously, in small individual urns stacked on top of each other in a double plot at Glasnevin Cemetery (fig. 6.3; O’Kane 1993; O’Morain 1993, 10). In an uncanny repetition of the past, the Magdalen women still living at the High Park convent were denied permission to attend the reburial services for their fellow inmates because, as an employee of the religious order told the first meeting of the Magdalen Memorial Committee, “We felt these women would be abused by the press” (O’Morain 1993, 10). The irony of the situation was not lost on Ms. Margo Kelly, a daughter of one of the former Magdalens: “Yesterday, the Catholic Church had an opportunity to begin to make amends. But the same veil of silence that put those women away in the first place was still there. Those of us separated from our mothers feel particular anger and grief” (O’Morain 1993, 10). The state’s official record for all these

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Figure 6.3. The Glasnevin Cemetery Magdalen plot, Dublin. Reproduced with permission from Justice for Magdalenes. Photograph by Hugh Smith.

human remains, the register of graves located at Glasnevin Cemetery, reads: “Box 114—unknown; Box 119—unknown; Box 226—unknown” (O’Kane 1996).

M E M O RY

AND

H I S T O RY

IN

1990S IRELAND

The St. Stephen’s Green monument constitutes a striking instance of what Kevin Whelan terms the collapse of a specific “postcolonial version of identity” that has taken place in Ireland over the last quarter of the twentieth century. In a recent essay on the politics of postcolonial memory, Whelan argues that “within the compressed span of three generations . . . Irish people have discarded a double set of

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imposed identities—colonial and nationalist” (2003, 94).5 From Whelan’s perspective, the reified command culture of the postindependence state, a hegemony distinguished by its application of a “green veneer to disguise the awkward grain of Irish history,” dissolved in the face of the internationalization of capital, the impact of global communications, rapid social transformations, the creation of an extensive underclass, and shifting gender roles (2003, 94). A movement to overcome the “malady of history” bequeathed by Ireland’s colonial past coincided with these social and political transformations, a movement Whelan defines as the “rememorative” version of history, or the attempt to write back in that which has been erased or submerged. In writing the story of Ireland’s Magdalen women onto the monumental narrative of St. Stephen’s Green, a space encoded with both the colonial and the nationalist version of Irish history, the memorial also clarifies the distinction between “society” and “community” remembrance. Joep Leerssen defines society remembrance as “state-sanctioned public commemoration,” invoking “a conservative ideal of social harmony” and “an ‘official’ version of history.” Community remembrance, on the other hand, he describes as “sub-elite and demotic, carried largely by the local or small-scale communities” (2001, 215). For Leerssen, community remembrance is indispensable to shoring up the collective will “not to forget,” which persists not by officially instituted public landmarks but by “traditionary renewal, self-repetition, and re-enactment” (2001, 215). In Ireland, where the experience of past trauma is an important part of the contemporary writing of history, Leerssen’s comments on the problems posed for historians by community remembrance become especially pertinent: The very praxis of community remembrance is an act of piety, salvaging respect for the acts and experiences of earlier generations from the entropy of the passage of time. But the fact remains that the sense of the past as transmitted through such channels is not easily disproved. Indeed historians who set out to disprove the historical awareness transmitted in community remembrance place themselves in a quixotic and impossible position; for it cannot be the task of academic scholarship to direct the patterns of culture at large. (2001, 219)

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The relationship between memory and history reemerged as a dominant concern in Irish Studies through the official commemorations attending the sesquicentenary of the Great Irish Famine in the mid-1990s.6 The official three-year commemoration witnessed a diverse range of government-funded initiatives, including traveling lecture series, television documentaries, academic conferences, publications, and the dedication of monuments and memorials. Local and communal commemorative groups supplemented the state effort by organizing candlelight processions to former workhouses, marking sites believed to be famine graveyards, and commissioning sculptures, paintings, and monuments remembering Ireland’s famine dead. Academics too responded to the commemorative impulse. Indeed, Ian McBride, in the introduction to his History and Memory in Modern Ireland, argues that “commemorative rituals have become historical forces in their own right” (2001, 2).7 R. F. Foster, one of Ireland’s foremost revisionist historians, was scathingly critical of famine commemorative activities, claiming that the language of popular psychotherapy replaced that of historical analysis: “posttraumatic stress disorder stalked the land, buried ‘memories’ were indiscriminately exhumed, and ‘survivor guilt’ was ruthlessly appropriated from Holocaust studies and exhibited in the market place” (2002, xv). Foster rejects as misconception, then, the belief that commemorative events could effect some sort of nationwide empathy responding to repressed cultural guilt or could produce a therapeutic catharsis of traumatic past events. Rejecting the therapeutic model, he insists that only further historical analysis can affect understanding of the famine and its cultural legacies. Literary critics too, including Edna Longley (2001), Niall Ó Ciosáin (2001), and David Lloyd (2000), refuted the “therapeutic” discourse pervading discussions of famine commemorations. For Lloyd, the therapeutic model is grounded in a mode of historicization that requires, in Freudian terms, “mourning” rather than “melancholia.”8 Lloyd thus highlights the similarity between therapeutic discourses on the famine’s effects (from which “recovery” is seen to be required) and the sociopolitical argument (often defining itself through the refutation of “famine trauma”) that views commemoration of the famine as a means of evasion or indulgence.9 Consequently, and troublingly for him, the “function of a public period of commemoration becomes that of letting the

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dead slip away without the trace of a wake behind them” (2000, 221). Lloyd concludes that “constantly underlying this urgent discourse was not only the analogy between individual trauma and recovery and a sociohistorical curing, but a distinctly developmental narrative: if we could leave our dead and their suffering behind and overcome our melancholy, we could at last shake off the burden of the past and enter modernity as fully formed subjects” (2000, 221). Margaret Kelleher’s influential essay, “Hunger and History, Monuments to the Great Irish Famine,” responds to Foster, Lloyd, and other detractors of the therapeutic paradigm. She accuses these critics of failing to posit “an alternative” discourse, one built on a nontherapeutic relationship with the past and structured around the notion of survival or living on (2002, 252). Kelleher borrows from Ricoeur’s “Ethics of Memory,” specifically, the third level of ethical memory, the “ethico-political,” to carve out a future-oriented relationship between memory and history. According to Ricoeur, “the duty to remember consists not only in having a deep concern for the past, but in transmitting the meaning of past events to the next generation. The duty, therefore, is one which concerns the future. . . . It is a duty, thus, to tell” (1999b, 9–10). Kelleher thus reclaims the presentness of past events in acts of Irish commemoration. She valorizes the truth-claim of memory, beyond its therapeutic or ideological layers. And she concludes with the conviction that “what ‘really happened’ ” must continue to concern us (2002, 271). What are the lessons to be learned from this debate regarding traumatic memory and history if we shift the focus from the official commemorative events associated with the famine to community efforts to memorialize Ireland’s Magdalen women? It is, I suggest, precisely the imperative of the presentness of past events, the duty to tell, and the ongoing need for action that links the two sorts of memorial. In an event that underscores these three imperatives, the unveiling of the St. Stephen’s Green Magdalen monument in April 1996 was followed a short five months later by a very different kind of announcement on the part of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge. As discussed in chapter 4, the following September the nuns announced that they would cease operations at their Gloucester Street Magdalen laundry just north of Dublin’s city center. Moreover, the religious sisters announced that with the close of Dublin’s last Magdalen asylum, the forty women still in residence would remain living there after the machines were turned off for

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the final time on October 25. Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, so recently memorialized as a thing of the past, rendered historic by no less than President Robinson, were suddenly and shockingly exposed as part of present-day Irish society. Moreover, the legacy of such institutions— forty women the eldest of whom was seventy-nine, the youngest in her forties—ruptured any neat notions about the pastness of history (O’Kane 1996; Culliton 2006). Three events—the 1993 exhumation, cremation, and reinterment; the 1996 unveiling of the monument to institutions deemed historic; and the subsequent revelations regarding the closure of Gloucester Street and its remaining residents—speak to the challenges posed by Ireland’s architecture of containment as it is remembered, retold, and memorialized in the present. A culturally progressive, economically vibrant, and increasingly Eurocentric Ireland was confronted on these separate occasions within a short three-year span with what Fintan O’Toole has called “a haunting image of a history that remains largely unwritten, a history that in being disturbed still has the power to disturb” (1993). Irish society was thereby forced to acknowledge something about its relationship to history, namely, that it cannot look simultaneously at the present and the past without disturbing the past itself. As both Leerssen (2001) and Lloyd (2000) intimate, memorials often function to contain the challenges posed by uncovered histories. In marking an event historical, they reinstate a safe distance between the past and the present, and sometimes leave a chasm of absent causality between the two. If the significance of the St. Stephen’s Green monument is the stamp of closure it gives to the past, then the announcement regarding Gloucester Street’s closure and the existence of its remaining residents signals the untenable nature of such a separation. Moreover, coming after the monument’s unveiling, these announcements only make transparent how attempts at containing the past, specifically, by repeating historical forgetfulness, help contemporary Irish society to contain the present by forgetting today’s outcasts, those newly marginalized communities excluded from and exploited by the Celtic Tiger phenomenon. As Luke Gibbons has recently suggested, “The capacity of a society to retrieve the memory of its own unacknowledged others—those who paid the price in different ways for its own rise to prosperity—is a measure of its ability to establish global solidarities with ‘the other’ without, both at home and abroad” (2002, 100).

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DIANE FENSTER’S SECRETS OF M AG DA L E N L AU N D R I E S ( 2 0 0 0 )

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Diane Fenster is an American artist based in San Francisco. She identifies her work as embodying “the hidden poetry of the ordinary, making visible what previously was hidden” (quoted in Kearns 2003).10 She first heard about Ireland’s Magdalen women from her husband, who had seen one of the documentaries on the laundry institutions aired on American television.11 She claims a resonance between the women’s confinement and certain experiences in her own childhood: “I felt confined by the structure of my family, in what was permissible and what was not, particularly around creativity. I wanted to address this artistically” (quoted in Holland 2000). Fenster’s contribution to the emerging narrative of Ireland’s Magdalen women is concerned with artistic expression rather than the established discourses of Irish identity politics. Irish historiography, with its concerns for documentation and authenticity, does not determine her visual retelling of the Magdalen story.12 The installation sits largely outside the concerns of nation and diaspora, church and state, or the recent debates regarding history and memory. Fenster, rather, offers an alternative narrative. Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries is a room-sized photography installation with digital sound environment (Fenster 2000b). The work creates a symbolic laundry space through the presence of numerous washtubs (fig. 6.4). Suspended from above and hanging into the individual tubs, a series of cotton bedsheets depict an array of overlapping photographic images. These include portraits of women as well as objects that betray their private thoughts and dreams. As Fenster explains: In my images these women live in a private world of desire, longing, and unreachable fulfillment, forced into a mundane ritual of service without pleasure or amenities. Their vitality and eros, bound by the superficial morality of the Church, reemerges as images on the sheets that they repetitiously wash, a reminder of their stained existence. They dreamed until the secret images were burned onto the sheets. (2000a)

Viewers journey through this labyrinth of swaying translucent sheets that are set in motion by the movement of visitors across the transformed

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Figure 6.4. Fenster’s symbolic laundry space, complete with washtubs and clothes pegs. Reproduced with permission from Diane Fenster.

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gallery space. The portraits appear and disappear as visitors walk around them, the images alternatively vanishing like the women lost in time or opening up each woman’s inner dream world. In this interaction, the sheets function both as material and immaterial objects, reminding the viewer of the body and the mind, evoking historic realities and private fantasy (Fenster 2000a). The installation comprises six distinct elements: sheets, buckets, double portraits, written text, images of iconic objects, and the accompanying sound track. The banal familiarity of warm bedsheets hanging by pegs as if from a clothesline is transformed into and thereby celebrated as the dreamscape of imagination and reverie.13 Although the Magdalen’s daily routine was drab and restricted, the women’s lives, as Fenster imagines them, were rich with individual desires. She draws on the physical intimacy of sheets: in sleep “they enfold the body, carry its warmth, desire, perfume, and wrap it in death” (Fenster 2000a). In the absence of bodies, these sheets invoke the imaginative release of desire. But where the sheets hang into or over antique washtubs and enamel buckets, their graceful movements are constrained, for the tubs are evidence of the women’s confinement and exploitation. Fenster’s installation steadfastly remains ambiguous: do the women’s dreams rise up out of the tubs in a triumph of the imagination, or does the endless reality of physical exertion disturb their imaginative escape? Three distinct images printed on each bedsheet further develop this tension between dreams and reality. Photographs resembling American mug shots underscore the women’s imprisonment, but Fenster softens this dehumanizing anonymity by posing her models to accentuate their highly personalized and idiosyncratic dream images.14 Yet other, darker images intrude. Above the portraits, each sheet displays two open-faced pages of written text from two 1875 copybooks once belonging to Isabella Morgan, a U.S. immigrant from Ireland. Purchased by the artist, these historic artifacts include duplicated letters addressed to “Dear Sister” and “Dear Brother” at home in Ireland that recount how Morgan recently discovered “true” religion and urge her family members in Ireland to do likewise. In the context of Fenster’s installation, Morgan’s discovery of religion in America undermines the imaginative reveries conveyed by the undulating sheets. Such proselytizing religious discourse, however, here invokes the “confines of the Church” and a repressive re-

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ligious dogma that justified the institutionalization of Magdalen women perceived as sexual deviants (Fenster 2003). Each bedsheet also incorporates an image floating over the copybook pages. These iconic objects the artist found and collected include children’s toys, domestic artifacts, and items relating to women’s fashion and modes of transportation. Symbolizing the Magdalen woman’s dream world, they suggest the possibility of imaginative liberation, that the women’s retreat into their inner fantasy lives offered them a survival mechanism, that “fantasy is sanctuary” (Fenster 2000b).15 The accompanying sound track adds a psychological fourth dimension to the installation. Produced by Fenster’s collaborator, Michael McNabb, the audio surrounds the viewer with the voices of four women speaking Irish.16 Seeming to be engaging in chitchat, they whisper, mutter, sigh, and giggle—plaintive and cheerful in turn—against a muted background sound of ocean waves. Among the conversational fragments, we discern snippets invoking separation: “Seo an dara bliann” (This is the second year), “An bhfuil sé ag teacht ar ais?” (Is he returning?), “Cad faoin uair dheireaneach a chonaic tú í?” (What about the last time you saw her?), and “Cén aois a bhfuil sí ?” (What age is she?). Despite their emphasis on betrayal and loss, these voices manage to interact in conversation and thereby convey the possibility of community. Thus the installation’s sound component starkly contrasts the silent and private isolation of the women’s dream world. These sounds, triggered as the viewer moves through the gallery, may be heard as a watery resonance, a secret communication across time released by the objects that were a focus of the women’s work (McNabb 2000). Unlike the monument erected by the Magdalen Memorial Committee in St. Stephen’s Green, Fenster’s Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries represents an act of personal commemoration, one that is closer to Leerssen’s “community” than to his “society” remembrance. The installation constitutes an act of commemoration in that it shores up the collective will not to forget, as it evokes women erased from the nation’s memory. Unlike the Stephen’s Green plaque, however, Fenster’s memorial is temporary rather than permanent, mobile rather than site-specific.17 Indeed, the installation’s transitory condition echoes the experience of the Magdalen women in ways that official and permanent sites of memory cannot. Unlike a metal plaque affixed to a park bench, Fenster’s act of

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commemoration is also a mutable work of art, lending itself to ongoing acts of interpretation. The installation reveals how art can re-present as well as represent, enact as well as speak for, an elided subject: Ireland’s community of Magdalen women. By positioning these women at the center of the installation, the artist makes visible that which previously remained hidden. Her installation demonstrates what Pierre Nora terms “a will to remember,” without fossilizing a version of Ireland’s past as a history that can be easily shed by Irish society today (1989, 19). As a “lieu de mémoire/site of memory,” this work also contributes to the creation of a growing “archive” of memory that protects against the erasure of historical traces (Nora 1989, 12). Finally, the installation’s truth-claim invites a particular set of responses from contemporary Ireland. Fenster’s Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries confronts her viewers with their own complicity; the work emphasizes rather than avoids Irish culpability for seeking to erase the nation’s past. Fenster mobilizes her critique by deploying a number of visual strategies but principally by her adoption of the prison mug shot pose, traditionally consisting of accompanying frontal and profile perspectives.18 This recurring motif suggests how for much of the twentieth century the nation’s Magdalen laundries functioned as an alternative to the state’s prison system. As one Magdalen survivor has stated, “I would have rather been down in the women’s jail. At least I would have gotten a sentence and I would have known when I was leaving” (“The Magdalen Laundries” 1999). Fenster’s mug shots conform to societal preconceptions, and thus she challenges an unspoken public perception of these women as criminals. Fenster’s critical stance toward this preconception is signaled by her deviation from mug shot conventions. For example, the subject is rarely centered in the frontal view (fig. 6.5),19 some crucial detail such as the ear or eyebrow is often missing in the profile shots (fig. 6.6),20 and some portraits offer two frontal images rather than one frontal and one profile (fig. 6.7).21 These pervasive irregularities—in particular, those in which the women avert their gaze by refusing to meet the viewer directly, eye-to-eye (fig. 6.8)22 —signal defiance of a genre that claimed total exposure of the subject. Representing the women as selfcontained survivors, the mug shots become portraits indicating the women’s agency and therefore ascribing subject identity and individuation to a population too easily and too often presumed to be passive and anonymous victims.

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In the portraits, Fenster reembodies Ireland’s Magdalen women and remakes them as individual female subjects through three additional strategies. First, the photographs insistently restore their femininity and sexuality, replacing the traditional drab and loosely fitting institutional garb associated with the Magdalen, on occasion, with lingerie and nightdresses (e.g., fig. 6.9).23 By invoking a female dream life afforded in sleep and contrasting that freedom with the enslavement signaled by the washtubs below, the artist refashions the strict code of modesty operating within the institutions. The frontal image of the woman’s torso in figure 6.9 suggests how Ireland’s Magdalen women, despite the religious order’s denial of their corporeality, could never be fully disembodied. The left hand portrait accentuates the active dream, the body in movement, the arm stretching above the head. The accompanying profile image provocatively positions the woman as cradling her own body: the right hand crosses and embraces her left shoulder, while the left arm hugs her lower abdomen. The posture intimates fantasy, selfcontainment, and a refusal of full exposure to the camera. The symbolic icon accompanying this portrait complements yet complicates this assertion of the body. The bed—denuded of its mattress, bed linen, and blankets — suggests a lost Eros, a denied sexuality, enforced on these women by their institutionalization. The cold, wooden frame and harsh steel springs accentuate that denial. In a further strategy of embodiment, Fenster uses images of the women’s hair to suggest both the institution’s deep unease with femininity and its desire to efface individuality. The religious orders traditionally equated long hair with excessive vanity, deemed sinful and contributing to the woman’s fall. The free-flowing, abundant, and unkempt hair throughout Fenster’s series of portraits (e.g., figs. 6.5, 6.10)24 —like the lingerie and nightdresses—invokes the individual’s selfhood in defiance of institutional attempts to suppress it. In stark contrast, however, figure 6.11 alludes to the common punishment of shaving women’s heads if they attempted escape or if they proved especially rebellious to the religious rule. The nuns believed this loss of hair further defeated the individual spirit, marking the culprit as unworthy and marginalizing her further within the penitent community. The image of the woman’s tightly cropped hair, shorn to the scalp, seems intimately related to the focus of her reverie: the stepladder icon, symbolic of a rebellious but perhaps futile desire to escape. Like the images of the motorcycle, the

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airplane, and the luggage, the ladder encodes the desire for motion, travel, and adventure, contrasting sharply with the rigidity and stagnating monotony of the Magdalen experience. These images undermine church and state goals to render the penitents passive before their fate. Resistance and defiance are suppressed by the harsh physical realities of the women’s lives in the laundry institutions. Fenster’s attention to anatomizing women’s hands, in particular, suggests the physical as well as psychological consequences of incarceration. Hands appear exaggeratedly swollen (fig. 6.6), gnarled (fig. 6.11), rough hewn (fig. 6.10), with veins raised and prominent (fig. 6.8), further evidence of the punishing nature of the women’s daily work. The exacting price of their drudgery is again communicated by hands that now support drooping heads (figs. 6.6, 6.12) and bodies that otherwise threaten to crumple, evidently weary and exhausted (figs. 6.8, 6.10). Indeed, these images betray how reality breaks through and intrudes on reverie, the only sanctuary for these women. In figure 6.13 the hand is presented in a protective posture, guarding against attack; even during sleep the woman anticipates or relives some physical or sexual assault in the supposedly safe refuge. Yet these hands also underscore the women’s ability to fight back, to commit acts of physical violence to ensure personal liberation or safety (fig. 6.14) and to protect against threatened punishment for acts of resistance (fig. 6.15). In these instances, the women’s hands appear to ward off the viewer’s intrusion, pushing us back, lashing out, and guarding against our entrance into their private space. Again, Fenster’s strategy of embodiment conveys agency and individual subject identity, even as it suggests violent punishment. In addition to embodying Ireland’s Magdalen women, the installation excavates the psychological terrain of unjust incarceration. Fenster’s collection of iconographic objects, symbolic of the women’s dreams and inner fantasies, powerfully and provocatively enhance this element of the work. Those icons related to children—the baby doll (fig. 6.16), the child’s rocking horse (fig. 6.15), and the infant’s dress and booties (fig. 6.8)—signify the women’s personal memories of childhood. These images also remind us that Magdalen penitents were often young girls, some little more than children, when first incarcerated. The icons’ antiquated appearance conveys a fossilized aspect, epitomizing the women’s

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sense of a childhood lost too soon. They also evoke the children born outside of marriage and surrendered to forced adoption, as well as the birth mother’s anxious fantasies of her lost baby. The icons serve as a fetishized substitute for the absent child, the unused baby clothing and toys alluding to the mother’s loss. Yet for the institutionalized birth mother they also signal the possibility of reunification with her baby: the dress and shoes must always stand ready, the toys always available. Once again Fenster’s installation invokes those dreams by which the Magdalen women survived incarceration. In contrast to the longed-for child, the icons associated with domesticity betray the women’s deep ambivalence about home and family. Because Ireland’s Magdalen women threatened to undermine the churchstate prescription of family and gendered respectability, they were made to disappear, removed involuntarily from their homes. But the many domestic artifacts imagined in the installation—the home itself (fig. 6.17), the bed (fig. 6.9), chair (fig. 6.7), kettle (fig. 6.18), and jug (fig. 6.14)— evoke a past family life. But yet again Fenster transforms traditional associations of Irish domesticity into icons signaling fragmentation, neglect, and loss: the bed’s mattress is missing, the chair offers little comfort, and the kettle and the jug appear tarnished. The artist represents the family home as abandoned; the front door is missing, the windows broken in. Weeds and bushes encroach, suggesting decay. This domestic space is troublingly ambiguous, shrouded in darkness and shadow. The ruined domicile intimates the invisible crimes—incest, infanticide, physical and/or sexual abuse—that undermine the domestic ideal. Such images conflate the imagined home and the Magdalen home, suggesting how Ireland’s political ideal of “the woman in the home” was propped up by institutions that served as repositories for citizens compromised by perceived sexual immorality. 25 Icons related to fashion suggest that such condemnation could be aroused by a young girl’s vanity, by the natural desire to display her physical beauty; they reveal how women in postindependence Ireland negotiated contradictory and conflicting constructions of femininity. The laced boots (fig. 6.6), the fan (fig. 6.10), and the mannequin (fig. 6.12) may well allude to the Magdalen women’s desire to control self-representation. But as icons of convention and conformity these objects also strike the viewer as ultimately oppressive. The fan modestly

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hides but also flirts. The boots—polished to a shine, laces decoratively tied, with two-inch heels—signal how Irish women were simultaneously expected to be laced up tight and objects of display. Such negotiations, moreover, were fraught with potential danger. The footwear, for example, recalls the state’s legal prohibitions against dance halls as centers of popular entertainment breeding licentious and immoral behavior. But as the Magdalen laundries suggest, the church-state patriarchy punished women alone for transgressing society’s moral proscriptions. Indeed, these institutions survived in twentieth-century Irish society, in part, to elide male responsibility for sexual relations while brandishing women as guilty for their own fall. These icons of fashion then invoke society’s abandonment of women deemed dangerous because they incited sexual passion and led men astray. Finally, Fenster’s window into the women’s psyches balances the iconography of loss and betrayal with images that evoke more intimate and individual aspirations.26 In the context of forced imprisonment, icons alluding to escape—luggage (fig. 6.19), motorcycle (fig. 6.5), ladder (fig. 6.11), and airplane (fig. 6.13)—suggest the women’s strongest personal aspirations. Once more, however, these icons are ambiguous. Most transparently, they symbolize the desire to be free, and like the ladder, they suggest the inability of the institutional regime to defeat the individual imagination. Yet because escape was so unavailable, the motorcycle, by contrast, suggests the remoteness of such fantasies. Moreover, these objects again confront the viewer with the women’s deep ambivalence about rejoining Irish society; liberation and reconciliation remain distinct and separate, for the psychological scars stemming from incarceration linger postrelease. The airplane, in particular, challenges the viewer to recognize the consequences of institutionalization for many Irish citizens. Notably, the plane faces away from the viewer, indicting us for silently colluding in the operation of these institutions; escape in this instance is from our gaze as much as it is from behind the convent’s walls. The plane also evokes how emigration long provided the silent pressure valve that removed previously institutionalized populations of Magdalens and residents of industrial and reformatory schools and mother and baby homes from the state. Moreover, Fenster’s iconic image extends from the specific history to a metaphor for related cultural practices. The plane reminds viewers, for instance, how

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some five thousand Irish women journey each year to England to obtain abortions that are constitutionally banned in the Republic of Ireland. On all these levels, the viewer is confronted with being part of a national problem. Fenster’s installation exposes such willful blindness—looking the other way or choosing not to see—as collusion, and in doing so, her work underscores Irish society’s complicity in the nation’s Magdalen institutions.

