As I have often noted when writing about Ireland, my grandmother Mary Trainor Rogers would frequently say that, “If Ireland were so great, we wouldn’t have all had to come over here.”
True that, Nanny, true that.
Yet Ireland is place that I love, and have visited many, many times. But I do go with at least some understanding that for all the good, there is plenty of bad, especially in the country’s past. This Ireland’s-not-being-so-great’s list of terrible regrets includes a level of viciousness directed mostly at the young, much of it by terrorists – there is really no other word – who were part of The Church.
Of course, I knew about the Magdalen laundries, workhouses run by orders of nuns where girls and young women were sent to slave – they were paid nothing for their work – and where they had little if any control over if and when they would be released.
What I hadn’t remembered was that the Magdalen Laundries were still in operation as recently as 1996 – at which point, I had been visiting Ireland for over twenty years, and quite regularly (sometimes annually) from 1985 on. Nor was I aware of how complicit the Irish government was in all this. (Shouldn’t have been a surprise. The government was historically in total cahoots with the Catholic church.)
…orphans and abused, neglected or unruly children were among more than 10,000 sent to the Magdalen Laundries from 1922* to 1996.
Some had committed minor crimes, others were simply homeless or poor. Women with mental or physical disabilities and some people with psychiatric illness also found themselves in the laundries.
Their average age, the report found, was 23, but the youngest child was just nine and the oldest known entrant was 89.(Source: NBC News.)
A decade ago, a film called The Magdalene Sisters chronicled the abuses and miseries predicated on the poor girls and women who ended up there. It took them a while, but in 2011, the UN Committee on Torture noted the "physical, emotional abuses and other ill-treatment" that Magdalen victims were subjected to, and articulated its grave concerns about the failures of the Irish government to do anything about it. (Among other things, the government used the laundries to do theirs, e.g., laundry for the military.) So the Irish government – which is these days blessedly free from many of its historic yokes – established a commission to look into things. (The full report can be found here.)
The original Magdalene Homes – which have been around for hundreds of years – were established to keep prostitutes off the street, and unmarried mothers out of the community. I remember when there was a local Magdalene House in Boston, a home for unwed mothers. (I actually think it was on Route 9 in Brookline, just outside the city). But I don’t believe it was a sweat shop – just a place where teenage girls sat out their pregnancies when it was considered a scandal for them to appear in public.
The Magdalen laundries that the Irish report focused on were run by orders stunningly called:
- Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge
- Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy
- Religious Sisters of Charity
- Sisters of the Good Shepherd
Charity. Refuge. Mercy.
Too bad they offered none of the above. (And yes, I do know that many of the women who “went in” were pushed in, and that many were victimized by the charity-less, refuge-less, merciless way in which they were treated by their orders during their inculcation period and beyond. If they weren’t nuts when they went it, many ended up nuts because of the institution.)
Among the incidents cited:
- [A] woman said "They were very, very cruel verbally — 'your mother doesn’t want you, why do you think you’re here' and things like that."
- One said she was put in "a padded cell" three times and told "if I didn’t work there’d be no food and the infirmary."
- Another woman said that when she wet the bed "they pinned the sheet to me back and I was walking on the veranda with it."
- "You learned not to ask questions or complain. You couldn’t be forward in any way. Talking was a thing that was seen as sinful," another said.
It’s not clear whether the Irish government will be forthcoming with an explicit apology, or to make reparations to those who slaved their lives away taking care of the dirty laundry of others.
In truth, I doubt that I would have ended up in a Magdalen Laundry