G E R A R D M A N N I X F LY N N , “ C A L L M E B Y M Y N A M E ” : REQUIEM FOR REMAINS UNKNOWN, 1889–1987 Diane Fenster approaches Ireland’s Magdalen laundries as an outsider. By doing so, she is perhaps better able to see and to expose the secrets confined behind the institutions’ walls. Although her installation offers a glimpse into the women’s psyches, she leaves these unnamed and unlabeled women their privacy. In a more overtly political and confrontational “extallation,” “Call Me by My Name”: Requiem for Remains Unknown, 1889–1987, Gerard Mannix Flynn acknowledges that the specificity of the Magdalen women’s buried histories demands to be told (fig. 6.20). Flynn, who is Irish and an adult survivor of Letterfrack industrial school, is actively committed to attaining political redress for fellow survivors of institutional child physical and sexual abuse.27 He raised his extallation at Dublin’s 8 Lower Leeson Street to coincide with Ireland’s presidency of the European Union in the first half of 2004.28 His work re-presents the High Park Magdalen women who were exhumed, cremated, and reinterred at Glasnevin cemetery in 1993 and memorialized at St. Stephen’s Green in 1996. Like Fenster, Flynn confronts the Irish public with the High Park Magdalen scandal but now by recasting the Glasnevin Cemetery headstone (see fig. 6.3) through a public and consciously political gesture. His extallation exposes the legal and ethical anomalies (e.g., missing death certificates, unknown identities, and unaccounted bodies) first revealed by Mary Raftery in the Irish Times in August 2003. Flynn calls attention to these contradictions and discrepancies, not in a cemetery on the periphery of society, but in the center of cosmopolitan Dublin, at a time when media interest was focused on the nation’s presidency of the

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European Union. With both its national and European agenda signaled by the Tricolor and European Union flags flying overhead, “Call Me by My Name”: Requiem for Remains Unknown disrupts what David Lloyd has referred to as the “current cultural and political tendencies in Ireland that are thrusting the country uncritically into European and transnational capitalist modernity” (2000, 222). Flynn’s commemoration— appropriating the nation’s official insignia, the Irish harp, and surrounding it with traditional signifiers of mourning, a black taffeta border, a black ribbon complete with red poppy, and black flag—deters contemporary Ireland’s easy passage “into the new world order” (Lloyd 2000, 222). Flynn’s extallation marks the gulf between Ireland’s transnational aspirations within a larger Europe and the as-yet-unsettled business of a national past, namely, the state’s unwillingness to account for women disappeared to the Magdalen laundries. The artist provocatively links the Magdalens to the other “residential institutions” run by Catholic congregations “on behalf of the Irish State,” and thus broadens the nation’s obligation to provide the same types of redress, reform, and reparation offered to adult survivors of industrial and reformatory schools (fig. 6.21). The unfinished business of the state, from Flynn’s perspective, implicates all of Irish society; the extallation challenges the people of Ireland, now citizens of Europe, to own the past and claim responsibility for the women—their mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, neighbors—lost behind convent walls. The installation’s four red plaques comprising 155 coffin nameplates attests to the nation’s act of deliberate forgetfulness. By publicly naming the women and by inscribing a select number of plates with “Remains Unknown,” Flynn underscores the conscious acts of abandonment in life and the callous disregard in death that denied these fellow citizens that most basic tenet of humanity, a name on a headstone and a final resting place. And the pun in his title is deliberately contentious, not only Remains Unknown denoting the lack of physical evidence but also Remains Unknown underscoring that even after all these years the full story of Ireland’s Magdalen women remains untold. The location of the extallation is particularly relevant to this discussion. Leeson Street is a major commuting thoroughfare, traversed by countless double-decker buses that regularly passed by Flynn’s artwork, its call to “bear witness” perhaps breaking through into the monotony of daily routine. The public nature of Flynn’s work sits in stark contrast to Fenster’s preoccupation with the inner workings of the women’s dream

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Figure 6.21. Gerard Mannix Flynn’s Extallation “Call Me By My Name”: Requiem For Remains Unknown, 1889– 1987. Reproduced with permission by Gerard Mannix Flynn. Http://www.manxproject.com.

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life. Immersed in the city’s bustling mobility and freedom of movement, Flynn’s chosen stage also differs from the static nature of Fenster’s women. Lower Lesson Street benefited from a significant infusion of transnational capital associated with the emergence of the Celtic Tiger economy. Indeed, the opening of a Conrad Hilton Hotel on Earlsfort Terrace in 1989 is often pointed to as signaling Dublin’s entry into the world of international finance. In exhibiting his extallation literally around the corner from this standard-bearer of global markets, the artist ironically recalls the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge’s speculative investments on the stock market that first necessitated the exhumation and reburial of High Park’s Magdalens. Leeson Street also runs into St. Stephen’s Green, and thus Flynn exhibited his artwork a short three-minute walk from the Memorial Committee’s park bench. Located outside the monumental narrative of the enclosed St. Stephen’s Green, however, Flynn’s act of commemoration privileges a public thoroughfare over a major tourist destination. Yet the proximity of the two memorials suggests how any act of commemoration can necessitate a subsequent one to recover, even correct, the omissions of the earlier attempt. Indeed, the temporary and unfixed nature of both Flynn’s and Fenster’s work suggests how acts of commemoration, at their best, are ongoing, each work testing the limits of representation, both consciously unfinished and incomplete. Leeson Street also abuts major state institutions, in particular, the Department of Foreign Affairs. The Irish government spent an estimated =C 60 million hosting the presidency of the European Union between January and June 2004, with numerous cultural and entertainment events taking place within a stone’s throw of Leeson Street, at, for example, the national concert hall, the national gallery, the national library, and Iveagh House. Given the increased international foot traffic, including visiting dignitaries and foreign bureaucrats, traveling in this area of Dublin throughout the duration of the presidency, Flynn’s extallation challenged the official image of a progressive and postnational society that the Irish government sought to project at the time (McConnell 2004). There is significance in the placement of Flynn’s “extallation” beyond ironic juxtapositions and embarrassing contradictions. Lady Arbella Denny established the first refuge for fallen women on Leeson Street

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in 1767; and Denny House, a later incarnation of that first Magdalen asylum, existed well into the past century. For much of the twentieth century, the Leeson Street area of Dublin was popularly associated with prostitution, one of the leading sources of Magdalen penitents throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Leeson Street is today the site of numerous wine bars and lap dancing clubs, places where predominantly eastern European female immigrants are exploited, a situation that recently led to calls for local government licensing and regulation. Ireland’s history of exploiting women, as Flynn’s work suggests, has its present-day variations. In all these ways, the placement of this extallation asks many different constituencies to bear witness, to acknowledge a history that is already well established and continually relevant to present-day realities. More than mere representation, beyond the symbolic, Flynn’s extallation seeks out the confrontational causeand-effect, or indexical, connections between Ireland today and Ireland yesteryear (Lydenberg 2003, 127 –33).

CONCLUSION Neither Diane Fenster nor Mannix Flynn make claims that their works of art enlighten viewers with a totalizing narrative of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries. Nor do they seek such a narrative. Both pieces, rather, offer a mixture of fact and fiction, image and text, politics and propaganda, resulting in imaginative works of fantasy, desire, and hope. Their narratives are discontinuous, full of gaps and silences. They tease out multiple meanings by placing fragments in shifting juxtapositions rather than fixed narrative sequence. Both artists self-consciously complicate their installations’ attempts at embodying the past: Fenster’s portraits are not fixed in paint on canvas, and Flynn’s nameplates expose but resist filling in the gaps of memory, remaining as deeply flawed as the Glasnevin headstone they represent. There is no body in either work of art, just disembodied voices and two-dimensional ghostly imprints; bodies are invoked and lost at the same time, just as Ireland’s Magdalen women are easily forgotten, it would seem, even at the very moment of remembrance and representation. The challenge, identified by both artists, seems to be how to commemorate without closure, how to

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effect a monument without fetishization, how to represent artistically without aestheticization. And yet both works leave a trace of forgotten memory and confront the viewer with the presence of the past by familiarizing us with the unfamiliar ghosts of Ireland’s Magdalen communities. The viewer’s gaze, no longer neutral or benign, becomes participatory and even complicit with the truth-claim of memory. Because they provoke the duty to tell and herald the continued need for action, Fenster’s and Flynn’s acts of commemoration are orientated not toward the past but toward the future.

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Conclusion History, Cultural Representation, . . . Action?

Forgiveness is not nebulous, unpractical and idealistic. . . . Amnesia is no solution. If a nation is going to be healed, it has to come to grips with the past. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1997

P

laced in the historical context I have outlined, cultural representations of the Magdalen laundries powerfully illuminate contemporary Irish society’s obligation to the survivors of the nation’s architecture of containment. They document the culpability of church, state, family, and community in maintaining the open secret of the laundries and the abuse of thousands of women confined therein. They compel the discerning viewer to move beyond evasion toward action on behalf of victims and survivors: action by way of acknowledging past injustice, action by way of effecting social change, and action by way of supporting calls for redress and reparations. Unlike the numerous social and political scandals over the past ten years—abuse in residential institutions, clerical pedophilia, widespread corporate and political corruption—cultural representations of the Magdalen story have yet to initiate an equivalent response: apologies, commissions of inquiry,

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official commemorations, appropriate monuments and memorials, or calls for reparations. Contemporary Irish society, newly enthralled with commemorating historical events and ensuring accountability for past injustices, remains curiously desensitized to this aspect of its recent history (O’Toole 1997, 2003a; Corcoran and White 2000; Kelleher 2002). Cultural representations of other institutional abuses, especially the industrial and reformatory schools, point the way toward a more productive outcome stemming from the recent accumulation of representations of the Magdalen laundries. Public pressure, largely mobilized as a result of television documentaries such as Dear Daughter and States of Fear, led Ireland’s Taoiseach, or prime minister, Bertie Ahern, to apologize to the victims and survivors of childhood abuse while in state-funded residential institutions (“Speech by An Taoiseach” 1999; Smith 2001). Ireland’s Magdalen survivors still await a similar apology from the state and the validation of their victimization that comes with it. The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, established by an act of legislation in light of revelations made public by States of Fear, provides a forum for survivors of childhood abuse not only to give testimony and therefore witness the past but also, when such evidence meets certain legal criteria, to pursue legal proceedings against perpetrators of physical and sexual abuse.1 Survivors of abuse in the nation’s Magdalen asylums are offered no such recourse. The Residential Institutions Redress Board, again initiated by government statute, provides reparations to the survivors of abuse in all state-licensed residential institutions.2 However, the Redress Board does not recognize Ireland’s Magdalen institutions. Indeed, the state’s official discourse steadfastly designates the Magdalen asylums as private charitable institutions outside the government’s control or responsibility.3 Notably, the state does not dispute the fact that the Magdalen laundries were abusive institutions. Its goal, however, is to limit liability, and consequently it redirects questions of financial reparations exclusively to the religious congregations. The state’s rationale for disqualifying Magdalen survivors from the reparations’ scheme is simple. The victims were adults, not children.4 The institutions were private, not public. The government disclaims any function in licensing or inspecting these homes. However, as I demonstrate throughout this book, the state always relied on the availability of the Magdalen laundries to con-

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ceal problem women within the nation’s architecture of containment. It continually facilitated the transfer of diverse populations of women into the nuns’ care. It sought ways to underwrite the religious congregations that operated the laundries—indirectly by making possible a labor force and providing lucrative contracts and, after 1960, directly by way of capitation grants for women on remand from the courts. The state, moreover, has long ignored the flagrant disregard for the Magdalen women’s civil and constitutional rights: false imprisonment; the absence of due process; exploitative and dangerous work practices; the denial of educational and human developmental resources; and emotional, physical and, in some cases, sexual abuse. Ireland’s Magdalen survivors are denied a distinct redress or reparations scheme despite these facts that provide evidence of the state’s culpability, complicity, and collusion in these abusive institutions.5 The four religious congregations, and by extension the Catholic Church, also remain steadfast in refusing to apologize for abuses against the Magdalen women. On 5 May 2004, Ireland’s Sisters of Mercy offered the most complete apology yet to the victims of abuse in their industrial and reformatory schools. The apology read: We have in the past publicly apologised to you. We know that you heard our apology then as conditional and less than complete. Now without reservation we apologise unconditionally to each one of you for the suffering we have caused. We express out heartfelt sorrow and ask your forgiveness. We ask forgiveness for our failure to care for you and protect you in the past and for our failure to hear you in the present. We are distressed by our failures. We have been earnestly searching to find a way to bring about healing. We need your help to do this (“Statement of the Sisters of Mercy Leadership Team” 2004).

The Mercy Sisters’ initial apology, like the Taoiseach’s apology in 1999, came in the wake of a television documentary alleging physical abuse in one of the order’s industrial schools (Dear Daughter 1996). Eight years later, Sr. Breege O’Neill explained that the congregation had been involved in a “reflective process around this crisis” for a number of years and that they were forced to reconsider all the aspects of their history in order to arrive at the more comprehensive apology. In a moment of unqualified candor, she concluded her words to the media by admitting,

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“Our greatest difficulty has always been to admit we got it wrong” (Raftery 2004). It is impossible to underestimate the significance of this unconditional apology for survivors of the nation’s residential institutions (McGarry 2004; Quinn 2004). However, in what can only be considered a further compartmentalization of responsibility, the order chose not to include the abuse of women in their two Magdalen institutions in this more recent apology.6 And, to be fair to the Sisters of Mercy, none of the other three congregations has offered an apology to the victims and survivors of abuse in any of their institutions, neither the Magdalen laundries nor their industrial and reformatory schools.7 In deciding not to do so, they each underestimate the potential for healing and reconciliation that such an apology would represent. The religious congregations also refuse to provide access to their records, thereby perpetuating the suffering for survivors who seek official acknowledgment of their institutionalization. Access to records would also enhance the adoption search process for the children of former Magdalen women now seeking to establish their birth identity and family histories. Careless record keeping and a climate of obstructionism impedes this process. The adoption search is often painful in its own right; the pain of the adult adoptee’s search is unnecessarily exacerbated when it terminates at an anonymous, unmarked, or incorrectly marked communal burial plot. The religious congregations have it in their power to rectify these painful legacies attached to their Magdalen laundries. Many families of former Magdalen women remain silent about their past abandonment of a daughter, a sister, a cousin, or an aunt, thereby refusing to recognize their role in supporting the abusive conditions in these institutions. Intentionally disappeared in the past, the women’s haunting presence cannot abate until they are fully and openly acknowledged in the present. Local communities also supported the operation of these institutions over the course of the twentieth century, in particular, by sending laundry to the Magdalens. The 1990s commemorations for the Great Irish Famine and the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion demonstrate local communities’ desire to participate in memorializing the victims of Irish history: local communities excavated famine graveyards, participated in famine walks, sponsored school essay competitions, published local histories, and erected local monuments to the dead. The ab-

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sence of any similar local initiatives to memorialize the victims of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries suggests a resistance to claiming ownership of this more personal and immediate history. Such manifestations of public resistance suggests, perhaps, why the various cultural representations of the Magdalen laundries failed to generate genuine social action. And still, cultural representations might even now help to cultivate precisely such action. To date, the international public attention that Peter Mullan’s film brought to Ireland’s Magdalen laundries continues to keep the story in the public consciousness. Despite its drawbacks, popular culture has an insidious way of entering the collective conscience. The effectiveness in generating redress, reform, and reparation may not lay with one theatrical performance or a single television documentary, but more likely with the whole complex of representations, including archival sources, testimonies, and legal documents, as well as the range of films, documentaries, art exhibitions, novels, plays, poetry, music, and other cultural reenactments that precede them and follow in their wake. By imagining and narrativizing Ireland’s Magdalen laundries as forms of historic injustice, they collectively support the campaign to elicit a political and social response similar to that afforded survivors of residential child care institutions. Cultural representations augment the advocacy work of the Magdalen Memorial Committee, which since its formation in 1993 has sought to support survivors and family members while seeking redress for past abuses.8 The international success of the film and documentaries, in particular, their success in the United States, assisted organizations such as Adoption Ireland. This organization works tirelessly on behalf of the children of former Magdalens who are seeking information on their birth mothers and their family histories, in particular, their medical histories.9 A similarly encouraging development is the appearance of a relatively new web-based listserv, “Justice for Magdalenes.”10 It too emerged in light of Mullan’s film and is actively working on a series of related initiatives, including fund-raising, increasing public awareness, issuing press releases that respond to political and church inaction, and disseminating information to support research focusing on these institutions. These diverse initiatives, while fragile and perhaps vulnerable, evince the power of popular cultural representation to generate meaningful social responses.

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At the root of this study remains a population of Irish women whose fate was almost uniformly dark: some were discarded anonymously in unmarked graves; others, so traumatized by the experience of incarceration, remain dependent on religious orders for their daily existence; still others are unable to escape from the societal stigma attached to their past. It is for their sakes that recent cultural representations of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries should be recognized as contributing to a collective movement forward—toward real action. Then, and only then, will the nation’s architecture of containment cease to exist.

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Figure 6.5. Figures 6.5 – 6.19 © 2000 Diane Fenster. Diane Fenster, Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries (2000). Reproduced by permission of the artist.

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Figure 6.6.

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Figure 6.7.

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Figure 6.8.

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Figure 6.9.

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Figure 6.10.

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Figure 6.11.

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Figure 6.12.

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Figure 6.13.

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Figure 6.14.

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Figure 6.15.

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Figure 6.16.

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Figure 6.17.

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Figure 6.18.

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Figure 6.19.

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Figure 6.20. Gerard Mannix Flynn’s Extallation “Call Me By My Name”: Requiem For Remains Unknown, 1889-1987. Reproduced with permission by Gerard Mannix Flynn. Photograph by Robert Savage.

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Appendix

Table 1.1. Inmates of Religious-Run Magdalen Asylums in NineteenthCentury Ireland Institution

Dates Covered

Total Number of Entrants

Total Number of Reentrants

Good Shepherd, Belfast

April 1851– December 1899

894

266 (29.75%)

Good Shepherd, Cork

July 1872– December 1899

1,749

592 (33.84%)

Sister of Charity, Cork

June 1846– December 1899

1,267

Unknown

Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, High Park, Drumcondra

May 1939– December 1899

2,633

434 (16.48%)

Sisters of Charity, Donnybrook

January 1833– December 1899

1,387

Unknown

Good Shepherd, Limerick

1848– December 1899

2,039

873 (42.82%)

Good Shepherd, Waterford

July 1842– December 1899

705

54 (7.66%)

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Table 1.1. Continued Institution

Dates Covered

Good Shepherd, New Ross

1860–1900

Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, Gloucester Street

February 1887 – December 1897

Sisters of Mercy, Galway

No information available

Sisters of Mercy, Dun Laoghaire

No information available

Sisters of Mercy, Tralee

No information available

SUBTOTAL (Entrants with Records)

Total Number of Entrants

Total Number of Reentrants

321 (records for 311)

120 (of 311) (39%)

511

(10%)

11, 506 (11, 496)

2,339

Note: Tables 1.1–1.3 reproduce Maria Luddy’s research findings; see tables 4.6–4.12 in Women and Philanthropy (1995, 125–29). As Luddy explains, however, the registers on which her findings are based are not complete. The information for the Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum, New Ross, is reproduced from Frances Finnegan’s research findings, including tables 16 and 17; see Do Penance or Perish (2001, 152–56). Prunty does not offer the same statistical breakdown for Gloucester Street; rather, she offers the following narrative analysis of her findings: While the age on admission ranged from 14 years to 58 years almost half were in the 21–29 years bracket, 25 years being the overall average. Most striking is the enormous turnover of residents, admittance was freely given, and the vast bulk of residents left after short stays varying from a few days to several months. Of 511 admissions between 17 February 1887 –26 December 1897, at least half left the house of their own accord, another c. 40 women took temporary refuge in the house en route to or from hospital, and about the same number were “sent away” or “sent out” of the house, with “expelled for disorder” or “disobedience” entered after the names of three women. 30 women were sent to “situations” from the house, of whom 3 left for America and 4 to Australia (“doing well”), a brave new start in a very different world. While the asylum regime may appear unattractive a century later, the fact that at least 10% of those who entered Gloucester Street during the period 1887 –1897 entered a second or third time testifies to positive experiences (at least relative to the workhouse alternative) and the genuinely open admissions policy. (1998, 269–70) Also see chap. 1, n. 23.

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Table 1.2. Sources of Entry to Religious-Run Magdalen Asylums in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Institution*

Voluntary Religious Family Police/ Other Unaccounted Referral Prison

Good Shepherd, Belfast

294 130 37 (32.89%) (14.54%) (4.13%)

Good Shepherd, Cork Sisters of Charity, Cork

27 (3.02%)

406 (45.41%)

902 569 74 103 93 (51.57%) (32.53%) (4.23%) (5.89%) (5.32%)

8 (0.46%)

Unknown

Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, High Park, Drumcondra Sisters of Charity, Donnybrook Good Shepherd, Limerick

211 22 37 117 (8.01%) (0.84%) (1.41 %) (4.44%)

2,246 (85.3%)

568 520 16 35 186 (40.95%) (37.49%) (1.15%) (2.52%) (13.41%)

62 (4.47%)

675 902 29 (33.10%) (44.24%) (1.42%)

Good Shepherd, Waterford

350 (49.65%)

Good Shepherd, New Ross

65 (22%)

27 81 (1.32%) (3.97%)

250 34 11 53 (35.5%) (4.82%) (1.56%) (7.52%) 179 (62%)

13 (4%)

325 (15.94%) 7 (0.99%)

34 (11%)

* See table 1.1 for dates covered.

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345 (24.24%)

384 (18.83%)

50 (7.09%)

Sisters of 633 Charity, (44.48%) Donnybrook**

Good Shepherd, 907 Limerick (44.48%)

Good Shephard, 359 Waterford (50.92%) 15 (5%)

5 (0.71%)

81 (3.97%)

26 (1.83%)

16 (0.61%)

4 (0,57%)

37 (1.81%)

9 (0.63%)

21 (0.8%)

106 (7.45%)

211 (8.0%)

24 (1.89%)

178 (10.1%)

16 (2.27%) 19 (6%)

27 (3.83%)

9 199 (0.44%) (9.76%)

23 (1.32%)

* See table 1.1 for dates covered. ** These figures include 34 women resident in the asylum in 1833.

28 (9%)

232 (8.8%)

Sisters of Our 1,403 Our Lady of (53.29%) Charity of Refuge High Park, Drumcondra

5 6 (0.39%) (0.47%)

112 (6.4%)

14 40 (1.57%) (4.47%)

103 (3.9%)

3 (0.1%)

3 (0.1%)

33 (11%)

11 (4%)

70 (23%)

7 (2%)

41 (3.23%)

91 7 (5.2%) (0.4%)

8 (3%)

5 136 (0.71%) (19.29%)

113 (5.54%)

11 (0.77%)

4 489 (0.15%) (18.57 %)

6 (0.47%)

47 142 13 12 7 (2.31%) (6.96%) (0.64%) (0.64%) (0.34%)

48 3 45 5 2 (6.81%) (0.43%) (6.38%) (0.71 %) (0.28%)

88 (4.32%)

128 4 115 34 10 (8.99%) (0.28%) (8.08%) (2.38%) (0.70%)

147 1 (5.58%) (0.04%)

27 10 (2.13%) (0.78%)

23 136 27 3 15 (1.32%) (7.78%) (1.54%) (0.17%) (0.86%)

11 95 14 4 3 116 (1.23%) (10.63%) (1.56%) (0.45%) (0.34%) (12.96%)

119 1 (9.39%) (0.08%)

44 (2.52%)

49 (5.48%)

To Work 19 (2.13%)

Home/ Other Work- Lunatic Unaccounted To Escaped friends Convents house Asylum For Marry

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120 (39%)

23 (1.81%)

1,005 (79.32%)

Sisters of Charity, Cork

76 (4.35%)

17 (1.9%)

Magdalen Class Hospital Deaths

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Good Shepherd, New Ross

206 (11.78%)

Good Shepherd, 808 Cork (46.2%)

31 (3.47%)

Expelled Situation Emigrated

69 (7.72%)

Left

Good Shepherd, 412 Belfast (46.09%)

Institution*

Table 1.3. Reasons for Leaving Religious-Run Magdalen Asylums in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

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Table 2.1. Residential Provision for Unmarried Mothers and Children, 1945 Institution

No. of Beds for Children

No. of Beds for Unmarried Mothers

200 200 122 560 240 94

125 152 75 149 52 100

1,416

653

Sacred Heart Home, Besboro Sean Ross Abbey, Roscrea Manor House, Castlepollard St. Patrick’s Home, Pelletsown Children’s Home, Tuam Regina Coeli SUBTOTALS

Source: NAI, Department of the Taoiseach, S10815A.

Table 2.2. Average Admissions for Women under Nineteen Years Old, Good Shepherd Home, Limerick. 1930

Period 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 to Sep. 1st

Average Yearly Admissions The average number of girls admitted for year –40

Years 16–17

Years 17 –18

Years 18–19

Total Under 19 Years

4 8 5 5 2 5

4 5 5 8 3 9

— 8 4 — 7 —

8 21 14 13 12 14

Source: NAI D/Jus 90/4/13—“Rev. M. Fitzpatrick, C. C., St. Michael’s Presbytery, Limerick.”

Table 2.3. Deaths of Legitimate and Illegitimate Infants under One Year of Age, with Rates per 1,000 of Corresponding Births, in the Years 1923–1929 1923

1924

1925

1926

1927

Legitimate Numbers 3,539

4,014

3,739

3,999

3,748

59

65

62

67

64

60

63

559

529

477

553

506

549

546

344

315

287

322

288

307

295

Rates Illegitimate Numbers Rates

1928

1929

3,467 3,556

Source: Saorstat Éireann 1930, 6. APPENDIX

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Table 2.4. “Illegitimate” Births—Percent of Total Births AREA Éire

1939 3.18

1940 3.22

1941 3.48

1942 3.66

1943 3.80

1944 3.92

1945 3.93

1946 3.89

Source: Éire 1948, xiii.

Table 2.5. Offenses against Children, from Statistical Abstracts of Ireland, 1931– 1940 Murder of Children under 1 Year 1 2 Year 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940

19 10 13 10 7 4 10 4 9 6 6 5 5 5

M

F

4 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0

11 5 10 10 2 0 5 6 5 4 3 2 2 1

Abandonment of Child under 2 Years 1 2

12 14 10 11 8 8 6 10 17 17 6 10 6 13

M

F

0 2 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1

7 7 2 2 6 7 0 1 2 4 1 5 2 3

Concealment of a Birth 1 2

41 49 50 48 58 38 38 38 29 44 32 34 36 36

M

F

1 0 1 3 1 2 5 8 1 5 1 2 0 2

21 31 32 26 38 20 19 23 16 21 23 11 15 13

Notes: 1 Numbers of crimes known to police. 2 Persons proceeded against; M = males, F = females. Source: Saorstát Éireann & Éire, 1928–41.

Table 2.6. Frequency of Murder/Concealment of a Birth/Infanticide Court Cases Years 1926–29 1930–34 1935–39 1940–44 1945–49 1950–54 1955–59 1960–64 Total

Number of Cases 47 41 39 44 29 8 2 1 211

Source: NAI, Central Criminal Court Trial Record Books, 1926–1964.

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Table 2.7. Sentences in Infanticide/Concealment of a Birth Court Cases Sentence

Total Cases

Magdalen asylum (Catholic) Magdalen asylum (Protestant, Bethany Home) Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta Street [Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul] Regina Coeli Hostel, Legion of Mary Sean Ros Abbey, Roscrea Mother and Baby Home Death penalty/Commuted to penal servitude for life with hard labor Prison sentence, ranging from 6 months to 7 years, typically with hard labor Guilty but released on own recognizance and must keep the peace for periods up to 3 years Guilty, but released into custody of father/family Insane and/or committed to mental hospital Discharged Discharged for marriage Detained or bound over Referred to High Court Jury disagreed Not arraigned Charged dropped Total Cases

54 4 26 1 1 12 36 26 2 5 31 1 4 1 1 1 5 211

Source: NAI, Central Criminal Court Trial Record Books, 1926–1964.

Table 2.8. Committals to Protestant Magdalen Asylums for Infanticide/ Concealment of Birth Cases Month/ Year County

Name

Charge

Guilty

Concealment Bethany House, of a birth Dublin, 1 year

6/29

Monaghan EM

11/30

Sligo

ES

Murder/ concealment of a birth Murder

10/37

Donegal

EA

Murder

11/45

Sligo

JM

Murder

Concealment of a birth Concealment of a birth Manslaughter

Sentence

Bethany House, Dublin, 1 year Bethany House, Dublin, 3 years Bethany House, Dublin, 2 years

Source: NAI, Central Criminal Court Trial Record Books, 1926–1964.

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Table 2.9. Committals to Catholic Institutions (excluding Magdalen Asylums) for Infanticide/ Concealment of Birth Cases Month/ Year County

Name

2/28

SC

2/28 6/28 5/32

6/33

6/33 2/34

6/34

11/34

3/35

6/35 6/36

Dublin

Charge

Guilty

Sentence

Manslaughter/ Concealment Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., Concealment of a birth Dublin, 1 year of a birth Galway MMcN Murder Concealment Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., of a birth Dublin, 1 year Kerry MH Concealment Concealment Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., of a birth of a birth Dublin, 1 year Limerick AMcC Murder/ Concealment Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., concealment of a birth Dublin, 1 year of a birth Louth KMcK Murder/ Abandonment Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., abandonment of a child Dublin, 1 year of a child Monaghan MEK Murder Concealment Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., of a birth Dublin, 1 year Dublin MR Murder/ Abandonment Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., abandonment of a child/ Dublin, 1 year of a child/ cruelty to cruelty to a child a child Dublin EMcA Murder/ Concealment Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., concealment of a birth Dublin, 2 years of a birth Clare TC Murder Concealment Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., of a birth Dublin, remain until her marriage Waterford MO’T Murder/ Manslaughter Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., endeavoring Dublin, 1 year to conceal a birth Limerick BB Murder Manslaughter Regina Coeli Hostel, Legion of Mary, 3 months Mayo MAD Murder Concealment Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., of a birth Dublin, 2 years

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Table 2.9. Continued Month/ Year County 2/37

Name

Wicklow KK

10/37 Limerick

MM

Charge

Guilty

Murder

Manslaughter Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., Dublin, 3 years Endeavoring Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., to conceal Dublin, 1 year a birth Manslaughter Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., Dublin, 2 years Manslaughter Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., Dublin, 1 year Manslaughter Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., Dublin, 18 months Manslaughter Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., Dublin, 2 years Manslaughter Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., Dublin, 3 years

11/38

Monaghan BK

Endeavoring to conceal a birth Murder

5/40

Longford MEG

Murder

11/40 Limerick

BC

Murder

4/41

Galway

BC

Murder

4/41

Galway

MK

10/41 Meath

MC

Murder/ conspiracy to murder Murder

11/43

Meath

MG

Murder

6/44

Cork

MH

Murder

10/44 Kilkenny MTW

Murder

10/44 Leitrim

MBB

Murder

11/45

AB

Murder

MC

Murder

Clare

10/46 Dublin

7/49* Tipperary NM

Concealment of a birth

Sentence

Manslaughter Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., Dublin, 1 year Manslaughter Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., Dublin, 18 months Concealment Our Lady’s Home, of a birth Henrietta St., Dublin, 1 year Concealment Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., of a birth Dublin, 2 years Manslaughter Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., Dublin, 18 months Concealment Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., of a birth Dublin, 1 year Manslaughter Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta St., Dublin, 15 months Concealment Sean Ros Abbey, of a birth mother and baby home

Note: *Refers to sisters charged in the same case; see table 2.10. Source: NAI, Central Criminal Court Trial Record Books, 1926–1964.

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Table 2.10. Committals to Catholic Magdalen Asylums for Infanticide/Concealment of Birth Cases Month/ Year County

Name

Charge

Guilty

Sentence

12/26 Dublin

AD

Concealment of a birth

Good Shepherd Convent, Waterford, 12 months

11/27

Offaly

MB

Murder/ concealment of a birth Murder

6/28

Kerry

BO’N

11/28

Galway

LD

6/29

Kildare

MW

11/29

Galway

CK

11/29

Carlow

LB

2/30

Leix

MT

6/31§ Waterford NH 5/32

Dublin

EP

11/32

Cork

KB

3/33

Galway

BC

3/33

Limerick BMcG

10/37 Cavan

KR

4/38

Dublin

MM

11/38

Cork

BD

4/39

Longford BC

Concealment of a birth Concealment Concealment of a birth of a birth Murder Concealment of a birth Concealment Concealment of a birth of a birth Murder Manslaughter by neglect Murder Concealment of a birth Murder Concealment of a birth Murder Concealment of a birth Murder/ Manslaughter concealment of a birth Murder Plea agreement Murder Concealment of a birth Murder Concealment of a birth Murder Manslaugter Murder/ concealment of a birth Murder Murder

10/39 Wicklow MMcC Murder

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198

High Park Convent, Drumcondra, 1 year High Park Convent, Drumcondra, 1 Year Magdalen Asylum, Galway, 2 years High Park Convent, Drumcondra, 18 months High Park Convent, Drumcondra, 2 years St. Mary’s Magdalen Convent, Donnybrook, 2 years St. Mary’s Magdalen Convent, Donnybrook, 18 months St. Mary’s Magdalen Convent, Donnybrook, 2 years Good Shepherd Magdalen, Limerick, 18 months

Good Shepherd Magdalen, Cork, 1 year Magdalen Asylum, Galway, 2 years Good Shepherd Magdalen, Limerick, 1 year St. Mary’s Magdalen Convent, Donnybrook, 1 year Manslaughter St. Mary’s Refuge, Dun Laoghaire, 2 years

Manslaughter St. Vincent’s Magdalen Home, Cork, 1 year Manslaughter St. Mary’s Magdalen Asylum, Donnybrook, 2 years Concealment High Park Convent, of a birth Drumcondra, 2 years

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Table 2.10. Continued Month/ Year County

Name

Charge

Guilty

Sentence

10/40 Cavan

MR

Murder

Manslaughter

11/40 Donegal

MMcB Murder

Manslaughter

1/41

Dublin

BB

Murder

Manslaughter

4/41

Dublin

MM

Murder

Manslaughter

ER

Murder

Manslaughter

10/41 Limerick NO’C

Murder

Manslaughter

11/41

Dublin

ML

Murder

Manslaughter

2/42

Dublin

MET

Murder

Manslaughter

2/42

Galway

MR

Murder

Manslaughter

4/42

Cork

EM

Murder

Manslaughter

11/42

Kilkenny MR

Murder

11/42

Limerick KL

Murder

Concealment of a birth Manslaughter

11/42

Tipperary KO

Murder

Manslaughter

11/43

Dublin

MC

Murder

11/43

Donegal

AD

Murder

Concealment of a birth Manslaughter

11/43

Roscommon NC

Murder

Manslaughter

11/43¶ Tipperary EQ

Murder

Murder

6/44

Carlow

NB

Murder

Manslaughter

6/44

Kerry

JC

Murder

Manslaughter

CMcB

Murder

Manslaughter

St. Mary’s Magdalen Asylum, Donnybrook, 3 years High Park Convent, Drumcondra, 18 months High Park Convent, Drumcondra, 12 months High Park Convent, Drumcondra, 2 years High Park Convent, Drumcondra, 1 year St. Mary’s Magdalen Asylum, Donnybrook, 2 years Gloucester St. Magdalen Asylum, 2 years Gloucester St. Magdalen Asylum 18 months High Park Convent, Drumcondra, 18 months St. Patrick’s Refuge, Dun Laoghaire, 2 years Gloucester St. Magdalen Asylum, 18 months St. Mary’s Magdalen Asylum, Donnybrook, 2 years High Park Convent, Drumcondra, 2 years High Park Convent, Drumcondra, 3 years Gloucester St. Magdalen Asylum, 1 year St. Patrick’s Refuge, Dun Laoghaire, 18 months St. Patrick’s Refuge, Dun Laoghaire, 18 months St. Patrick’s Refuge, Dun Laoghaire, 1 year High Park Convent, Drumcondra, 1 year Gloucester St. Magdalen Asylum, 1 year

10/41 Dublin

10/44 Dublin

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Table 2.10. Continued Month/ Year County

Name

Charge

4/45

BC

Murder

Dublin

Guilty

Sentence

Manslaughter High Park Convent, Drumcondra, 18 months 4/45 Wexford MK Murder Concealment Gloucester St. Magdalen of a birth Asylum, 1 year 2/46 Limerick EQ Murder Manslaughter Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum, Limerick, 5 years 4/46 Cavan AMR Murder Manslaughter High Park Magdalen Asylum, Drumcondra, 18 months 6/46 Sligo MEF Murder Manslaughter Gloucester St. Magdalen Asylum, 12 months 10/46 Limerick EMcN Murder Manslaughter Gloucester St. Magdalen Asylum, 15 months 10/47 Cork MH Murder Manslaughter Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum, Limerick, 1 year 10/47 Limerick KO’M Murder Concealment Good Shepherd Magdalen of a birth Asylum, Limerick, 1 year 2/48 Mayo BF Murder Manslaughter Gloucester St. Magdalen Asylum, 12 months 10/48 Kilkenny MMcD Murder Concealment Gloucester St. Magdalen of a birth Asylum, 12 months 7/49 Offaly MJW Murder Manslaughter Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum, Limerick, 1 year 7/49* Tipperary MM Conceal birth Concealment High Park Asylum, of a birth Drumcondra, 1 year 2/50 Wexford MR Murder Infanticide Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum, Waterford, 12 months 10/53** Limerick NO’B Murder Infanticide Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum, 6–12 months or “as the nuns might decide” 10/53** Limerick MO’B Infanticide Infanticide Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum, 6–12 months or “as the nuns might decide” 5/64 Dublin MR Murder Infanticide Donnybrook Magdalen Asylum, 4 months Notes: *Refers to sisters charged in the same case; see table 2.9. **Refers to a mother and daughter charged in the same case. § Expelled and transferred to Gloucester St. Magdalen. ¶ Transferred to Good Shepherd Magdalen, Limerick, in 1944. Source: NAI, Central Criminal Court Trial Record Books, 1926–1964.

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Table 2.11. Institutions Receiving Probationers, March 1944 Institution

Number of Women Received

Period Specified by Court

Gloucester St. Asylum

1 4 1

3 years 1 year 2 years

St. Patrick’s Refuge, Crofton Rd, Dun Laoghaire

1 8

18 months 12 months

High Park Convent, Whitehall, Dublin

1 2 4

3 years 2 years 1 year

House of Mercy, Baggot St., Dublin

1

1 year

Good Shepherd Convent, Cork

2

Period not stated

Sisters of Charity, Peakcock Lane, Cork

1

do

Good Shepherd Convent, Limerick

1 1

3 months Period not stated

Bethany Home, Dublin

1

do

TOTAL

29

Source: NAI D/ Jus 16/62 A.

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Table 2.12. Catholic Magdalen Asylums with Industrial and Reformatory Schools Attached, and Other Residential Institutions Managed by Same Religious Congregations, 1969 Industrial School Attached (certified for)

Reformatory School Attached (certified for)

Industrial Schools Managed by Congregation

Congregation in Charge

Magdalen Asylum

Sisters of Mercy

Galway Magdalen

Rushrook, Mallow, Booterstown, Goldenbridge, Clifden, Lenaboy, Killarney, Tralee,

St. Patrick’s Refuge, Dun Laoghaire

Limerick, Newtownforbes, Dundalk, Westport, Moate, Wexford, Rathdrum

Sisters of the Good Shepherd

Limerick Magdalen

St. George’s (100) [closed 1975]

Reformatory Schools Managed by Congregation

St. Joseph’s [closed 1975]

Sunday’s Well, St. Finbarr’s Cork (172)

Sisters of Charity

Waterford

St. Dominic’s (160)

New Ross, Wexford

St. Aidan’s (70) [closed 1968]

Peacock Lane, Cork

Lakelands (100) Kilkenny (162)

St. Mary’s, Donnybrook

[closed 1966] Benada Abbey (60)

Sisters of Our High Park, St. Joseph’s Lady of Charity Drumcondra (50) of Refuge St. Mary’s Gloucester St. Source: Éire 1970, 2–3; Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999, 397 –400.

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Whitehall

St. Anne’s Kilmacud (20) [closed 1984]

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Table 2.13. “Reports from Magdalen Asylums and Kindred Institutions. Compiled 1931” Institution

Cases

Institution

Cases

High Park, Dublin

3 cases in 10 yrs.

Peacock Lane, Cork

1 case in 10 yrs.

Donnybrook, Dublin

2 cases in 10 yrs.

Good Shepherd, Cork

0 case in 10 yrs.

Gloucester Street

0 case in 10 yrs.

Bessboro, Co. Cork

0 case since opening

Henrietta St.

0 case in 10 yrs.

Good Shepherd, Limerick

0 case in 10 yrs.

Westmoreland Lock Hospital

3 cases in 12 yrs.

Good Shepherd, Waterford

0 case in 10 yrs.

Catholic Girls’ Hostel

8 cases since opening

Good Shepherd, New Ross

2 cases in 5 yrs.

Dun Laoghaire

3 cases in 5 yrs.

Magdalen Asylum, Galway

0 case in 10 yrs.

Source: NAI D/Jus 8/20, “Department of Education Reformatory and Industrial Schools Branch Report of the Committee on Criminal Law Amendment Act.”

Table 2.14. Total Number of Children in Care, 1968–1969 Industrial schools Reformatory schools Institutions (other than industrial schools) approved by the minister for health* Voluntary homes that have not applied for approval* Boarded-out and at nurse

2,073 129

TOTAL

4,834

658 617 1,357

* These figures are not fully accurate because (a) two of the approved homes have not given returns, and (b) in the case of voluntary homes, we cannot be certain that we compiled a full list of such institutions despite our efforts to do so. Of the known voluntary homes, four did not reply to enquiries. Source: Éire 1970, 12.

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Notes

I NTRODUCTION 1. Benedict Anderson famously defined the nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (1991, 6). The “state,” as I use the term in this book, refers to the “political organization or management which forms the supreme civil rule and government of a country or nation” (OED). The “nation-state” is the territorially defined political entity defined by numerous critics as the end-goal of nationalism, e.g., the Irish Free State, Éire, the Republic of Ireland (Lloyd 1999, 19–36; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990). However, the nation and the “nation-state” are not coequal. The nation includes those living outside the political jurisdiction who claim affiliation with the nationstate as well as members of the nation’s diaspora. In the Irish context this includes survivors of the nation-state’s architecture of containment living in exile. For discussions of nation and state in an Irish context, see Lloyd 1993; Kiberd 1995; Gibbons 1996; Kearney 1997; Howe 2000; MacLaughlin 2001. Raymond Williams offers two meanings for “society”: it is “our most general term for the body of institutions and relationships within which a relatively large group of people live” and also “the condition in which such institutions and relationships are formed” (1983, 291). As Williams explains, the term signals the ability to exist in a condition of loose affiliation—“companionship” or “fellowship”—as distinct from the binding relationships of state institutional power. 2. My reading of the state’s investment in institutional containment is influenced by Foucault’s two important studies, Discipline and Punish (1995) and The History of Sexuality (1990). The double effect of Ireland’s containment culture in naming and concealing transgressive social phenomena coincides with Foucault’s disparate claims about speech. He suggests that confessional speech does not liberate but rather becomes a powerful instrument of domination (Foucault 1990). As Margot Backus points out, however, there is a need to firmly reconnect “Foucauldian discourse analysis . . . to the material roots of discourse.” Although the contexts are self-evidently different—the Magdalen laundries rather than Samuel Richard-

204

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son’s novel Clarissa —I acknowledge Backus’s critical paradigm in my questioning of the “roots of power, privilege, and educated speech in the soil of deprivation, disenfranchisement, abjection, and enforced silence” (Backus 1999, 49). 3. On the advent of “nativist” nationalism in the postcolonial moment, see Said 1988; Said 1993, xi–xxviii; Nandy 1983; Kiberd 1995; Gibbons 1991. 4. This project builds on the work of Ailbhe Smyth (1991), Gerardine Meaney (1994), Eavan Boland (1996), and Kim McMullan (1996), all of whom link feminist and postcolonial critique in their analysis of Irish patriarchy in the immediate postindependence era. Meaney, in particular, identifies the consequences for Irish women of sexual conservatism and political stagnation: “Women in these conditions become guarantors of their men’s status, bearers of national honour and the scapegoats of national identity. They are not merely transformed into symbols of the nation, they become the territory over which power is exercised. The Irish obsession with the control of women’s bodies by church, state, boards of ethics and judicial enquiries, has its roots in such anxieties” (1994, 191). 5. This was increasingly the case after 1927, when de Valera and Fianna Fáil entered the Dáil. Irish politicans’ allegiance to Catholic values, which traditionally was simply presumed, suddenly adopted partisan political significance as Cosgrave and de Valera each attempted to out-Catholic the other. 6. Also see Coulter 1993; Wills 2001. 7. See National Archives of Ireland (NAI), Department of Justice (D/Jus) file 247/41 A–E. 8. Information received by author from Tom Quinlan, head of the Records Acquisition Division, National Archives, Bishop Street, Dublin 2. See NAI D/Jus 90/4/1–31 and D/Jus 8/20. 9. Hereafter parenthetically cited as Report. Although the report was never officially published, the Stationery Office produced a limited print run for government use. NAI D/Jus 90/4; Saorstát Éireann 1931c. 10. The formation of a committee deflected a potentially sectarian debate over public morality and allowed Cosgrave to protect the minority Protestant vote from encroachments by Fianna Fáil. See Keogh 1986, 163–64; Lee 1989, 148; Whyte 1980, 49. 11. The other committee members were Rev. John Hannon, S.J.; Rev. H. B. Kennedy, dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin; Francis J. Morrin, surgeon; Mrs. Jane Power, a commissioner of the Dublin Union; and Ms. V. O’Carroll, matron of the Coombe Hospital (Report, 3). 12. Cosgrave had just successfully negotiated the partisan political posturing associated with Letitia Dunbar-Harrison’s appointment as county librarian in Mayo. The appointment was rejected by various local groups and especially by the Catholic archbishop of Tuam. That she was a Protestant was deemed incompatible with her role in choosing suitable literature for Catholic children. Fianna Fáil actively politicized the confrontation, siding with the hierarchy so as to demonstrate their adherence to Catholic values. Cosgrave ultimately compromised but moved

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decisively to close down a subsequent sectarian challenge regarding the appointment of medical practitioners in rural and predominantly Catholic areas (Keogh 1986, 166–77; Whyte 1980, 44–46). 13. A copy titled “Department of Justice Memorandum” is attached to “For Agenda of Meeting of Executive Council” dated 28 October 1932, NAI D/Jus 90/4. The copy on file is stamped “CONFIDENTIAL ” and has the following written across the top: “To be returned to the Minister for Justice.” 14. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Department of Justice Memorandum,” 13. 15. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Department of Justice Memorandum,” 1. 16. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Department of Justice Memorandum,” 13–14. Given Gen. Eoin O’Duffy’s influence on the Carrigan Report (discussed below), it is worth considering the Department of Justice’s negative response in light of its ongoing struggle with the Garda commissioner regarding his seemingly constant desire for enhanced state regulation across a broad spectrum of social and political issues. See, e.g., Regan 1999, 279–304, esp. 287. 17. Dermot Keogh offers anecdotal evidence suggesting that members of Fianna Fáil carried concealed weapons as they walked the halls of Dáil Éireann with “the pockets of their trenchcoats bulging” (1986, 185–86). 18. See the retrospective summary of these decisions in “Department of the President Memorandum, to Each Member of the Executive Council,” dated 10 November 1933, attached to “For Agenda of Meeting of Executive Council” dated 15 November 1933. NAI D/Jus 90/4. 19. See correspondence between Geoghegan and Cosgrave dated 26 November 1932, 29 November 1932, and 1 December 1932, NAI D/Jus H247/41 C. Cosgrave nominated Mr. Fitzgerald Kenney and Mr. D. Fitzgerald as representing Cumann na nGeadheal, although all eight members were deemed “nonparty” for the duration of this committee. They joined Geoghegan, the attorney general, Deputies Morrissey (Independent Labour/Cumann na nGeadheal), Davin (Labour), Thrift (Independent), and Dillon (Independent). 20. Geoghegan forwarded copies of the final report together with a copy of the “Department of Justice Memorandum” to Canavan and Brown. Both responded with detailed critiques—five pages and three pages, respectively. See NAI D/Jus H247/41 B. 21. Canavan, “Memorandum,” NAI D/Jus H247/41 B, I. 22. Brown, “Memorandum,” NAI D/Jus H247/41 B. 23. Canavan, “Memorandum,” NAI D/Jus H247/41 B, II. 24. Brown, “Memorandum,” NAI D/Jus H247/41 B. 25. “Rough Notes made by the Minister for Justice after an interview on the 1st December 1932, between the Bishop of Limerick, the Bishop of Ossory, the Bishop of Thasos and the Minister,” NAI D/Jus 90/4. 26. Geoghegan to bishop of Limerick, Friday, 9 December 1932, NAI D/Jus 90/4.

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7–8

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27. David Keane, bishop of Limerick, to Geoghegan, 20 January 1933, together with memorandum titled “View of Standing Committee on points discussed at interview on Dec. 1st 1932,” NAI D/Jus 90/4. 28. “View of Standing Committee,” NAI D/Jus 90/4. Keane’s memorandum concludes with the following challenge to Geoghegan: “Finally, if the heads of any agreed bill should be ready in the next month or two the Standing Committee requests that these heads be communicated to the members of the recent deputation before April the 26th.” 29. After the snap election in February 1933, de Valera appointed Mr. P. J. Ruttledge the new minister for justice. Despite normal protocols whereby the sitting minister would serve as committee chairman, Ruttledge was happy to have Geoghegan continue to serve in that capacity. NAI D/Jus H247/41 D. 30. At its final meeting, the informal committee decided not to forward the draft bill to members of the hierarchy for their review, claiming that any such step would constitute “a breach of privilege.” “Minutes,” Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts, Eighth Meeting, 31 May 1933, NAI D/Jus 90/4. See note 28. 31. See Department of Justice memorandum “To each Member of the Executive Council,” dated 10 November 1933, and “Heads for a Bill to amend the Criminal Law (Amendment) Acts,” NAI D/Jus H247/41 E. 32. In fact, the “general prohibition” allowing for “exceptional conditions” or “medical prescription” was common to the Carrigan Report, the “Department of Justice Memorandum,” the hierarchy’s “View of Standing Committee,” and Geoghegan’s draft “heads.” In a personal letter dated 20 February 1934 to members of Geoghegan’s informal committee, the secretary of the Executive Council informed them of the cabinet’s unexplained revision: “The Committee recommended that the new provisions relating to contraceptives should be limited to appliances as serious difficulties would be involved in legislating for substances or drugs sometimes used for this purpose. The Committee were also of opinion that medical practitioners should have power in their discretion to prescribe and supply appliances. The Executive Council have now decided that there should be a definite prohibition of the sale or importation of all appliances and substances used for contraception and that no exceptions are to be made.” NAI D/Jus 8/20. 33. See memorandum from Sean Moynihan, secretary, Department of the President, to S. A. Roche, secretary, Department of Justice, dated 11 December 1933, NAI D/Jus 8/20. 34. Even at this late stage Carrigan’s final report remained a strictly proscribed document, as evidenced by correspondence between D. Coffey, assistant clerk of the Seanád, and S. A. Roche, secretary, Department of Justice, regarding the former’s request for copies of the report for use by the Seanád’s special committee working on amendments to the bill. While Roche ultimately shared his personal copy after being “authorized” to do so by the minister for justice,

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he still saw fit to remind Coffey that “there is on the records a decision of the Executive Council . . . to the effect that this Report should not be published” and that “it is lent on the strength of your assurance that the members of your committee will regard it as strictly confidential.” Letters dated 7 and 8 January 1935, NAI D/Jus 8/20. 35. See note 8. The “Minutes of Evidence” exist in two formats. The original is a longhand version recorded in a departmental ledger; a typescript copy, running some seventy-two pages, was likely created while the final report was being written. 36. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Department of Justice Memorandum,” 1. 37. Beyond the criticism in the Department of Justice’s memorandum above, I also base this conclusion partly on the repeated references to the secrecy and nonpublic nature of the committee’s proceedings but more particularly on the absence of a copy of the “Minutes of Evidence” or of copies of the various witness memoranda (except O’Duffy’s) in the official departmental files available since 1991, i. e., NAI D/Jus H247/41 A–E. 38. The following was recorded in the minutes for the first meeting of the committee, dated 20 June 1930: “It was decided that the sittings of the Committee should not be open to either the Press or the Public. The Press however to be kept informed of the progress of the enquiry.” NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 2. 39. The other clergy members were Rev. M. Fitzpatrick, C.C., St. Michael’s, Limerick; Very Rev. John Flanagan, P.P., Fairview, Dublin; Rev. Denis Gildea, Charlestown, Co. Mayo; Very Rev. John Canon Lee, P.P., Bruff, Co. Limerick; and Rev. P. J. Roughneen, Administrator, Ballaghadereen, Co. Mayo. 40. NAI D/Jus 90/4/7, “Rev. Richard Devane, S.J.;” emphasis in original. This file includes copies of two of Devane’s publications submitted at the time of his presenting evidence, “The Dance Hall” (1931a) and “The Legal Protection of Girls” (1931b). 41. Despite Devane’s four-page memorandum and submitted publications or the three typed pages in the “Minutes of Evidence,” the “General Statement” section of the final report only mentions Devane once, to corroborate the general conviction that official statistics fail to capture the real extent of illegitimacy in the country. NAI D/Jus 90/4, Report, 11. 42. See NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 32, 40, 64. Also see individual witness files, D/Jus 90/4/13, “Rev. M. Fitzpatrick, C.C., St. Michael’s Presbytery, Limerick”; D/Jus 90/4/14, “Rev. John Flanagan, P.P., Fairview, Dublin”; and D/Jus 90/4/31, “Rev. P. J. Roughneen, Adm., & Rev. Denis Gildea, P.P.” 43. NAI D/Jus 90/4, Report, 12. 44. See NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 32, 50. 45. The priests’ concerns regarding popular amusements are summarized at length—over three pages—in the “General Statement” section of the final Report. See NAI D/Jus 90/4, Report, 11–14.

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9–12

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46. Finnane (2001) interrogates the role of the Garda Síochána and O’Duffy as police commissioner in shaping a Catholic social order for independent Ireland. 47. This influence is evident in the manner that both the Carrigan Report and Geoghegan’s draft “Heads” follow almost precisely the outline of issues addressed in O’Duffy’s memorandum. O’Duffy’s testimony also proved noteworthy, as evinced in the only journalistic report announcing the report’s finding; see “To Wage War on Immorality” 1932. 48. See copy of statistical survey, NAI D/Jus H247/41 A. 49. O’Duffy, “Memo,” NAI D/Jus H247/41 A, 2. 50. NAI D/Jus H247/41 A, 18–20. 5 1. O’Duffy’s claim is diminished in the only example of minimized text in the report. NAI D/Jus 90/4, Report, 14. 52. NAI D/Jus 90/4, Report, 14. 53. O’Duffy also pointed to parents’ anxiety to protect their children from public exposure and from the stress of cross-examination in court proceedings. NAI D/Jus 90/4, Report, 14. 54. NAI D/Jus 90/4, Report, 14, 26–28. Also see Kennedy 2000, 356. 55. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Department of Justice Memorandum,” 10. Such doubts regarding the legitimacy of children’s testimony were not specific to Ireland at the time. 56. The Brendan Smyth affair involved a pedophile priest who was wanted in Northern Ireland on charges of sexually abusing seventeen young children. Smyth hid out in a monastery in the Irish Republic, refusing to return to Northern Ireland to answer for his crimes. Ireland’s attorney general, purported to be a member of a very conservative Catholic organization, ignored the extradition order, and this resulted in the collapse of Albert Reynolds’s government in 1995 (Moore 1995). Both the Kilkenny and “West of Ireland Farmer” cases centered on prolonged incestuous abuse of two young children and entered into the public eye after official investigations documented negligence on the part of the authorities to intervene and provide safety for those involved (Cooper 1993; McKay 1998). 57. NAI D/Jus 90/4, Report, 11. Fifty-four Irish women doctors signed the five-page memorandum submitted by this organization; see NAI D/Jus 90/4/29, “Medical Women.” 58. NAI D/Jus 90/4, Report, 6. Also see “Appendix,” Report, 43–44. 59. See notes 8 and 35, above. 60. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence.” Not all the female witnesses were concerned with rehabilitation. Notable exceptions were two individuals advocating the foundation of separate colonies for the confinement of prostitutes and children afflicted with venereal disease. 61. Dermot F. Gleeson, justice of the district court in Ennis, alone of all the male witnesses, also addressed this issue, arguing, “The lack of proper education was a cause of the downfall of many girls. Young girls going out as domestic

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servants are not trained to cook, wash, or sew. In addition they are lacking in knowledge of physical facts and are, so, a prey to evil-doers.” NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 54. 62. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 13. 63. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 15. 64. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 36. 65. NAI D/Jus 90/4/, “Minutes of Evidence,” 59. Also see States of Fear 1999; Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999. 66. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 36. 67. For the “Mother and Child” scheme, see Keogh 1995, 210–13; Brown 1986. For the “Stay Safe” program, see O’Toole 1997, 156–59. 68. Preliminary church-state discussions regarding “unmarried mothers” coincided, almost precisely, with the foundation of the Irish Free State; see MacInerney 1921, 1922; Glynn 1921; “An Sagart” 1922; Devane 1924a, 1924b, 1928, 1931a, 1931b. 69. NAI D/Jus 90/4/,“Minutes of Evidence,” 19. 70. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 37. 71. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 60. 72. NAI D/Jus 90/4, Report, 9. 73. NAI D/Jus 90/4, Report, 10–11. These organizations included the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society, providing for 2,707 unmarried mothers between 1926 and 1928, 950 in 1929, and 1,026 in 1930; St. Patrick’s Guild, providing for 1,126 cases between 1926 and 1928, 495 in 1929, and 432 in 1930. Similar institutions not listed include the Rotunda Aid Society. 74. M. J. Cruice, St. Patrick’s Guild, facilitated information regarding Irish unmarried mothers being provided for by British charities, including Liverpool (429 cases in 1929 and 501 in 1930), Manchester (100 cases between 1925 and 1930), Leeds (12 cases in year ending April 1929), and London (approximately 200 cases in 1927 at four different organizations). In addition, Cruice forwarded her statistics for both Irish and British charities to Dublin’s Archbishop Byrne in a letter dated September 1929. NAI D/Jus 90/4/8 (b). For recent work on the relationship between Irish unmarried mothers and immigration, see Ryan 2002, 51–65; Garrett 2000a. 75. Long before adoption became legal in 1952, an Irish unmarried mother, though very rarely allowed to raise her child, was legally obliged to contribute to the child’s upkeep. 76. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 11. Morclair Horne and Stopford Price echoed this sentiment, claiming that while “prostitution was decreasing, sexual immorality was on the increase.” “Minutes of Evidence,” 38. 77. NAI D/Jus 90/4, Report, 9–10. Also see McAvoy 1999, 259–60; Luddy 2001, 802–6. 78. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 20–22. Also see NAI D/Jus 90/4/20, “Irish Women Worker’s Union.”

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79. Moloney and Chenevix here echo the wider debate surrounding the state subsidizing religious orders to establish mother and baby homes. See Devane 1924b; Glynn 1921; “An Sagart” 1922; Saorstát Éireann 1931a, 92. 80. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 4, 20, 13. 81. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 17. 82. NAI D/Jus 90/4, “Minutes of Evidence,” 60. 83. It is particularly disturbing with respect to Ireland’s Magdalen asylums, whose nineteenth-century rehabilitative function seems to have waned after Irish independence in favor of long-term and sometimes lifelong incarceration. See Luddy 1995a, 99–145; Finnegan 2001, 197 –241, 231–33. For Bessboro, see Goulding 1998; for Castlepollard, see Milotte 1997; for Gloucester Street, see O’Kane 1996; Culliton 1996; for Sunday’s Well, see Matley 1991; “The Magdalen Laundries” 1999. 84. I have chosen not to identify this young woman. All the details provided stem from her father’s case file. He was charged with four counts of unlawful carnal knowledge and one count of indecent assault. See NAI, Central Criminal Court (CCC), City of Dublin, dated 16 June and 13 October 1941. On 2 July 1941 the young woman appeared at the Green Street (Children’s) Court of Dublin’s Metropolitan District Court, where Judge Davitt remanded her for seven days to the High Park Convent. This was subsequently extended to 30 November 1941. Thereafter, her record is sealed. 85. Letter dated 7 July 1941 from E. M. Carroll, probation officer, to S. O’Connor, county registrar, Four Courts, Chancery Place. Carroll lists two industrial schools and one reformatory school refusing to admit the girl. NAI, CCC City of Dublin, October 1941.

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1. Costello’s four-part journalistic series, focusing on Dublin’s penitentiaries for fallen women, appeared in The Lady of the House, a popular middleclass woman’s magazine in the late nineteenth century. 2. Fund-raising activities included “charity sermons,” an account of which appeared in the Freeman’s Journal on 23 January 1882; see “The Magdalen Asylum, High Park” 1882. The same “charity sermon” in aid of High Park was still taking place as late as 1931; see “Christian Obligation” 1931. 3. On prostitution in nineteenth-century Ireland, see Luddy 1989, 1992, 1997. For prostitution and Victorian society more generally, see Walkowitz 1980, 1992. 4. The first Magdalen refuge for the reception of fallen women in England opened in 1758 at Whitechapel, and by 1898 there were more than three hundred Magdalen institutions operating throughout England. See Finnegan 2001, 7 –8.

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5. The Dublin Magdalen Asylum, as the Leeson Street institution became known, was for the reception of young Protestant women after a first fall and for expectant unmarried mothers; “those hardened by vice” were not admitted (Bayley-Butler 1946–48, 9–10). 6. Maria Luddy, in Women and Philanthropy, claims “at least twenty-three asylums or refuges were established to rescue and reclaim ‘fallen women’ ” (1995a, 109). Currently completing a book examining prostitution in Ireland, 1863–1940, Luddy, in conversations with me, now asserts that there were upward of thirty such institutions in the period covered. 7. Feminist theology tends to refute this appropriation of the biblical “Mary Magdalene” for socially symbolic purposes. For example, Rosemary Radford Ruether argues that “Mary Magdalene, contrary to popular assumption, is never referred to as a prostitute or former prostitute in the New Testament” (1985, 286n.). In 1968 the Catholic Church officially declared that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute. 8. On women’s movement into the “public sphere” by way of their involvement in philanthropy, see Preston 2004, 1–11. 9. By the 1920s Denny House, formerly the Leeson Street Magdalen asylum, and the Edgar Home in Belfast had both adapted their mission to serve primarily unmarried mothers and their children (McCormick 2005, 374–75, 377). 10. On poverty in nineteenth-century Dublin, see Robins 1980; Daly 1984; Prunty 1998; Preston 2004. On the impact of the famine on social and demographic changes, see Kinealy 1994; Ó Gráda 1999; Donnelly 2000. 11. On the transformation of the Catholic Church in postfamine Ireland, see Larkin 1972; Miller 1975; Connolly 1982; Corish 1985; Taylor 1995; Murphy 1997; Rafferty 1999. On the role of the priest in postfamine Ireland, see O’Shea 1983; Kerr 1994; Inglis 1998. There is an ongoing debate surrounding the levels of cultural authority assumed by female religious in this period. Caitríona Clear’s Nuns in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (1987) depicts female religious as powerless instruments of the male hierarchy and therefore as not playing a deciding role in the revitalization of the church or in the emergence of a new Catholic middle class. Mary Magray’s The Transforming Power of Nuns (1998) argues that the development of women’s religious life helped “to make possible the transformation of the Irish church and Irish society,” and yet concludes that by century’s end bishops had gained increased control over convent communities operating in their dioceses (11). Luddy’s Women and Philanthropy (1995a) argues more assertively, for example, that mother superiors remained formidable opponents in protecting their sphere of influence. 12. Traditionally, Irish historians argued that the famine “drastically weakened the position of women in Irish society” (Lee 1979, 37; Rhodes 1992). Literary critics too have subscribed to this position, e.g., Innes 1993, 39. Joanna Bourke, on the other hand, argues convincingly that housework, and therefore the move

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from work outside to inside the home, was an economically productive activity that increased status for women in postfamine Ireland; see Bourke 1993. 13. Lee argues, “The rise of the strong farmer coincided with the growth of clerical power . . . The church was able to preach its doctrines in detail for perhaps the first time in Irish history to the mass of the people just at the moment when the new image of woman, and the new public obsession with sex, was gaining the ascendancy” (1979, 39). 14. Anna Clark’s recent article (2005) also demonstrates that young women in Irish workhouses were not hesitant to use alliances with the Catholic clergy to resist maltreatment within state relief agencies. 15. Dympna McLoughlin contends, “sexual prudery in nineteenth century Ireland had little to do with the church and all to do with the economics of the emerging middle class” (1994, 273). 16. Francis Hackett’s semiautobiographical novel, The Green Lion, offers a portrait of the illegitimate child in late-nineteenth-century Ireland: “Paudheen, an illegitimate child conceived in a dyke and born in a poorhouse, worked resolutely for Uncle Matt at a pound a quarter. . . . He was clothed as a scarecrow is clothed . . . He had no education to worry about. In his brain there were native tracts as dark as Africa, teeming with primitive lore[,] . . . unilluminated and undeveloped, [which made] strangers think him a brute or clown, and a sub-man” (1936, 142–43). Also see William Trevor’s novel The Silence in the Garden (1988). 17. On the modernization of Irish women in the nineteenth century, see Fitzpatrick 1987; Wills 2001. 18. For women’s involvement in philanthropy in nineteenth-century Ireland, see Clear 1987; Luddy 1995a; Prunty 1997; Magray 1998; Preston 2004. 19. The asylum in Tralee closed in 1910. Few records have survived into the twentieth century for the Mercy Sisters’ three asylums, and thus we possess little statistical information as compared to the other religious congregations. 20 The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge’s and the Good Shepherd Sisters’ move to Ireland is indicative of a larger dynamic within the postfamine church of importing religious societies that would contribute to the production of a native bourgeois Catholicism where the emphasis is placed squarely on social and moral propriety, refinement, modesty, etc. (see Clear 1987, 101–12; Inglis 1998, 129–58). Both French orders evince the growing Francophile influence on Irish Catholicism. The disparity and ensuing tension between native Irish religious and their continental sisters is given literary representation in Kate O’Brien’s novel, The Land of Spices (1941). 21. Although not always reliable as a source, given the sectarian bias of his study, Michael McCarthy provides the following account of this congregation’s activities at High Park and Gloucester Street: “The Order of our Lady of Charity of Refuge owns High Park, Drumcondra, in which there are 65 nuns. That institution is, perhaps, the largest and most lucrative public laundry in the city of Dublin. Its

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vans are to be seen delivering washing and collecting money in all parts of the town. It is a Magdalene Asylum, in which it is stated that there are 210 penitents giving their services free until the ‘nameless graves in the cemetery’ claim their poor bodies. . . . This Order works another Magdalene Asylum in Lower Gloucester Street, within the Mecklenburgh Street area, in which there are 13 nuns who keep 90 fallen women at work at the profitable laundry business. Admitted total Sisters of Charity of Refuge, 78” (1903, 423). 22. Fellow historians have greeted Finnegan’s book with mixed critical response (see, e.g., Luddy 2005; Maguire 2005; McCormick 2005). 23. Luddy’s Women and Philanthropy (1995a), drawing on the registers of seven asylums from three separate religious congregations—the Irish Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, and the Good Shepherd Sisters—offers the most complete analysis to date of religious-run Magdalen asylums in nineteenth-century Ireland. Frances Finnegan’s Do Penance or Perish (2001) focuses more exclusively on the Good Shepherd Sisters, considering four of their five Irish Magdalen institutions; she provides separate local histories for each of these four foundations, and she also discusses the Good Shepherd’s Irish Province in the context of the congregation’s French origins and their worldwide mission to reform fallen women. Jacinta Prunty’s study, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925 (1998), offers more limited statistical information for the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge’s Gloucester Street asylum, but she provides significant social and cultural context explaining the location of Dublin’s refuges for fallen women, both religious and lay. Two more recent books build on Luddy’s original analysis: Mona Hearn’s Thomas Edmondson and the Dublin Laundry (2004) examines the commercial laundries housed in these asylums in the context of the various Factory Acts (1867 –1907); Margaret H. Preston’s Charitable Words (2004), although it focuses primarily on Protestant laywomen’s involvement, provides in-depth discursive analysis of the language and literature associated with rescue work. 24. In 1863 there were 3,318 arrests for prostitution in Ireland. This rose to 3,673 in 1870, but the number of alleged prostitutes among other offenders was 11,864. By 1900 these figures had dropped significantly, to 656 arrests for prostitution and 2,970 for alleged prostitutes among other offenders. See Luddy, 1995a, 101, table 4.1. 25. Of the 7,085 for whom we have records, 2,854 (40.3%) entered the homes “voluntarily”; of the 8,331 for whom we have records, 2,339 (28%) reentered the homes a number of times (see Appendix, table 1.2). 26. Of the 9,718 for whom we have records, 2,761 (28.4%) were referred by other Catholic religious (see Appendix, table 1.2). 27. Statistics for women leaving the Magdalen and entering hospitals, workhouses, lunatic asylums, and other convents make manifest the interconnectedness of Catholic-run charities (see Appendix, table 1.3). 28. Magray argues, “Families sought out these institutions to help them control and reform errant members. Many inmates of St. Mary Magdalen’s penitent

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asylum in Dublin were there because their families thought they were ‘an embarrassment’ to them” (1998, 82). 29. In chapter 2, I document the Irish state’s continued use of Magdalen asylums in this manner, specifically, in cases of infanticide and concealment of birth. 30. In each of the four Good Shepherd institutions that Finnegan examines, over 50 percent of women spent less than two years inside the asylum (2001, 75, 109, 154, 238). 31. Finnegan’s work, in particular, is replete with examples from the Good Shepherd’s registers and convent annals of very young women staying for decades on end (2001, 68, 100, 115, 143–44). 32. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically by page number only. 33. At least one survivor account from High Park in the twentieth century starkly contrasts with this earlier one regarding the prisonlike environment: “We arrived in this place with a big long avenue, and when we came up to the building my heart sank. All I could see was bars on the windows” (Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999, 328). 34. Preston provides a helpful discussion of the discourse of charity and class issues in nineteenth-century Dublin (2004, 41–66). Also see Luddy 1995a, 21–67; Magray 1998, 74–86. 35. The Mercy Sisters’ Guide for their Magdalen asylums also stipulated the cutting of the woman’s hair before admitting her. In part, this assumed symbolic significance, signaling the woman’s decision to abandon a life of vanity, “by consecrating her hair to her Redeemer.” But it also had more practical benefits, “as a check to the wild sallies of passion and temptation; under these violent impulses, some, who would not yield to better motives, have been known to defer leaving the asylum until their hair should be sufficiently grown, in whom in the mean time grace grew and passion subsided, and they became good penitents. It is therefore, very advisable to encourage them from time to time, during their fits of fervour, to make a renewed offering of their hair to God in imitation of Magdalen” (Luddy 1995b, 59). 36. As Finnegan suggests, this change of name had the more practical benefit of ensuring the anonymity of penitents (2001, 26). 37. The Good Shepherd Sisters also referred to the women as “children,” and were encouraged by their founder, Mother St. Euphrasia Pelletier, to serve as “guides and mothers to the children of the classes” (Finnegan 2001, 23; Clarke 1895). 38. Laundry work was not, however, the exclusive form of labor. Women, especially if so skilled, were also employed in sewing and lace making. 39. Hearn argues that in the late nineteenth century these institutional laundries were “deemed worthy of support by the public for benevolent as well as financial reasons” (2004, 101). Costello, in her description of High Park, insists that “the laundry work which is done therein is too well known to need advertisement” (1897a, 8).

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40. Hearn’s recent study provides a fresh understanding of the religious laundries as commercial entities: “The larger institutional laundries, in addition to providing a service to private customers, did valuable contract work. The Good Shepherd laundry in Limerick, for example, did the washing for the military, Mount St. Alphonsus, Mungret College, St. Munchins College, the Salesian Missionary College, the Convent of Mercy, Tuam, and the Mary Immaculate Training College. Many of the convent laundries did a considerable trade of a high-class nature; indeed, much of their work came over from Mayfair or from large English houses” (2004, 100). Hearn also documents the manner in which the Catholic congregations actively resisted the inclusion of their institutional laundries under the statutes of the various Factory Acts, ostensibly because this would represent “ ‘the thin edge of the wedge’ for convent inspection” (2004, 111). The Factory and Workshop Act, 1907, finally brought the religious laundries under the remit of state legislation, but even then there were a series of special provisions that exempted the congregations from full compliance. See Hearn 2004, 110–34. 41. While the incongruity might appear obvious to the contemporary reader, at the time few in society would have questioned residential institutions, especially those operated by congregations of religious women, as an appropriate setting in which to prepare young women for successful assimilation back into society. 42. See note 24, above. 43. Costello recounts the death of another High Park inmate in similar terms: “She was more than a year in dying, but no complaint ever escaped her lips; the Sisters who nursed her assured me that it often unnerved them to see the physical struggle the poor creature made to hide her sufferings from them, to see her clenching the sides of her bed, while her white lips murmured, ‘Not enough, dear Lord, not enough.’ Her death was that of a saint. There is no name on her grave, but the memory of her is green and sunny among those with whom she spent the beautiful evening of her life” (Costello 1897c, 8).

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IN

1. Halliday Sutherland (1882–1960) was born into a Scottish Presbyterian family but later converted to Catholicism. He criticized Marie Stopes’s book on contraception, Married Love (1918), on sociological and religious grounds. His own book on the subject, Laws of Life (1935), published with the imprimatur of an English Catholic bishop, was banned in Ireland but later allowed on appeal. His interview with the Mercy nuns operating the Galway Magdalen Asylum in 1955 is unique and therefore worthy of this extended analysis (Sutherland 1958; Barrington, 1987, 190; Seanád Éireann 63, 7 June 1967). 2. In Sutherland’s earlier interview with the bishop of Galway, Rev. Michael J. Brown shed light on the mother superior’s assertion that a penitent can only gain

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her release if she has somewhere “suitable” to go. Brown explained that the women “may leave if their parents or some other person will be responsible for them” (Sutherland 1958, 80). 3. Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan refer to this transfer between various residential institutions as characteristic of what they call “the System” (1999, 18–19). 4. The term “backward” to describe young Irish women here evokes the testimony of various witnesses before the Carrigan Committee in 1930–31 (see introd.). 5. See introduction, above, 15–18. 6. See Rt. Rev. Mgr. J. J. Dunne to the Secretary, Minister of Local Government, Dublin, 27 Sept. 1922 (Dublin Diocesan Archives [DDA], Archbishop Byrne Papers, Government and Politics, Department of Local Government). 7. See “Memorandum: re Provision for Unmarried Mothers,” DDA, Byrne Papers, Government and Politics, Dept. of Local Government, 5. 8. See letter from E. P. McCarron, Secretary, Dept. of Local Government, to Rev. Mgr. J. J. Dunne, 25 Oct. 1922, together with attached “SUGGESTIONS as to the scheme for treatment by Federated Catholic Rescue Societies of the cases of unmarried mothers classed as First Offenders who would otherwise be dealt with in Poor Law Institutions” (DDA, Byrne Papers, Government and Politics, Dept. of Local Government). 9. “Memorandum: re Provision for Unmarried Mothers,” DDA, Byrne Papers, Government and Politics, Dept. of Local Government, 3–4. The emphasis here on “appropriate divisions,” “separate classes,” and “cases suitable for Homes” replicates the categorization of fallen women between “first fall” and “hopeless cases” attempted but not always carried out in Irish workhouses dating back to the 1840s (Great Britain 1838; Great Britain 1906, 42–43; O’Hare et al. 1987, 5). 10. See “Unmarried Mothers,” an unsigned and undated typescript but ca. 1923–24 (DDA, Byrne Papers, Government and Politics, Department of Local Government). 11. Devane betrays an awareness that many fallen women resist entering Magdalen institutions because of their harsh regimes and reputation for lifelong servitude (1924b, 184–85). 12. See S. O’Suilleabain, Secretary, Office of the Parliamentary Secretary, to Secretary, Department of the Taoiseach, 18 May 1945 (NAI, Department of the Taoiseach, File S10815A). 13. St. Patrick’s Home, Pelletstown, catered to first offenders from the Dublin area, while the Children’s Home in Tuam cared for women in the greater Galway and Mayo region. There was also a small auxiliary institution for unmarried mothers at Kilrush, Co. Clare. 14. This was the typical period of detention in the Sacred Heart mother and baby homes in England. However, in Ireland the period of detention, even for firsttime offenders, very quickly became two years and in some cases even longer. A number of historians addressing pregnant Irish women’s emigration to England

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have recently pointed to the length of detention in Irish institutions as a primary reason for such “abnormal flight” (Earner-Byrne 2003, 2004; Ryan 2001b, 2002; Garrett 2000a, 2000b). 15. There were 356 “unmarried mothers of two or more children” in the county homes on 31 December 1928 (Saorstát Éireann 1931a, 9). 16. The description of the “Galway County Scheme” for assisting unmarried mothers also publicly acknowledged the Magdalen asylum’s contributions to this bifurcated strategy (Saorstát Éireann 1923, sect. 4). Also see Appendix, table 2.2, which shows the average number of unmarried mothers under the age of nineteen entering the Good Shepherd Magdalen asylum in Limerick between 1925 and 1930. 17. Moral corruption proves the common denominator linking infanticide cases and the “semi-imbecile and mentally deficient” women referred to by Devane. This suggests that both church and state were empowered to render any unmarried sexually active woman “mad” as part of a mechanism of social control. 18. Irish folklore reveals that the killing of newborns as the ultimate form of contraception was a well-established practice (O’Connor 1991, 2005; Yeats 1996, 18; Bourke 1988, 1997; Evans 1996; Nic Suibhne 1992; Ó Héalaí 1997, 3; ScheperHughes 1987, 6). There is not yet a completed history of infanticide in twentiethcentury Ireland, although Cliona Rattigan, a Ph.D. candidate at Trinity College Dublin, is currently completing one. Also see Ryan 1996; 2001a, 253–88; 2004; Guilbride 1995a, 1995b, 2004. 19. Justice Matthew Kenny betrays contemporary anxieties in 1929: “The number of newly-born infants in the country who were murdered by their mother at present surpassed belief. Only one out of fifty came up in the courts, but there was a wholesale slaughter of these innocents going on through the country” (Cork Examiner, 9 Oct. 1929; quoted in Conroy Jackson 1992, 126). 20. See introduction above, 15–18. 21. Caitriona Clear suggests that at this time the tolerance level in society for child death— whether the result of illness, abuse, or infanticide— was diminishing (2000, 125–27; also see Ferguson 1993, 20–22). 22. Many Irish women circumvented the legal impediments to contraception by traveling to Britain (Earner-Byrne 2003, 2004; Ryan 2001b, 2002; Garrett 2000a, 2000b, 2003). The Emergency Powers Act, 1939, introduced restrictions limiting Irish women’s ability to travel, which resulted in a significant increase in the reported illegitimacy rate in Ireland (see Appendix, table 2.4; Éire 1939; Ó Drisceoil 1996). 23. As a result of the Jurys Act, 1927, Irish women were deemed exempt from serving in this capacity (Valiulis 1995, 120–24; Bhreathnach-Lynch 1997, 26–30; Beaumont 1997). 24. This analysis and the Appendix tables reflect primary research into the Central Criminal Court Trial Record Books and case files deposited at Ireland’s

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National Archive in Dublin. Many infanticide cases never made it as far as the Central Criminal Court but were processed through the District Criminal Court. 25. In the Registrar-General’s report for 1945 there are eight instances of infanticide recorded (Éire 1946, xxxi). This number fell to two the following year (Éire 1948, xxxi). 26. See letter from the office of the minister for justice to the Taoiseach’s office dated 25 Oct. 1954 (NAI, Department of the Taoiseach, File S 14493). 27. Discussion related to the proposed legislation dates to 1939, and the first draft heads for an infanticide bill date to 1946 (NAI D/Jus 8/144/1). Difficulties in defining insanity as a defense in murder cases delayed the final legislation. 28. See “Infanticide Bill, Memorandum for the Government,” 10 Feb. 1949 (NAI, D/Jus 8/144/1 “Infanticide Bill 1941–49”). Also see NAI D/Jus 8/144 A, B, C “Infanticide Bill 1949” and Department of the Taoiseach, File S 14493. 29. See communications between the Attorney General’s Office and the Department of Justice urging the introduction of this legislation, dated 6 and 8 June 1945 and 19 and 30 May 1947 (NAI D/Jus 8/144/1). The British government in 1860 recommended that infanticide cases be treated leniently. The Offences against the Person Act, 1861, introduced “concealment of the birth” as an alternative to murder in such cases, and thereafter executions for this crime did not occur (Great Britain 1861, sec. 60). The British Infanticide Act, 1922, first introduced the issue of women’s minds being “unbalanced” when they killed “newly born” children (Great Britain 1922). The 1938 British legislation introduced new language making allowance for the “effect of lactation consequent upon the birth of the child.” A copy of the British legislation together with a Department of Justice brief, “British Infanticide Bill, 1938,” can be found in government archives; see NAI D/Jus 8/144A. 30. For the committee’s report, submitted to the government in 1941, see NAI D/Jus 8/144 A. For the Department of Justice’s evaluation of the report, see S. A. Roche, Secretary to the Attorney General’s Office, dated 25 Aug. 1941, NAI D/Jus 8/144/1. 31. “Infanticide Bill, Memorandum for the Government,” 10 Feb. 1949 (NAI, D/Jus 8/144/1). 32. See minute prepared by the Department of Justice (NAI D/Jus 8/144 A) and Appendix, table 2.7. A death sentence typically led to an application for reprieve considered at Executive Council level. The process entailed letters of support and calls for clemency; e.g., in 1932, Dublin’s Catholic archbishop wrote in support of Mrs. Jane O’Brien: “I feel that an execution would cast a sinister shadow over the glorious celebrations of the Congress and I think that an act of clemency would come most appropriately at this time” (NAI, Department of Taoiseach, File S8653 “Death Sentence on Mrs. Jane O’Brien). 33. See “Infanticide Bill, 1949. Memorandum for the Government,” 7 Mar. 1949 (NAI D/Jus 8/144/1) and Department of the Taoiseach, File S 14493. 34. See “Infanticide Bill, 1949. Memorandum for the Government,” 7 Mar. 1949 (NAI D/Jus 8/144/1).

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35. Notably, not a single female deputy participated in the debate; see Dáil Éireann 115, 27 Apr. 1949, 263–83, and 8 July 1949, 529. 36. Also see Mr. G. Boland (Dáil Éireann 115, 28 Apr. 1949, 268). 37. Also see Mr. Jack Lynch (Dáil Éireann 115, 28 Apr. 1949, 273). 38. The Central Criminal Court Trial Record Books reveal at least three cases in which men were charged with murder for killing an infant child. In two cases— EO’C in Dublin, October 1948, and JM in Wexford, July 1949—the men were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death and had their sentences commuted to penal servitude. In the third case—PO’S in Dublin, October 1955—although the man was sentenced to murder, a verdict of infanticide was returned. This is the only such instance and likely referred either to a man of diminished capacity or a young boy. He was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. 39. Although de Valera was the lone dissenting voice in the Dáil, others in the civil service articulated similar concerns. See memorandum by Dr. Con Ward, parliamentary secretary to the minister for local government and public health, NAI Department of the Taoiseach, File S13311A. Also see Department of Justice to Philip O’Donoghue, Department of Attorney General, 25 Mar. 1949 (NAI D/ Jus 8/144/1). 40. A note on the department file reveals that after requesting his input, the minister for justice accompanied by the attorney general met with Archbishop John Charles McQuaid on 2 March 1949 to discuss the bill. McQuaid independently sought three separate and anonymous evaluations, copies of which are available in his papers (DDA, Archbishop McQuaid Papers, “Infanticide Bill, 1949”). 41. For an example of a married woman charged with infanticide, see CCC Carlow, Jan. 1953, #1. 42. This need to conceal an illegitimate birth is not simply confined to the middle decades of the twentieth century. For more recent cases, see “Inquest Told Remains of Unmarried Mother’s Baby Found in Tea Chest” 1995; Magee 1994, 11. 43. Sentences ranged from six months to seven years and typically mandated the additional stipulation of hard labor. 44. This all-female institution was established to help “Catholic discharged prisoners who are just commencing a life of crime, to leave their evil ways” (cited in Prunty 1998, 270; original emphaisis). 45. The Central Criminal Court Trial Record Books also reveal that women receiving suspended sentences for crimes other than infanticide voluntarily entered the Magdalen, especially in cases of attempted murder by way of poison; see CCC Kilkenny, Feb. 1956, #1; CCC Kilkenny, Oct. 1956, #1. 46. CCC Cavan, Apr. 1946, #1. 47. CCC Kilkenny, Oct. 1948, #1. 48. A 1942 Department of Justice memorandum notes, however, that sending these women to a Magdalen asylum was a “makeshift practice” and that “there are no positive means of compelling the offender to remain in the convent, if at any time she chooses to leave” (NAI D/Jus 8/28).

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49. A 1926 committal order from the County Registrar, Dublin, to the Governor, Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, is more explicit than most about this situation; see CCC City of Dublin, 7 Dec. 1926, #5. 50. Original copies of these letters can be found in numerous case files. See, e.g., CCC Cork, 15 Nov. 1938. #1. 51. “Office of the Minister for Justice, Memorandum for the Government, Proposed Criminal Justice Bill,” 9 Dec. 1958 (NAI Department of the Taoiseach, Files S13290, S16540). 52. See, e.g., the exchange between Minister Traynor and Deputy D. Costello that addressed these concerns at length (Dáil Éireann 183, 5 July 1960, 889–906). 53. The Gloucester Street and Sean McDermott Street Magdalen asylums are one and the same institution. 54. McQuaid’s other two concerns were the establishment of a separate juvenile court in Dublin and transferring the Borstal institution for young male offenders from Cork to Dublin, see Department of Justice to Sean T. O’Kelly, minister for finance, 8 Jan. 1942 (NAI D/Jus 8/28 Criminal Justice (Female Offenders) Bill, 1942). 55. “Proposed Legislation to Amend the Existing Law in Relation to the Detention in Custody of Young Female Offenders” (NAI D/Jus 8/28 Criminal Justice (Female Offenders) Bill, 1942). 56. Like Devane (1924b, 181–83), the Carrigan Committee in 1931 also identified the lack of a female Borstal as a significant gap in the state’s institutional infrastructure (Saorstát Éireann 1931c, 37 –38). 57. Letter signed by F. C. Connolly, to Secretary, Department of Justice, 2 Nov. 1943 (NAI D/Jus 16/62 A “Our Lady’s Home”). 58. Department of Justice to Secretary, Department of Finance, 24 Mar. 1944 (NAI D/Jus 16/62 A “Our Lady’s Home”). 59. See “Proposed Legislation to Amend the Existing Law in Relation to the Detention in Custody of Young Female Offenders” (NAI D/Jus 8/28 Criminal Justice (Female Offenders) Bill, 1942). 60. According to a minute on file, this note was typed on 25 Apr. 1957 by the personal secretary in the Department of the Taoiseach, Máire Ní Ceallaig, having been dictated by the Taoiseach after his return from the archbishop on Saturday morning, 23 Mar. 1957 (NAI Department of the Taoiseach, File S 13290). 61. The untitled position paper is attached to a letter signed by J. Boland, private secretary, Office of the Minister for Justice, and addressed to the private secretary, Department of the Taoiseach, 6 May 1957 (NAI Department of the Taoiseach, File S 13290). 62. These were located at Whitehall and Kilmacud; both accepted young girls up to the age of seventeen (NAI Department of the Taoiseach, File S 13290). 63. NAI Department of the Taoiseach, File S 13290. 64. NAI Department of the Taoiseach, File S 13290.

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65. Copies of letters, both dated 7 Apr. 1960, in McQuaid’s papers (DDA Archbishop McQuaid Papers, “Department of Justice, 1940–61”). 66. In the case of reformatory schools, the upward age limit was extended to twenty-one “where considered necessary” by the Children Act, 1941 (Éire 1941, sec. 12). Similar extensions to the period of detention enabled religious orders to retain industrial school children in need of “further training” up to the age of seventeen (Éire 1949a, sec. 6). 67. The report stated, “Attention was frequently drawn during the Inquiry to the necessity for affording better protection for young persons on being discharged from Industrial Schools. . . . The records of the Courts show that many drift into evil ways, and, in the case of girls, that a large number fall into the hands of vicious associates and are ruined” (Saorstát Éireann 1931a, para. 32, 38). 68. O’Neill’s ten-page report, titled “Department of Education Reformatory and Industrial Schools Branch Report of the Committee on Criminal Law Amendment Act, Memorandum on Paragraph 32 as it relates to Industrial School Girls,” was forwarded to the Department of Justice with a cover letter from Seosamh Ó Neill, secretary, Department of Education, on 27 July 1933 (NAI D/Jus 90/4/8). 69. “Department of Education Reformatory and Industrial Schools Branch Report of the Committee on Criminal Law Amendment Act, Memorandum on Paragraph 32 as it relates to Industrial School Girls” (NAI D/Jus 90/4/8). 70. For a broader evaluation of the Kennedy Report, see Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999; Smith 2001. 71. St. Anne’s was certified in May 1944 with a very specific mission; see Inspector, Department of Education, Industrial and Reformatory School Branch, to secretary, Department of Justice, 11 May 1944 (NAI D/Jus 93/83 “Reformatory Schools-St. Anne’s Reformatory”) 72. This likely refers to children with physical and mental disabilities confined to remedial residential institutions. 73. Elizabeth, an adult survivor, who grew up in St. Bridget’s Industrial School, Loughrea, Co. Galway, and was transferred to the High Park Magdalen describes how two Sisters of Mercy escorted her to Dublin (Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999, 327 –30). 74. Section 58 of the Children Act, 1908, stipulates the reasons for committing children under the age of fifteen to an industrial school (Great Britain 1908, sec. 58, and Appendix 3.1). 75. More recently, Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan’s study, Suffer the Little Children (1999), offered a comprehensive analysis of the industrial and reformatory school system. 76. Another adult survivor, in correspondence with the author, evinces a similar threatening regime at High Park, Drumcondra: “The threat of being sent on ‘The First Train to Limerick’ was daily. That’s what the nuns called it. The High Park nuns mainly sent their girls to Limerick. This threat was the worst that could happen to any girl and any that we did witness being sent there was a terrifying

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experience. I always remember when a girl went that night there would be total silence in the dorms, not messing around, telling stories or jokes, just silence. I think now one would call it ‘Fright.’ We had the lives frightened out of us.” Also see Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999, 160–61. 77. Mary Norris, who has appeared in a number of documentaries focusing on the Magdalen asylums, was similarly dispatched to the Good Shepherd’s Sunday’s Well Magdalen in Cork (Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999, 37 –38). 78. E.g., Hannah, another adult survivor, recalled her life at the age of thirteen: “They put me to work in the laundry. . . . We got up at 5 a.m. to wash the nuns’ calico drawers and other things. One spot and they’d be thrown back at you and you’d get a clatter round the ear” (Arnold and Laskey 1985, 61). 79. Arnold and Laskey (1985) identify the nun in this manner and thus suggest that Sister Angela is a state-registered social worker. 80. Indeed, one need turn no further than James Joyce’s short story “Clay,” published in Dubliners, which betrays the author’s awareness of the Magdalen asylum’s function in Victorian Ireland ( Joyce 1991, 110–18). Austin Clarke’s poem “Living on Sin” also betrays his understanding of the nation’s sexual double standard that institutionalized sexually active women while paying “conscience money” to Catholic nuns to conceal the offending mother and child (1991, 65). 81. Harold Thompson, the London Times reviewer, mistakenly found himself at the Irish-language performance in Dublin and despite the obvious language barrier wrote a very positive review. The play’s critical acclaim led to a film version produced by RTÉ that was entered in the Berlin Television Festival. An English-language stage version soon followed, as did a published version in English (Ní Ghráda 1966; Ó Ciosáin 1999).

CHAPTER

3. R EMEMBERING I RELAND ’ S A RCHITECTURE

OF

C ONTAINMENT

1. Although it is increasingly commonplace to anoint the media as Celtic Tiger Ireland’s social conscience, it can equally be argued that Irish society has replaced one hegemony (a patriarchal church-state collusion) with an equally destructive one (media spectacle) (Inglis 1998, 208). For a more critical interpretation of media in contemporary society, see Debord 1995, 1998; Bloom 2005. 2. Roddy Doyle’s Family made its impact felt again in his subsequent bestselling novel, The Woman Who Walked into Doors (Doyle 1996), as did the infamous “X-case” in Edna O’Brien’s novel Down by the River (1998; see also Smyth 1998). 3. For differing perspectives on various changes occurring in Irish society at this time, see Kirby, Gibbons, and Cronin 2002; Corcoran and White 2000; O’Toole 1997; Brennan and de Saint Phalle 1997; Crowley and MacLaughlin 1997. 4. Seamus Deane also explains the function of a “foundational text” in a national context (1997, 1–2).

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5. Gerard Delanty takes issue with postmodern critique in defining the relationship between “stories” and the emergence of a postnational Irish identity (1996, 28– 30). Also see Bhabha 1994, 171– 97; Bhabha 1990; Kaplan 1988; Hutcheon 1989; Bell 1993. 6. Irish studies is increasingly interested in populations marginalized or excluded by the postindependence state; see e.g., Backus 1999; Gibbons 2002; Whelan 2003a; Conrad 2004. 7. For similar discussions of Ricoeur’s work in an Irish Studies context, see Kearney 1997; Smith 2001; Kelleher 2002; Whelan 2003a. 8. Ricoeur cautions: “We must remember, however, that the historian is also embedded in history, he belongs to his own field of research. The historian is an actor in the plot. . . . The historian’s testimony is therefore not completely neutral, it is a selective activity. It is, however, far less selective than the testimony of the dominant class” (1999a, 16). 9. Ricoeur points to the dual aspect of narrative when he states, “It is precisely through narratives that a certain education of memory has to start. Here we can introduce the connection between memory and forgetting, because the best use of forgetting is precisely in the construction of plots, in the elaboration of narratives concerning personal identity or collective identity; that is, we cannot tell a story without eliminating or dropping some important event according to the kind of plot we intend to build. Narratives, therefore, are at the same time the occasion for manipulation through reading and directing narratives, but also the place where a certain healing of memory may begin” (Ricoeur 1999b, 8–9). 10. The potential problem in such a scenario is that these multiple identities degenerate into conflict over competing traumatic memories, for as Ricoeur points out, “what is considered a founding event in our collective memory may be a wound in the memory of the other” (1999b, 9). 11. Arendt argues, “Only a human being is capable of being unbound through forgiveness and bound through promising. This is a very powerful rapprochement, forgiving and promising, untying and tying” (cited in Ricoeur 1999b, 10). 12. Increasingly, popular cultural representations tend to conflate the Magdalen asylum, mother and baby homes, and other residential institutions. While laundry work was common across all three sets of institutions, they were otherwise distinct. For example, Marita Conlon-McKenna’s novel (1999) and the television drama Sinners (2002) both depict women giving birth and caring for infants purportedly while confined in the Magdalen asylum. Historically, there is no evidence to corroborate such representation. While the particular genres allow for such artistic license, Magdalen survivors take exception to this conflation because, in their opinion, it elides the otherwise unique aspects of their incarceration. 13. All further references to Eclipsed refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and page number (1994b). Eclipsed had its first reading in Galway in 1988 and was first performed by Punchbag Theatre, Spanish Arch, Galway on 14 February 1992. It went on to tour Ireland successfully. It was

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also awarded a First at the Edinburgh Fringe Theatre Festival the same year. The play received its U.S. premiere at the Forum Theatre, Worcester, Mass., in 1994. It subsequently enjoyed productions in New York at the Off-Off Broadway Dame Judith Anderson Theatre in January 1996, as well as productions on the West Coast in Burbank, Calif. (1995), and Seattle, Wash. (1995). Eclipsed again toured Ireland extensively in summer 1998. See Tait 1992; Linklater 1992; Fowler 1992; Cameron 1992; Fanger 1994; Loynd 1995; Pollard 1995; Gates 1999; Bruno 1999. 14. Burke Brogan recalls her time at Galway’s Magdalen asylum in vivid and disturbing terms: I was brought down a long dark corridor, and into a room full of women. They were surrounded by large machines and irons, there was an atmosphere of steam. It was the convent laundry, rather gloomy and claustrophobic. The women wore old clothes and cardigans. They were quiet, passive. . . . My job was to supervise the women. Most were very institutionalised but one or two who hadn’t been there too long were rebellious. I did not get to know their stories in any detail, but a number of them were single mothers whose children had been taken from them. . . . Many of them stayed in the convent until they died. The most extraordinary aspect of it is that they were told they were not allowed to leave. They were locked in at night with double locks on the dormitory doors. Legally they could have walked out the gate any time they wanted, but very few did. For many, there was no place to go. They lived and died in a virtual prison. (quoted in Dempsey 1993) Also see Burke Brogan 2004. 15. Killmacha, according to Burke Brogan, deliberately combines pagan and Christian names—kill (cill) is the anglicization of the Gaelic for church or the cell/ oratory of the early church; Macha, the ancient pagan fertility goddess of Ard Macha (Armagh). Correspondence with the author. 16. Depending on the location of the performance, Burke Brogan’s stage direction allows for Rosa to be from “London (Boston, New York, Los Angeles)” (1.1.3). This suggests not only a deliberate appeal to an international audience but also the real international ramifications of the nation’s containment culture, specifically, the practice of facilitating foreign adoptions between 1947 and 1970 (Milotte 1997; Maguire 2002). 17. The visual metaphor evokes recent church practice whereby access to records and evidence of culpability for past abuses is typically difficult to ascertain or revealed to have been kept in a haphazard fashion. 18. Burke Brogan, in correspondence with the author, explained that she gave herself “permission to go back a generation or two” for the name of Nellie-Nora’s employer. She adds: “The reason I gave Nellie-Nora’s employer the surname of Persse, which she could have pronounced ‘Persee,’ was that landlords in Ireland procured, used and raped the attractive daughters of their tenants. Sadly, the Persses, brothers of our great Lady Augusta Gregory, were notorious in this regard.”

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19. On one level, of course, this is a formal requirement, and yet it also annotates the widening gap between the anachronistic laundry environment and the transformations taking place in 1960s Ireland. The play is set in 1963, the year John F. Kennedy visited his ancestral home, at which time the state sought American capital investment. Symbolically, the women subvert the religious rule of strict silence, prayer, and hard labor with illusory flights of fancy accompanied by the pulsating lyrics of Elvis Presley songs. The irony of the opening rock’n’roll classic, “Heartbreak Hotel,” savagely conflates with the contralto aria of Handel’s oratorio, Messiah —the play’s overriding musical score. The juxtaposition of rock lyrics and religious music recurs throughout the performance. 20. Brigit is a doubly enabling character in Burke Brogan’s critique of Irish Catholicism, for she alludes both to the Catholic saint and to the ancient pagan goddess. In the stage design, the playwright directs that a St. Brigit’s Cross be placed on an old cupboard or wall, a Christian symbol superimposed on the earlier Celtic fertility symbol. It is interesting, in this context, that the strong and rebellious character is named Brigit and not Mary. 21. Numerous commentators address this notable hypocrisy (Finlan 1993; Fahy 1998; McElwee 1998). 22. For example, Juliet is first denied permission to attend her mother’s funeral in the Magdalen but quickly transferred to the same institution after she is nearly raped by “Mick, the vegetable man” (1.4.22). Juliet is guilty because her mother was guilty; she is the sacrificial lamb on the altar of society’s sexual double standard. In this sense, she embodies the perverted warning Mother Victoria issues to her young novice: “Women tempt men! Remember the Garden! Eve started it all!” (2.1.45). 23. All further references to Stained Glass at Samhain refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and page number. See Lonergan 2002; Kelly et al. 2003, 123–24. 24. At various stages throughout the play, Sister Luke and Maura Ber sing a traditional Irish lullaby: “Seothín seo hó, mo stóir’n, mo leanbh, mo / sheód gan cealg, mo chuid den tsaol mór.” As the following translation suggests, the lullaby evokes the changeling myth from Irish folklore, which is appropriately ironic given the play’s subject matter. Hush Hush my little one, my dearest, my baby / My jewel without fault, my whole world Hush my little one, I deeply adore you / My dearest in his bed, sleeping without worry. My baby, may your sleep be good to you / Good luck and happiness each night be with you It’s me by your side praying happiness to you / Hush my little one, sleep for now.

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On top of the house there are white fairies / Dancing merrily under the full moon They’re calling on my child / In hopes of bringing him with them to the big rath. (http://academic.evergreen.edu/w/williams/songs/seoithin_seo_ho.html) 25. See note 20 above. 26. These stories echo and thus retell the community of Magdalen women in Eclipsed: “poor Rosemary” who fell to her death while trying to escape (1.3.7), Mary Ann who committed suicide by drinking a bottle of bleach (1.3.7), Julia Ann Moran who “aborted her baby” (2.1.42), and “our Katie” who died contentedly as a consecrated penitent (2.1.44).

CHAPTER

4. (E F ) FACING I RELAND ’ S M AGDALEN S URVIVORS

1. As intimated in the preface, this is not to suggest that the Magdalen is unique to Ireland. In fact, Washing Away the Stain emerged precisely as a result of Scottish theater-goers being challenged to acknowledge the presence in Edinburgh and Glasgow of institutions all too similar to those depicted in Patricia Burke Brogan’s play Eclipsed. 2. Humphries’s typical preoccupations—the unheard first-person account of a forgotten social history, the institutionalized cruelty of those with power, and attitudes to sexual mores and women made pariahs because of them—manifest themselves in Sex in a Cold Climate (Goldstone 1998). 3. The original film appeared in French with subtitles, but it was subsequently made available on video in an English-language version titled Convents of Shame. Notably, this documentary, alone of the four discussed in this chapter, focuses on both the Magdalen laundries and Ireland’s mother and baby homes. I have signaled the interconnections between both sets of institutions but also insist on the distinct character of each. 4. RTÉ, the national broadcasting organization, did air Julian Vignoles’s radio program, “The Magdalen Laundry,” in 1992 but to little fanfare (“The Magdalen Laundry” 1992). The comparative impact of radio and television coverage is also evident in the different receptions for Christine Buckley’s recollections of Goldenbridge industrial school first aired on Gay Byrne’s morning radio show in 1993 and later generating a media controversy following the television documentary Dear Daughter in 1996 (Torode and O’Sullivan 1999, 85). 5. Given the Irish media coverage, its seems obvious that many people in Ireland were able to view this documentary on Channel 4 television, which is widely available via cable. Interestingly, no similar media controversy followed Washing Away the Stain when it aired on BBC 2 five years earlier. 6. A total of nine Magdalen survivors contribute to the four documentaries, and their experiences are depicted as representative. Two women, Phyllis Valentine and Mary Norris, appear in more than one documentary.

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7. Humphries’s film, in particular, makes extensive use of archival footage, both Irish and non-Irish. 8. The film is unique in that the Irish Film Archive is empowered to make it available to contemporary filmmakers for incorporation in their documentaries (O’Flynn 2004). The archive is in possession of at least one other original film— also shot by a Catholic clergy member —that focuses on the Good Shepherd Magdalen asylum, Sunday’s Well, Cork. It dates from sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s. It too depicts the Magdalen women at recreation, playing outdoor games including rolling a hoop. The film also depicts what appears to be a summer outing to a beach where the nuns accompany the Magdalen women. The majority of the film focuses on a large religious outdoor festival, possibly a Corpus Christi or a Founder’s Day celebration. The scenes show about one hundred Magdalen women as well as a large group of industrial school children, some dressed in their First Communion finery, marching toward an intricately decorated altar erected in the convent grounds. I have seen this film. 9. Kearney’s explanation of postnationalism does not discard more traditional notions of self and nation but welcomes a multiplicity of perspectives and metanarratives, including those previously marginalized or excluded in mainstream society. He concludes, “Every nation is a hybrid construct, an ‘imagined’ community which can be reimagined again in alternative versions. The ultimate challenge is to acknowledge this process of ongoing hyrbridization from which we derive and to which we are constantly subject” (Kearney 1997, 188). For related discussion of postnational and postcolonial identity in an Irish context, see Kiberd 1995; Gibbons 1996; Lloyd 1993, 1999. For critical responses to this debate, see Howe 2000; Graham 2001. 10. Over four hundred people, most identifying themselves as Irish, contacted a Channel 4 telephone helpline after Sex in a Cold Climate aired on British television (Donnolly 1998a, 1998b). 11. In a similar vein, Martha Cooney publicly thanked the producers of Sex in a Cold Climate on Ireland’s national radio airwaves: “They gave me a chance to say what I had to say, a chance I never had before” (“Magdalen Laundries: Martha Cooney” 1998). 12. Walker explains: “Proponents of this historiographic method maintain that we need facts, lots of them, to prove beyond a doubt that incest was and is an abuse of epidemic proportions and that the Holocaust really, horrifically, happened. Denial, either categorically or through a series of rhetorical shifts, becomes unbearable. The idea that the ‘[p]hysical residues of all events may yield potentially unlimited access to the past,’ or that ‘the whole historical record survive[s] somewhere; [and] given the right techniques, nothing would elude retrieval,’ assumes a tremendous attraction in this age of historical contestation and amnesia” (Walker 2005, xvii). Also see Frisch 1990, 15–28; Lowenthal 1985, 19. 13. R. F. Foster is representative of Irish historiography’s preference for empirical scholarship, suggesting, “The dangers of new, deconstructed history, with its

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stress on the personal and the unmediated, include complacent anti-empiricism and aggressive sentimentalism, often reinforcing each other, and often relying on assumptions that actually contradict recorded experience” (2002, xv). 14. After Dear Daughter aired in 1996, a number of critics called into question the survivors’ testimony and suggested that the allegations of abuse required more rigorous substantiation. The filmmaker defended his film in response. Likewise, an organization named Let Our Voices Emerge (LOVE) has created a website that offers narratives testifying to positive experiences in Irish institutions operated by Catholic religious congregations. See www.voicesemerge.com. 15. The Holocaust survivor was testifying for the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University and claimed that she had seen four chimneys explode as a result of actions during the Auschwitz uprising. In fact, only one chimney, not all four, had been destroyed. Thus, as Laub explains, the historians discredited the woman’s account: “Since the memory of the testifying woman turned out to be, in this way, fallible, one could not accept—nor give credence to—her whole account of the events” (Felman and Laub 1992, 59–60). 16. As pointed out in chapter 2, the state capitation grant for children in the industrial school ceased when they reached the age of sixteen, and this was often the time that the religious orders transferred young women to the Magdalen asylums. 17. McCarthy’s experience again demonstrates the influence of the Carrigan Committee and Report, which identified dance halls and sexual activity in motor cars as major sources of moral decline in Free State Ireland (see introd.). 18. Walker, again referring to the Holocaust survivor, suggests in such circumstances that “the historical payoff comes from our knowing the difference between the veridical memory (one chimney did blow up; there was effective resistance at Auschwitz) and the pseudomemory (the other three chimneys did not blow up; the woman’s memory exaggerates; . . . ). Although pseudomemories also testify, we know more about memory function when we have additional information about a memory’s basis in real occurrence. It is partly our recognition that a memory is not wholly veridical that enables us to read the historical meaning that it nevertheless possesses” (2005, 5–6). 19. Christina Mulcahy died in February 1997 before she could view her story on television. However, only months earlier she reconnected with the son she was forced to surrender some fifty years earlier. 20. The focus on resistance and subversion presents a real difficulty that these documentaries struggle to resolve. In stressing the survivor’s defiance, the films distort the public’s perception of all Magdalen survivors. This is particularly the case with Sex in a Cold Climate in which the individual women are so compelling that viewers could easily make the mistake of thinking that they are representative. In gaining access to the Gloucester Street convent and its community of former Magdalen women, the producers of Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen effect a much better balance between survivors who resisted the religious rule (Mary

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Norris, in particular, but also Rita and Bridget) and survivors who remain institutionalized at an emotional and psychological level. 21. Rita, one of the survivors appearing in the French documentary, grew up in an industrial school, the daughter of an unmarried mother, before being transferred to the Good Shepherd Magdalen asylum in Limerick when she was seventeen. Like Phyllis Valentine, she insists that she constantly sought out ways to subvert the religious rule. After her escape she lived the rest of her life in London (Les Blanchisseuses 1998). 22. A number of survivors make similar implications connecting their experiences in industrial schools and Magdalen asylums and failed personal and sexual relationships thereafter. Bridgit Young concludes, “It haunts you” (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998). Mary Norris connected her experience with years of suffering from insomnia (Les Blanchisseuses 1998). A number of women link their incarceration and the fact that they never married, including Rita (Les Blanchisseuses 1998) and Martha Cooney (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998). 23. The potential for this scenario existed at all four Good Shepherd Magdalen asylums and at the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge High Park Magdalen; all five religious compounds also included an industrial school. See Appendix, table 2.12. 24. Peter Mullan fictionalizes Young’s testimony in one of the most powerful scenes of his film The Magdalene Sisters (2002). 25. In the aftermath of the Dear Daughter controversy, Nuala O’Faolain provided one of the few journalistic responses that recognized the socially constructed position of Ireland’s women religious (O’Faolain 1996). 26. As Niall McElwee, writing in the midst of the ensuing controversy, claims: “The nuns who were the guardians of the ‘penitents’ living in these institutions were expected by the society of the time to operate as both carers and gaolers. They were hardly compatible tasks” (1998, 2). 27. In late 1998 the 60 Minutes production crew encountered a media ban enforced by the Congregation of Religious of Ireland (CORI) that prohibited the religious orders from participating in their documentary. Correspondence with Kay Lim, Associate Producer, 60 Minutes, CBS News. New York. 28. Burton’s comments signal the significant shift in the church’s moral authority in 1990s Ireland. Just five years earlier, in the earlier documentary, Sr. Marcella O’Brien, superior general of the Mercy Sisters in Galway at the time, asserted that the Magdalen provided these “homeless and penniless” women “a place of refuge” (Washing 1993). 29. Shortly after Washing Away the Stain was filmed by BBC Scotland but before it was released on television, the cement-covered mass burial graves in Bohermore Cemetery in Galway were cleaned up and covered with white marble chippings and a black marble headstone was erected. No names were identified on the new headstone. Likewise, after Eclipsed was produced in Galway, six black

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marble headstones and a white statue of Mary Magdalen were added to the previously innocuous crucifix that marked the consecrated penitents’ burial plot in the Sisters of Mercy’s Galway convent. A total of seventy-two former consecrated penitents are named together with the dates of their deaths. Information supplied by Patricia Burke Brogan. 30. 60 Minutes’ point in filming the identities of these women is to reach a specifically Irish American audience; the names, as Kroft points out, could be found in any telephone directory in the United States and reflect the proximity of this elided history for many CBS viewers. Mary Norris complicates Kroft’s observation by asserting that Irish children adopted by Irish American families would also discover their birth mothers buried in these Magdalen plots—not only at the Cork convent, but at each of the similar burial sites throughout Ireland. Here Norris is referring to the revelation in 1996 that almost two-thousand illegitimate Irish children were adopted by American families between 1949 and 1970 (Milotte 1997; Maguire 2002). 31. Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen also depicts a communal burial plot, this time in New Ross, Co. Wexford, where the Good Shepherd Sisters also operated an asylum. The memorial plaque here uses precisely the same language as their Cork institution, with the historical span of years being the only difference: “In Loving Memory of the Residents of the Good Shepherd Convent New Ross, 1860–1967.” According to Finnegan, after the publication of her book in 2001 this monument was replaced with a new one again referring to the “residents” of St. Mary’s Good Shepherd Convent, but now recording the names of the sixty-two women who died in the home (Finnegan 2001, 156; 2004, 156). 32. Bishop Willie Walshe, who appeared in the 60 Minutes segment, remains the only member of Ireland’s Catholic hierarchy to apologize for the treatment of women in the Magdalen asylums: “I who lived in that society have a deep sense of shame at the wrong that has been done to them, I would see an obligation on us to make some effort to make, to make our reparations for the wrongs that were done to these girls” (“The Magdalen Laundries” 1999).

CHAPTER

5. T HE M AGDALENE S ISTERS

1. Quotations in the text, not otherwise attributed, are transcribed from the film. “Magdalen” and “Magdalene” are alternate spellings, but whereas historians have privileged the former, recent cultural representations tend to use the latter. In part, this may reflect a recent resurgence of interest in the biblical figure Mary Magdalene. 2. The film was shot on location in a disused Benedictine convent in the town of Dumfries, Scotland. Although the rural setting replicates traditional cinematic treatments of Ireland that accentuate an agricultural-based society, it also reverses the historic relationship by which the nation-state abandoned “immoral”

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women to urban institutions (e.g., Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway, Waterford, and New Ross) so as to maintain its imagined rural ideal. 3. The film’s conclusion cites the figure of thirty thousand women entering these institutions over the past two centuries. This number is now routinely referenced in documentaries (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998) and by journalists (Gordon 2003) and historians (Ferriter 2004, 538). In fact, there are no official records documenting the number of women entering Ireland’s Magdalen institutions after 1900. 4. Mullan relied heavily on this documentary directed by Steve Humphries, literally transcribing survivor testimony from the documentary and transferring it onto his characters in the film (Crowdus 2003). This use of oral history to construct a story that is largely unverifiable may prove particularly difficult for historians. See chap. 4; Walker 2005; Liddington 2002. 5. The film begins with a series of back-story sequences relating the reasons for three of the protagonists’ incarceration. It concludes with end titles summarizing the characters’ subsequent lives. This concluding coda problematically collapses the audience’s assumption, up to that point, that the film is fictional. The end titles suddenly underscore a different reality; the film is a dramadocumentary. 6. On the cultural deference paid to figures of authority, see Maguire and Ó Cinnéide 2005, 635–36; McGahern 2005. 7. This conclusion is too simplistic. Changing social conditions for women in 1970s Ireland also inform the laundries’ demise. For example, the state introduced the Unmarried Mothers Allowance in 1973, something Finola Kennedy suggests was like “stepping on to a new planet” (2001, 239). This latter provision helped to cultivate greater acceptance of single mothers. 8. The provenance of this photograph remains uncertain, even though it has appeared in O’Kane 1996; Sex in a Cold Climate 1998; and Finnegan 2001, fig. 15. Sister Lucy Burton, the reverend mother of the Gloucester Street convent when it closed in 1996, provides some evidence of authenticity in stating that “trusted girls were allowed to work on the convent door, take in laundry from the public and join the Corpus Christi parades along Sean MacDermott Street” (O’Kane 1996, 2). In the absence of an authenticating provenance, historians in particular might question whether those depicted in the photograph are Magdalen women. 9. Survivors frequently assert that escapees were routinely captured and forcibly returned behind convent walls by members of the police, something Rose, at the film’s end, warns Bernadette about just prior to her departure for Liverpool (Washing 1993; Sex in a Cold Climate 1998). 10. Christina Mulcahy states that she reported an instance of abuse to one of the convent nuns after a priest exposed himself while hearing confession. The priest denied his actions, but Mulcahy recounts how she responded in turn, informing him, “You’re not a man of God!” (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998)

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11. Noel Brown, who was forced to resign as minister for health (1948–51), represents one example of an individual paying a price for questioning this churchstate collusion (Brown 1986; Keogh 1995, 185–213; Ferriter 2004, 501–4). 12. By focusing on her aberrant individuality, Mullan enables the bad apple response to Sister Bridget. This response was widely promulgated in the wake of Louis Lentin’s drama-documentary Dear Daughter. 13. There is very little precise evidence detailing the finances of the Magdalen laundries in the twentieth century. Unlike commercial laundries that had to file annual accounts at the state’s Companies Office, the Magdalen laundries, as registered charities, had accounts closed to public inspection. Moreover, for those charities that may also have been limited companies, a special section of Irish company law allowed religious orders to file their annual audits at the Companies Office without any disclosure of turnover, profit, or capital assets (Harold 2003; Hearn 2004). 14. Article 41.2.1 of Ireland’s constitution states, “In particular, the State recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.” The subsequent clause, 41.2.2., adds, “The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.” Bunreacht na hÉireann/Constitution of Ireland (Dublin: Stationery Office/Brunswick Press, 1997), 166–68. 15. Phyllis Valentine recalls how on special occasions the nuns arranged movies for the inmates of the Galway asylum (Washing 1993). 16. The Irish historian James Donnelly points to the formation of the National Film Institute together with the increasing availability of cheaply rented 16mm sound projectors as leading to increased involvement by local Catholic clergy in showing “suitable” films for educational and entertainment purposes, e.g., The Song of Bernadette, How Green Was My Valley, and A Bell for Adano. These innovations enabled Catholic clergy to redirect entertainment in rural areas away from secular entertainments, including cinema and dance halls, and back into parish halls that were more directly under the priest’s supervision (2000, 276–80). 17. Because she is a prostitute, Patsy’s mother places her daughter in the care of nuns. Patsy feigns a religious vocation as a retreat from secular uncertainties. Ultimately, she purposely fails her exams so as to ensure that she will not graduate to high school. The film’s major conflict ensues between the liberal Father O’Malley and the more rigid Sister Benedict on the importance of educational standards for Catholic institutions. 18. See MacCurtain 1997; Inglis 1998, esp. 211–19; Fuller 2002, esp. 164–92. 19. In 1901 there were more than eight thousand nuns in Ireland (Fahey 1987, 7). By 1970 this number had grown to 18,662 (Inglis 1998, 212). See also MacCurtain 1995; Cullingford 2006. 20. Women possessed some choice in deciding which religious community to join. Clear (1987) suggests that the religious orders engaged in institutional work often found it most difficult to gain new recruits.

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21. Burke Brogan explains how as a “white novice” in the Mercy order she was summarily ordered to substitute for a nun at Galway’s Magdalen laundry (2004, 161–62). See also Fuller 2002, 164.

CHAPTER

6. M ONUMENTS , M AGDALENS , M EMORIALS

1. Most Magdalens were buried anonymously. The reasons given for such practices by various religious orders include that the women’s family did not want to be exposed to shame and ridicule by having the name exposed publicly. See Washing Away 1993; “The Magdalen Laundries” 1999. 2. Information on the park bench obtained from the Parks Superintendent of St. Stephen’s Green via Emma Steven, Assistant Librarian, Office of Public Works Library, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. The Magdalen bench is the only memorial erected in St. Stephen’s Green in recent times. 3. The committee members were Patricia McDonald, Pat Tierney (deceased), Margo Kelly, Kathleen Maher, and Blaithnaid NíChinnedie. The plaque was designed by Adam May and cast by Lan’guage, 17 Adelaide Rd., Dublin 2. 4. O’Toole revealed that the sisters invested $110,000 in Guinness Peat Aviation holdings in 1991 when the share price of the speculative company was at its highest. The bottom fell out of the company in 1993, and the company’s share register, when made public, revealed the High Park convent as holding “5,200 shares.” While O’Toole acknowledges that there is no direct correlation between GPA’s collapse and the nuns’ decision to exhume the bodies, the Catholic Press and Information Office released a statement explaining the sale of land in terms of the convent’s need to realize capital to fund “further development at the convent” (1993). 5. Whelan continues: This double dislocation has created acute problems of representation. . . . Culture was subordinated to the service of politics—culture as the selfconscious construction and mobilization of difference. The state’s cultural nationalism then became the effort to retrieve an authentic tradition, whose continuity differentiates the primordial nation from those that occupy it. Culture initially has to act as the site of self-differentiation, and therefore of resistance; but once that resistance becomes successful, the new state must then redeem the culture by cleansing it of its colonial impurities, and retrieving that which has been blemished or repressed. The cultural nationalism of the postcolonial state anxiously seeks the pure, the original, the authentic, the traditional, as a means to recuperate a depleted plenitude. . . . The postcolonial Irish state had a problem, however; if the nation existed essentially as a narrative strategy, how could any narrative authority and closure be achieved, when Ireland’s history was so obviously contested and broken? (2003a, 94–95)

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6. Two other events also influenced this renewed scholarly interest. Following three years of focus on the famine, 1998 witnessed the celebrations of the bicentenary of the United Irishmen Rebellion, which similarly led to a broad series of commemorative activities. At the same time, the Northern Ireland peace process, influenced in part by the language of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, recognized the concomitant need to memorialize and commemorate as part of the process of closing the wounds left by three decades of sectarian violence. 7. Moreover, McBride asserts that “there is no evidence” that “this preoccupation is abating; if anything, questions of collective memory and commemoration have assumed a new prominence in recent years” (2001, 3). The historian Mary Daly dismissed the “wave of commemorations” as constituting a “form of national therapy,” concentrating almost exclusively on the pain of the past, and making the memory of the famine more “intelligible to people who find it distant to their everyday lives” (2004, 39–40). 8. As Lloyd explains, “The therapeutic or curative element of psychoanalysis is at one with the discourse on the development of the political subject: fixation, or even a mere persistence in reinvoking the lost is, as a form of melancholy, disruptive of the social functioning of the subject and is met with the demand that the melancholic overcome their disabling obsession” (2000, 218). 9. The language of “public, historical mourning,” which presents itself as the means of overcoming such a “disabling obsession,” comes to represent, in Lloyd’s analysis, “not a retrieval of the past nor a reactivation of the lost potential in the present, but an inward-turning decathexis or separation from that which has been lost” (2000, 218–21). 10. Fenster outlines her artistic aesthetic as follows: Two encompassing metaphors preoccupy me. These are the architecture of creative work and the archaeology of the soul, which like building out or digging deep are mirror images. Through these fundamental themes, I grapple with internal and personal processes of identity, desire, longing, and the inevitable losses sealed in memory. The metaphor or architecture suggests the processes of constructing, building, and creating a place for the self. The idea of place implies safety and sanctuary, intimacy and warmth, but also isolation and loneliness in the home of one’s past, as well as boundaries and limits, both protective and fearsome. The other metaphor in my work is that of the archaeological excavation of memory, which, while it reveals, also conceals through illusion, transformation, and deeply embedded ideas that may obscure the truth. (Fenster and Rabinovitch 2003, 414) 11. In conversation with the author, Fenster asserted that when she was working on her installation she was unaware of Eclipsed or the documentaries discussed above. Her installation preceded Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters by some

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two years. She acknowledges the assistance of Mari Steed, who has long advocated on behalf of Ireland’s Magdalen and adoption communities. Steed’s website, www.netreach.net/~steed/magdalen.html, was one of the first online sources of information available, and it served as a starting point for Fenster’s research. 12. “ ‘Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries’ is not intended to be a documentary about the Irish Catholic Church run prison laundry systems that were in operation from the 1800s to the 1970s but is instead is [sic] an imaginative inquiry into the question of what enabled the women incarcerated in the laundry prisons to survive in such a punitive environment” (Fenster 2003). 13. The artist used “found” sheets, collected from thrift stores and retaining insignia marks, stains, and tears to further symbolize Ireland’s Magdalen laundries. Conversation with the author. 14. The double Polaroid Image Transfer portraits on each sheet were manipulated digitally using Photoshop resulting in the sepia tones. Ultimately, she applied dye-sublimation prints to the cotton sheets (Fenster 2003; De Nicola 2001). 15. These objects are stylized to look similar to images in children’s books and the items appear to have a 1930s–1950s vintage (e.g., doll, airplane). Unwittingly, therefore, the artist locates the Magdalen institutions back in the “bad old days” of the 1950s, whereas the final one closed its doors in 1996. 16. Manipulated digitally through a series of software algorithms, the sound component includes only one minor additional sample of sea waves. Two concentric layers of four-channel sound—one inner layer of the conversational voices coming from the sheets and an outer layer from the walls giving voice to the women’s deeper emotional desires—are complemented by highly manipulated voices emanating from within the washtubs (McNabb 2000). 17. The institutions themselves, as “sites of memory,” are literally disappearing from the landscape: there is a new development of townhouses at High Park, and upscale condominiums were built on the sites of the Galway and Gloucester Street Magdalens. The former Limerick Magdalen now houses the University of Limerick’s college of art, and Waterford’s Magdalen was absorbed by its Institute of Technology. 18. This presentation is not, however, unique to the United States. An exhibition at Dublin’s Kilmainham jail in 1997, Guns and Chiffon, included photographic images of women imprisoned for their participation in the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War. These images of female prisoners provoked outrage among contemporary viewers witnessing how the British colonial administration treated Irish women, imprisoning them sometimes for minor crimes. See Russell 1997; O’Faolain 1997. 19. Also see figs. 6.8, 6.17. 20. Also see figs. 6.15, 6.10. 21. Also see figs. 6.11, 6.12. 22. Also see figs. 6.16, 6.18. 23. Also see figs. 6.7, 6.17.

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24. Also see figs. 6.17, 6.18. 25. See chap. 5, note 14. 26. She offers thus a series of icons that suggest the women’s personal control; in other words, while demonstrating how the institution regulated every aspect of their lives, she insists that there is one feature it cannot suppress, the imagination. 27. Flynn was one of the survivors who participated in Mary Raftery’s awardwinning documentary States of Fear (1999), which examines Ireland’s industrial and reformatory school system. Flynn’s earlier novel offers a fictional account of his childhood spent in Letterfrack industrial school in County Galway (1983). He has also written and performed in a number of plays, including The Liberty Suite (Paine’s Plough Theatre Company in London), Talking to the Wall (Dublin Arts Club, 1996/Dublin Theatre Festival, 1997), and James X (Dublin, Music Centre, Dublin Theatre Festival, 2002). Most recently, he has erected a number of public art projects, ManxProject, related to surviving institutional abuse. 28. The presidency, which rotates between member nations, began on 1 January and ended on 30 June 2004.

C ONCLUSION 1. For more information on the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, see www.childabusecommission.ie. 2. For more information on the Residential Institutions Redress Board, see www.rirb.ie. 3. Speaking in Dáil Éireann on 12 February 2002, Dr. Michael Woods, Ireland’s minister for education, outlined the factors by which Magdalen survivors were excluded from the proposed reparations scheme for survivors of residential institutions: “The laundries differ substantially from the institutions now covered by the Bill in that the residents concerned were for the most part adults and the laundries were entirely private institutions, in respect of which public bodies had no functions” (Dáil Éireann, 12 Feb. 2002, 459; see also Ireland 2001). 4. One week later, on 19 February, Minister Woods was forced to announce an extension of the redress compensation scheme that suggests the already fraying logic of the compartmentalized scheme: “Children who were transferred to Magdalen laundries from industrial schools or orphanages and who were abused there will also be covered by the scheme” (“Woods Extends Child Abuse Compensation Scheme” 2002). 5. The importance of a “distinct” redress scheme is twofold. First, folding the Magdalen survivors into the Residential Institutions Redress Board would be inappropriate and insensitive given that historically the religious orders insisted on treating these adult women as children. It would be cruelly ironic if the state were to do likewise. Second, folding the Magdalen issue into the Child Abuse

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Commission or the Redress Board has the potential to elide the distinct characteristics of this specific historical injustice. A similar elision occurred when the government folded the “vaccine trials” (involving the use of industrial school children for medical testing by major pharmaceutical companies in the 1950s and later) into the Child Abuse Commission by tacking an amendment to the original legislation, which ultimately did not stand up under judicial review. 6. In August 2003, amid the media controversy provoked by Peter Mullan’s movie, the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas did “sincerely apologize for any and all injustices that may have occurred” in the Magdalen laundries. See www. sistersofmercy.org/justice/magdalene_movie.html. 7. Sr. Teresa Coughlan, the former mother superior of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge Gloucester Street convent, claimed that she would regret if she was ever lacking in compassion toward the women in her care, but she concluded her comments as part of the French documentary as follows: “The Lord knows the truth, so it doesn’t matter what the media says. We are not going to defend ourselves, because God knows” (Les Blanchisseuses 1998). 8. For more information on the Magdalen Memorial Committee, see www. magdalenelaundries.com. 9. For more information on Adoption Ireland, see www.adoptionireland.com. 10. For more information on Justice for Magdalenes, see http://groups.yahoo. com/group/justice_for_magdalenes/.

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Index

abuse. See child abuse; domestic abuse; physical abuse; sexual abuse action cultural representations and, 183–84 Eclipsed on need for a continuation of, 101, 103, 104 adoptees, 231n30 as legacy of institutions in contemporary society, 94 and refusal of access to records of Magdalen asylums, 186 Adoption Act (1952), 53 Adoption Ireland, 187 age of consent in Carrigan Report, 6 Catholic Church on, 8 female witnesses on, 17 Ahern, Bertie, 184 Aikenhead, Mary, 28–29 Anderson, Benedict, 204n1 anonymity of former Magdalen inmates, 160 burial plots and, 231n31 families and, 133 testimony and, 130 An Triail (On Trial) (Ní Ghráda), 82–83 apologies refusal of —by religious congregations, 185 —by state, 184–85

by the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, 238n6 by the Sisters of Mercy to victims of abuse in industrial and reformatory schools, 185 architecture of containment. See containment, architechture of archival images in documentaries, 117, 228n7 Arendt, Hannah, 90, 224n11 Arnold, Mavis, 79–80 artifacts in The Magdalene Sisters, 140 attractiveness, institutionalization and, 136 Backus, Margot, 204n2 Barton, Ruth, 138 Batts, Fionnula, 91 Bells of St. Mary’s, The (film), incorporation in The Magdalene Sisters, 154–56 Blanchisseuses de Magdalen, Les, 113–14, 115 on institutionalized survivors, 229–30n20 use of archival images in, 117 and viewpoint of Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, 132–33 Boland, Eavan, 205n4

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Boland, Gerry, 59 Bolger, Dermot, 91 Borstal institutions, 19 unavailability for young women, 51, 68, 69, 71 —Carrigan Committee on, 221n56 Bourke, Joanne, 212n12 Brady, Ita, 15, 18 Broderick, John, 91 Brown, Michael J., 8, 216n2 Bruen, Ken, 91 Buchanan, Emily, 18 Buckley, Christine, 227n4 burial plots of Magdalen inmates, 231n31 in Galway, 230–31n29 Glasnevin Cemetery Magdalen Plot, Dublin, 105, 137, 163, 177 in Good Shepherd, Cork, 134–35 in New Ross, 231n31 Burke Brogan, Patricia, 18, 82, 91–94. See also Eclipsed (Burke Brogan); Stained Glass at Samhain (Burke Brogan) on her time in a Magdalen asylum, 225n14 Burton, Sr. Lucy, 133, 232n8 Byrne, Edward, 48 Byrne, Gay, 227n4 “Call Me by My Name”: Requiem for Remains Unknown, 1889–1987 (Flynn), 177 –81, 179 Canavan, J., S. J., 7 –8 capitalism, Magdalen laundries and, 152–53, 216n40 Carrigan, William, 6 Carrigan Committee appointment of, 5–6 new archival material on, 4 witnesses —Catholic Church clergy, 10 —O’Duffy, Eoin, 10, 12–13 — women as, 14–19

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Carrigan Report (1931), 9–19 censorship of, 7 contents of, 6 on correlation between girls leaving industrial schools and prostitution, 73 and origin of Ireland’s containment culture, 5 withholding of witness testimony, 10, 14–19 Carroll, Elizabeth, 20 Cassidy, James F., 1 Catholic Church. See also churchstate partnership; congregations, religious; nuns absence of clergy from Ní Ghráda’s An Triail, 83 abuse scandals and release of The Magdalene Sisters, 139 clergy as witnesses in Carrigan Report, 10 concerns of, 8 culpability of, 183 decline of social and political power, 106 interconnectedness of institutions, 30–31, 72 Magdalen Memorial Committee and, 161 moral standards of, 3, 26, 47, 137 and patriarchal order, 99 and reimagining of Irish identity, 135 and responsibility for areas of social welfare, 24 RTÉ television and, 116 as scapegoat, 106, 139 and sexual double standard, 93 Standing Committee of the Catholic hierarchy, 7 and state financing of charities, 49 Catholic Protection and Rescue Society, 210n73

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censorship of films, 2 Charitable Words (Preston), 214n23 Chenevix, Helen, 18 child abuse refusal to acknowledge as concern, 13 state apologies to residential victims of, 184 children number in care in 1968–1969, 203t offenses against, 194t Children Act (1908), 20, 73 on industrial schools, 79 Children (Amendment) Act (1957), 80 Children of the Poor Clares (Arnold and Laskey), 79–80 church-state partnership, 74 and architecture of containment, 19 beginning of, 48 criminalization of sexual relations outside of marriage, 4 effects of, 137 legislation resulting from, 2 The Magdalene Sisters on role of, 139, 146–50 Clark, Anna, 213n14 Clarke, Austin, 91, 223n80 “Clay” ( Joyce), 223n80 Clear, Caitríona, 212n11, 218n21 Cleary, Joe, 138 closing of the last Magdalen laundry, 42, 166–67 clothes of Magdalen inmates, 125, 126, 173, 225n14 colonial administration, British relationship with Catholic Church, 31 responsibility for social welfare ceded to Catholic Church, 24 commemoration, 235n7 Eclipsed as ritualized, 94 Eclipsed on, 103, 104 of Great Irish Famine, 165–66

memorials and distance between past and present, 167 Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries as act of personal commemoration, 171 therapeutic discourse and, 165 Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor, Including the Insane Poor, 51–52 on infant mortality, 55–56 on mandatory periods of detention, 53 Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, 184 Committee on the Criminal Law Amendments Acts (1880–85) and Juvenile Prostitution. See Carrigan Committee communal friendship in Eclipsed, 96–97 communities culpability of, 146–50, 183 support of Magdalen laundries, 186 concealment of a birth committals to Catholic institutions, 196–97t committals to Catholic Magdalen asylums, 198–200t committals to Protestant Magdalen asylums, 195t court cases, 194t, 195t legislation on, 219n29 Congregation of Religious of Ireland (CORI), 230n27 congregations, religious. See also nuns Burke Brogan on —criticism in Stained Glass at Samhain, 110–11 —in Eclipsed, 93 and custodial care, 28 denial of access to twentieth century records, 24, 186

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congregations, religious (cont.) importance of mother superior in arrangement with courts, 65 resistance to examination of their involvement in documentaries, 133–34 and state service, 23 Conlon McKenna, Marita, 91, 224n12 Connell, Kenneth Hugh, 28 Conrad, Kathryn, 137 containment, architecture of church-state partnership and, 2, 19 and cruelty, 100 definition of, 2–3 Magdalen institutions and, 42 nuns as products of, 93, 99 —documentaries and, 132 origins of, 5 and transfers between institutions, 45 types of institutions in, 46 contraception, 9, 207n32 as concern of the Catholic Church, 8 proscription of, 46 —and travel to England, 218n22 Convents of Shame. See Blanchisseuses de Magdalen, Les Cooney, Martha, 228n11 interview on Pat Kenny Show, 126, 129 testimony in Sex in a Cold Climate, 124, 125–27, 230n22 —on release, 128–29 —use in The Magdalene Sisters, 141 Cooper, Alison, 88 Cosgrave, William T., 6, 205n12 Costello, John A., and infanticide legislation, 57 Costello, Mary, 33, 38 on double standard of sexuality, 41 on Magdalen asylums, 23–24 publication in The Lady of the House, 211n1

INDEX

264

Coughlan, Sr. Teresa, 133, 238n7 county homes, unmarried mothers in, 1, 18, 42, 49, 53, 218n15 Criminal Justice Act (1960) church-state complicity in, 66 Dáil debate on, 69 Justice Department’s “Memorandum for the Government,” 67 St. Mary Magdalen Asylum’s status as a remand home not mentioned in, 71 Criminal Justice (Female Offenders) Bill (1942), 68 Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935), 2, 9, 17 debates on link between ban on birth control and infanticide, 55 informal committee and preparation of, 8 as origin of Ireland’s containment culture, 5 cruelty in architecture of containment, 100 and enforcement of social conformity, 138 Cruice, M. J., 16, 18, 210n74 culpability, male, elision of, 55, 58, 61–62, 145 cultural memory. See memory cultural purity, fiction of, 19 Daly, Mary, 235n7 Dance Hall Act (1935), 9 dance halls Carrigan Report on licensing of, 11 as concern of Catholic Church, 8 Dear Daughter (television documentary; Lentin), 88, 115–16, 227n4 testimonies called into question, 229n14 Delaney, Fr. Jack, 117 Delanty, Gerard, 224n5

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Delay, Cara, 27 Denny, Arbella, 25, 180–81 Denny House, 181, 212n9 destitution, infanticide and, 60 Devane, R. S., S. J., 10–11, 50–51 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 204n2 divorce, prohibition of, 2 documentaries. See television documentaries Dodd, I., 17, 18 domestic abuse, 88 Donnelly, James, 233n16 Donoghue, Emma, 91 Do Penance or Perish (Finnegan), 214n23 Doyle, Paddy, 91 Doyle, Roddy, 88 Dublin. See also Gloucester Street asylum; Leeson Street Denny House, 181, 212n9 Glasnevin Cemetery Magdalen Plot, 163, 177 Magdalen Memorial Bench (St. Stephen’s Green), 159–63, 160, 161, 164 unmarried mothers in, 48 Dublin County Union, 15 Dublin Slums, 1800–1925 (Prunty), 214n23 Duff, Frank, 52 Duggan, Sr. Noel, 133 Dunbar-Harrison, Letitia, 205n12 Eclipsed (Burke Brogan), 18, 82, 91–105, 92, 102 on need for action, 101–5 on nuns, 99–101 on past and present, 94–96 performance history of, 224–25n13 Edgar Home, Belfast, 212n9 education, lack of displacement to mental illness, 62 and downfall of girls, 209n61

and infanticide, 60 on sexuality, 15 Education Department awareness of transfers from industrial and reformatory schools to Magdalen asylums, 73 emigration of pregnant Irish women to England, 217 –18n14 as reason for leaving Magdalen asylums, 192t Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries on, 176 unmarried mothers and, 16 England availability of contraception in, 218n22 emigration of pregnant Irish women to, 217 –18n14 Magdalen institutions in, 211n4 entries into Magdalen asylums sources of, 191t unavailability of official records after 1900, 24, 232n3 voluntary, 19, 24, 37 —in the nineteenth century, 30, 45 —by women responsible of infanticide, 54, 63–64, 69 escapes from Magdalen asylums, 128, 192t Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries on, 176 “Ethics of Memory” (Ricoeur), 166 Eudes, Fr. John, 39 Factory and Workshop Act (1907), 216n40 Fahy, Bernadette, 88 Fáil, Fianna, 205n5 families and anonymity of former Magdalen women, 133

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families (cont.) culpability of, 183 The Magdalene Sisters on, 141–44 referrals by, 31, 191t —Eclipsed on, 98 —Sex in a Cold Climate on, 125, 126 refusal to recognize role, 186 religious vocations and social mobility of, 157 of unmarried mothers, 61 Family (television drama; Doyle), 88 Felman, Shoshana, 119 Fenster, Diane, 168–77 on her artistic aesthetic, 235n10 Field Day Anthology (Howes), 3 financing by state of Catholic Church charities, 49 and inspections and regulations, 71 of Magdalen institutions, 47, 185 of mother and baby homes, 48, 52 for Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta Street, 68 financing of Magdalen asylums, 24, 47, 185, 233n13 Finnane, Mark, 6 Finnegan, Frances, 138, 214n23 Fitzpatrick, Father, 11, 12 Flanagan, Father, 11, 12 Flynn, Gerard Mannix, 177 –81, 237n27 Foster, R. F., 165, 228–29n13 Foucault, Michel, 204n2 Frisch, Michael, 118 Galway Magdalen Asylum. See Sisters of Mercy Gavin Duffy, Margaret, 15, 18 gender inequality, The Magdalene Sisters on, 144, 145 generational contamination theory, 28, 131 Geoghegan, James, 7 –8 Gibbons, Luke, 137, 167 Gildea, Father, 11

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266

Glasnevin Cemetery Magdalen Plot, Dublin, 105, 137, 163, 177 Gleeson, Dermot F., 209n61 Glimois, Nicolas, 115 Gloucester Street asylum, Dublin, 29. See also St. Mary Magdalen Asylum as alternative reformatory school, 81 archival images from, 117 Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen on, 113–14 closing of, 42, 166–67 committals for infanticide/ concealment of a birth, 198–200t McCarthy on, 213–14n21 Magdalen women from, 147 number of inmates, 190t and probationers, 201t Prunty on, 190, 214n23 as remand home, 71 Glynn, Joseph, 19 Good Shepherd asylum, Belfast, 29 number of inmates, 189t reasons for leaving, 192t sources of entry to, 191t Good Shepherd asylum, Cork, 29. See also Good Shepherd asylum, Sunday’s Well, Cork industrial school attached to, 202t number of inmates, 189t and probationers, 201t reasons for leaving, 192t sources of entry to, 191t, 198–200t Good Shepherd asylum, Limerick, 29 admissions of women under nineteen years old, 193t industrial and reformatory schools attached to, 202t number of inmates, 189t and probationers, 201t reasons for leaving, 192t sources of entry to, 191t, 198–200t

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Good Shepherd asylum, New Ross, 29 industrial school attached to, 202t number of inmates, 190t reasons for leaving, 192t sources of entry to, 191t Good Shepherd asylum, Sunday’s Well, Cork, 122. See also Good Shepherd asylum, Cork archival film on, 228n8 Good Shepherd asylum, Waterford, 29 industrial school attached to, 202t number of inmates, 189t reasons for leaving, 192t sources of entry to, 191t, 198–200t Good Shepherd Sisters, 29 Finnegan on, 214n23 Luddy on, 214n23 move to Ireland, 213n20 in “The Magdalen Laundries,” 134 Goulding, June, 18, 91 Great Irish Famine commemorations, 165–66, 186 and women’s position in Irish society, 212n12 Green Lion, The (Hackett), 213n16 Guide for the Religious (Mercy Sisters), 31–32, 33 on hair cutting, 215n35 Hackett, Francis, 213n16 hair Mercy Sisters’ Guide on cutting, 215n35 shaving alluded to in Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries, 173 Hearn, Mona, 214n23, 216n40 High Park asylum, Drumcondra, 29, 33–42 Cooney at, 126 exhumation of remains from, 105, 136–37, 162, 167 —extallation on, 177 –81

Galway’s Magdalen asylum compared to, 45 industrial school attached to, 202t McCarthy on, 213n21 number of inmates, 189t and probationers, 201t reasons for leaving, 192t Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge and, 29 sources of entry to, 191t, 198–200t History and Memory in Modern Ireland (McBride), 165 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 204n2 Horne, Delia Moclair, 15, 16 Howes, Marjorie, 3 Humphries, Steve, 115, 150, 227n2 “Hunger and History, Monuments to the Great Irish Famine” (Kelleher), 166 iconographic objects in Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries, 174–76 illegitimacy breaking the silence about, 88 Catholic Church and, 28 increase due to limited travel to England during World War II, 218n22 intolerance for, 46 as percent of total births, 194t and rates of infant mortality, 55–56, 193t social conditions ignored by Carrigan Report, 12 Illegitimate Children (Affiliation Orders) Act, 16 incarceration in Magdalen asylums persistence of effects of, 230n22 sexual immorality and, 16, 19 through judicial system, 31, 63–65, 71

INDEX

267

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incest breaking the silence about, 88 cases, 209n56 and illegitimate children, 12 institutionalization of victims of, 136 social conditions fostering —ignored by Carrigan Report, 12 individuality, eradication of, 138 industrial schools attached to Catholic Magdalen asylums, 202t documentary on abuse in, 88 interconnectedness with Magdalen asylums, 130 Magdalen asylums compared to, 46 number of children in 1968–1969, 203t transfers to Magdalen asylums from, 45–46, 72–81, 229n16 —illegality of, 78 —Washing Away the Stain on, 120–21, 130 upward age limit, 222n66 Industrial Schools Act (1868), 28 infanticide, 54–66 ban on birth control and, 55 committals to Catholic institutions, 196–97t committals to Catholic Magdalen asylums, 198–200t committals to Protestant Magdalen asylums, 195t court cases, 194t, 195t Irish folklore on, 218n18 men and, 220n38 unmarried mothers and, 16 Infanticide Act (1949), 54, 59, 62 debate on, 58–59 Justice Department’s “Memorandum for the Government,” 57 –58 infant mortality, 55–56, 193t Inglis, Tom, 27

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268

inmates of Magdalen asylums. See also survivors anonymity and, 130, 133, 160, 231n31 burial plots, 105, 134–45, 163, 177, 230–31n29, 231n31 clothes of, 125, 126, 225n14 former, as legacy of institutions in contemporary society, 94 in Magdalen asylums, 189–90t referred to as children, 38, 215n37 inspections financing by state and, 71 Magdalen asylums and, 81, 82 at Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta Street, 69 Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 50 Irish Free State. See also church-state partnership cooperation with Catholic Church, 2, 3 deference to the Catholic Church in the realm of institutional provision, 47 private negotiations with the Catholic Church, 50 Irish Rosary (magazine), 33 Irish Times, 136, 177 Irish Women Citizens and Local Government Association, 15, 17 Irish Women Doctors’ Committee, 15 Irish Women Workers’ Union, 18 Joyce, James, 91, 223n80 Justice Department memorandum on Carrigan Report, 7 “Justice for Magdalenes” (web-based listserv), 187 Keane, David, 8 Kearney, Richard, 89, 228n9 Kelleher, Margaret, 166 Kelly, Margo, 162

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Kennedy, Eileen, 75 Kennedy, Finola, 232n7 Kennedy Report, 75–78 Kenney, James Fitzgerald, 5 Kenny, Pat, 126, 129 interview of Martha Cooney, 129 Kerwick, Lavinia, 87 –88 Kettle, J. M., 15 Kilkenny incest case, 88, 209n56 Kroft, Steve, 123, 124, 134 Lady of the House, The (magazine), 211n1 Land of Spices, The (O’Brien), 213n20 Laskey, Heather, 79–80 Laub, Dori, 119 Laws of Life (Sutherland), 216n1 leaving Magdalen asylums. See also escapes from Magdalen asylums reasons for, 192t Lee, Father, 11 Lee, J. J., 12 Leerssen, Joep, 164, 167 Leeson Street, Dublin. See also Denny House Magdalen asylum on, 212n5 site of first asylum, 25 as site of Flynn’s extallation, 178, 180–81 Legion of Mary, 52 Leland, Mary, 91 Lentin, Louis, 88. See also Dear Daughter (television documentary; Lentin) Let Our Voices Emerge (LOVE), 229n14 “Living on Sin” (Clarke), 223n80 Lloyd, David, 165–66, 167, 178, 235n8, 235n9 Longley, Edna, 165 Luddy, Maria, 26, 30, 39, 138 Women and Philanthropy, 212n6, 212n11, 214n23

McBride, Ian, 165, 235n7 McCabe, Patrick, 91 McCarthy, Josephine, 134 testimony in “The Magdalen Laundries,” 122–23 —on separation of mothers and children, 131 McCarthy, Michael, 213–14n21 McElwee, Niall, 230n26 MacInerney, M. H., 19, 50 McKenna, Yvonne, 156 MacLaverty, Bernard, 91 McLoughlin, Dympna, 26, 213n15 McMullan, Kim, 205n4 McNabb, Michael, 171 McQuaid, John Charles, 67 –68 pressured by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, 69 Magdalen asylums, Catholic, 26, 28–29, 189–192t, 198–200t Magdalen asylums, Protestant, 25–26, 195t Magdalen laundries and capitalism, 152–53, 216n40 and financing of Magdalen asylums, 24 as important part of Magdalen asylums, 38 Sex in a Cold Climate on work in, 126 Magdalene Sisters, The (film; Mullan), 18, 136–58, 143, 146, 149, 155 and genre of popular film, 150–53 media coverage of, 139 and public consciousness, 187 use of survivor testimony, 140, 141, 149, 151 religious vocations and, 153–57 Magdalen experience, persistence of effects of, 128, 230n22 “Magdalen Laundries, The” (CBS 60 Minutes), 115, 122–24 McCarthy’s testimony in, 122–23

INDEX

269

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“Magdalen Laundries, The” (cont.) and media ban, 230n27 Norris’s testimony in, 123 use of archival images, 117 “Magdalen Laundry, The” (radio program), 227n4 Magdalen Memorial Bench (St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin), 159–63, 160, 161, 164 origin of, 162 Magdalen Memorial Committee, 160–61 cultural representations and, 187 “Magdalens of High Park, The,” 33–42 Magray, Margaret, 212n11 Married Love (Stopes), 216n1 Meaney, Gerardine, 205n4 media CBS 60 Minutes and media ban, 230n27 coverage of The Magdalene Sisters, 139 memory. See also post-colonial memory, Whelan on ethics, 132–33 —Ricoeur on, 89–90, 166 relationship with history, 165 mental deficiency Devane on, 51 and institutionalization, 136 patriarchal culture and, in Sex in a Cold Climate, 125 women responsible of infanticide and, 54, 62 mission of Magdalen asylums change in, 42, 47, 81 preventative, 72 punitive, 47, 65, 81, 172 rehabilitative, 47, 81 —taken over by mother and baby homes, 49 Moloney, Helena, 18

INDEX

270

Moral Monopoly (Inglis), 27 Morgan, Isabella, 170 mother and baby homes, 48, 49, 52 Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen on, 227n3 Magdalen asylums compared to, 46 Sex in a Cold Climate on, 124–25 state financing of, 48, 52 mothers, unmarried Cassidy on, 1 classes of, 48 —according to Devane, 50–51 —according to Report of the Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor, 52 —first offenders, 49–50 —segregation of, 49 criminalization of, 17 and infanticide, 60 intolerance of, 16 Irish Free State’s institutional response to, 51–54, 136 residential provision for, 193t separation from children, 131 Sex in a Cold Climate on, 124 in twentieth-century Ireland, 48–54 motor cars, moral abuse in, as concern of Catholic Church, 8 Mulcahy, Christina, 229n19, 232n10 testimony in Sex in a Cold Climate, 124–25 —escape, 128 —inspiration for The Magdalene Sisters, 149 —on rebellion, 127 –28 Mullan, Peter, 18. See also Magdalene Sisters, The names, new, 37, 122 narratives as challenges to official history, 89

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and duty to remember and tell, 90, 166 Ricoeur on dual aspect of, 224n9 national identity, Irish and Catholic morality, 3, 26, 47, 137 collapse of postcolonial version of identity, 163–64 reimagining of, 135 selective narrative and, 90 nation-state, defined, 204n1 nativist policies, religious vocations and, 156–57 Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, 91 Ní Ghráda, Máiréad, 82, 91 nineteenth century, Magdalen asylums in, 23–43, 189–92t Nora, Pierre, 172 Norris, Mary, 118, 134, 227n6 testimony in Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen, 230n22 testimony in “The Magdalen Laundries,” 123, 231n30 —on separation of mothers and children, 131 nuns. See also congregations, religious The Magdalene Sisters on, 141, 151–53 — vocations of, 153–57 products of the containment culture, 93, 99 —documentaries and, 132 as scapegoats for abuses in the Magdalen asylums, 133 —Stained Glass at Samhain on, 108 Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Clear), 212n11 O’Brien, Kate, 213n20 O’Brien, Sr. Marcella, 230n28 Ó Ciosáin, Niall, 165 O’Duffy, Eoin, 10, 12–13 O’Faolain, Nuala, 230n25

Offences against the Person Act (1861), 56, 219n29 O’Flynn, Sunniva, 117 O’Malley, Donough, 75 O’Neill, Sr. Breege, 185–86 O’Neill, Margaret, 74–75, 78 Osservatore Romano, L’ (Vatican newspaper), 139 O’Sullivan, Eoin, 217n3 O’Toole, Fintan, 140, 167 Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta Street state financing, 68–69 state oversight and inspection, 69 use as a Borstal institution, 68 Pat Kenny Show (RTÉ Radio 1), 126 patriarchal culture Catholic Church and, 99 The Magdalen Sisters on, 144 Sex in a Cold Climate on, 125 pedophilia Brendan Smyth affair, 209n56 criminalization of victims of, 17 penitents. See inmates philanthropy, Victorian, 17 and Magdalen asylums, 47, 81 physical abuse, breaking the silence about, 88 post-colonial memory, Whelan on, 163–64 postnationalism, 228n9 Postnationalist Ireland (Kearney), 89 poverty, infanticide and, 60 present, separation from past, 138, 167 Preston, Margaret H., 214n23 probationers, institutions receiving, 201t prostitution decline by 1900, 39 Devane on, 51 and institutionalization, 136 prevalence of, 214n24 unmarried mothers and, 16 Prunty, Jacinta, 214n23

INDEX

271

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Raftery, Mary, 116, 177, 217n3. See also States of Fear (documentary, Raftery) rape breaking the silence about, 88 cases, 87 –88 Cooney’s testimony in Sex in a Cold Climate, 141 The Magdalene Sisters on, 141–44 victims of —and criminalization, 17 —and institutionalization, 136 recarceral institutions and containment, 46 Magdalen asylums as, 47, 65, 81 redress scheme, importance of, 237 –38n5 Reformatory Act (1858), and role of Catholic religious congregations, 28 Reformatory and Industrial Schools Systems Report, 1970. See Kennedy Report reformatory schools, 76 attached to Catholic Magdalen asylums, 202t Magdalen asylums compared to, 46 number of children in 1968–1969, 203t transfers to Magdalen asylums from, 72–81 —illegality of, 76 upward age limit, 222n66 Registration of Maternity Homes Act (1934), 52–53, 56 remand, young men on, 66–67 remand, young women on, 66–72 remand homes for young women as concern of McQuaid, 68 St. Mary Magdalen Asylum as, 71 remembrance, society versus community, 164 rescue work and proselytism, 32

INDEX

272

residential institutions conflation in popular cultural representations, 224n12 and containment, 46 state apologies for child abuse in, 184 Residential Institutions Redress Board, 184 resistance, evidence in survivor testimony, 127 Ricoeur, Paul, 89–90, 91, 224n8, 224n9 “Ethics of Memory,” 166 Robinson, Mary, 88–89 at unveiling of Magdalen Memorial Plaque, 161–62 Rotunda Aid Society, 210n73 Roughneen, Father, 11 RTÉ radio, 227n4 RTÉ television, 115 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 212n7 Russell, Angela, 15, 17, 18 Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries (Fenster), 168–77, 169 description and elements of, 168–71 use of mug shot pose, 172–73 strategies of embodiment, 173–74 Sex in a Cold Climate (Channel 4 documentary), 18, 115, 116 on contact between children and Magdalen women, 131–32 focus on survivors, 132, 229–30n20 inspiration for The Magdalene Sisters, 140, 148 testimonies —Cooney, 124 —Mulcahy, 124 —Valentine, 121–22 sexual abuse breaking the silence about, 88 Sex in a Cold Climate on, 124

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sexual crimes against women and children concealing of, 4 underreporting of, 16 sexual immorality conflation with vice, 11, 17 criminalization of, 17 institutional provision as response to, 19, 136 sources of, according to Carrigan Report, 11 sexuality double standard, 41, 61–62 —Eclipsed on, 98 —state supported, 93 ignorance about, 15, 46 proscription of, 27 sexual offenses, prosecutions of, 12 Sinners (television drama), 224n12 Sisters of Charity, 28–29 Luddy on, 214n23 Sisters of Charity asylum, Cork, 29 number of inmates, 189t and probationers, 201t reasons for leaving, 192t sources of entry to, 191t Sisters of Charity asylum, Donnybrook, 28 number of inmates, 189t reasons for leaving, 192t sources of entry to, 191t, 198–200t Sisters of Mercy apologies to victims of abuse in industrial and reformatory schools, 185 Galway Magdalen Asylum, 29, 44–45 Guide for the Religious, 31–32, 33 —on hair cutting, 215n35 lack of statistical information about asylums of, 213n19 Sutherland’s interview with, 44–45 in Washing Away the Stain, 132

Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Reguge, 29. See also Gloucester Street asylum; High Park asylum, Drumcondra Cooney on, 129 and last Magdalen laundry, 42, 153 in Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen, 113–14, 132–33 Luddy on, 214n23 move to Ireland, 213n20 pressure on McQuaid, 69–70 speculative investments of, 180 Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd of Angers. See Good Shepherd Sisters Sisters of the Poor Clares, 79 Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, 52 Smyth, Ailbhe, 205n4 social conditions of illegitimacy, 59 Carrigan Report and, 12 social control, discourse of religious vocation and, 153–54 social stigma, fear of, and infanticide, 60 social work, beginning of professional, 17 society, Irish benefits from Magdalene laundries, 144–45 collusion in Magdalen asylums —Burke Brogan on, 93, 94 —documentaries on, 117 — willingness to examine, 135 The Magdalene Sisters on, 139, 144–45 obligation to the Magdalen survivors, 183 society, meanings for, 204n1 “Souperism,” articles on, by MacInerney, 50

INDEX

273

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spirituality, individual, as distinguished from institutionalized religion, 108–9 St. Anne’s reformatory school, 76 St. Brigit, figure of, 109, 226n20 St. Joseph’s Orphanage, 79 St. Joseph’s reformatory school, 76 St. Mary Magdalen Asylum. See also Gloucester Street asylum, Dublin as remand home, 71 St. Patrick’s Guild, 210n73, 210n74 St. Patrick’s Institution, 67 Stained Glass at Samhain (Burke Brogan), 106–12 state. See also church-state partnership; colonial administration, British; financing by state abdication of responsibility for very young women, 77 and availability of Magdalen asylums as sites of confinement, 47, 82 culpability of, 183 definition, 204n1 legislation and Magdalen asylums, 46 The Magdalene Sisters on role of, 146–50 and sexual double standard, 93 state prison, Magdalen asylums as alternative to, 65 Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries on, 172 States of Fear (documentary; Raftery), 88, 116 and establishment of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, 184 Flynn’s participation in, 237n27 Statistical Abstracts, 56 statistical research on nineteenthcentury asylums, 30

INDEX

274

staying in Magdalen asylum as voluntary decision, 31 Steed, Mari, 235–36n11 Stopes, Marie, 216n1 Stopford Price, Dorothy, 15, 16 Suffer the Little Children, 88 Sullivan, K. M., 18 survivors challenge of testimony of, 118 empowering through documentaries, 118 institutionalized, 229–30n20 Irish society —obligation to, 183 —response to, The Magdalene Sisters on, 139 and persistence of effects of incarceration, 128, 230n22 scholarship and, 110 Sex in a Cold Climate on, 132, 229–30n20 Sutherland, Halliday, 216n1 interview with the Sisters of Mercy, 44–45 television documentaries. See Blanchisseuses de Magdalen, Les; “Magdalen Laundries, The” (CBS 60 Minutes); Sex in a Cold Climate (Channel 4 documentary); Washing Away the Stain (BBC documentary) testimony. See also Cooney, Martha; McCarthy, Josephine; Mulcahy, Christina; Norris, Mary; Valentine, Phyllis; Young, Bridget and anonymity, 130 in Dear Daughter called into question, 229n14 inherent vagaries or exaggerations of traumatic, 123 The Magdalene Sisters inspired by, 140

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methods of assessing personal, 123 work on oral, 119 Thomas Edmondson and the Dublin Laundry (Hearn), 214n23 Touher, Patrick, 91 traditional music use in The Magdalene Sisters, 142–44 transfers between institutions, 45. See also under industrial schools; reformatory schools Transforming Power of Nuns, The (Magray), 212n11 Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (Walker), 118–19 Traynor, Oscar, 66 twentieth century, Magdalen asylums in, 44–84 financing of, 233n13 records about, 24 United Irishmen Rebellion, commemoration of, 186–87 United States apologies by the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, 238n6 release of The Magdalene Sisters in, 139 Unmarried Mothers Allowance (1973), 232n7 Valentine, Phyllis, 227n6, 233n15 testimony in Sex in a Cold Climate, 121–22 testimony in Washing Away the Stain, 120–21 Valera, Eamon de, 7, 69, 205n5 Valera, Vivion de, 59–60 Valiulus, Maryann, 3 Vignoles, Julian, 227n4 vocation, religious, 153–57

Walker, Janet, 118–19 Walshe, Willie, 231n32 Washing Away the Stain (BBC documentary), 18, 115, 116 on transfers from industrial schools to Magdalen asylums, 120–21, 130 Valentine’s testimony in, 120–21 and view point of Sisters of Mercy, 132 Weber, Christopher, 115 “Well Below the Valley, The” (ballad), 142 Whelan, Kevin, 163–64 Williams, Raymond, 204n1 women. See also inmates of Magdalen asylums; nuns; religious vocations; survivors categories in asylums, 30–31, 38–39 —at High Park, 40 categorization of sexuality in absolute terms, 36 women, Irish compared to young women in Britain, 15 effect of famine on position of, 212n12 identity of, 3 image of respectable, 26–27 Women and Philanthropy (Luddy), 212n6, 212n11, 214n23 Woods, Michael, 237n3 Young, Bridget testimony in Sex in a Cold Climate, 230n22 —on contact between children and Magdalen women, 131–32 —inspiration for The Magdalene Sisters, 151

INDEX

275

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JAMES M. SMITH is associate professor of English and Irish Studies at Boston College.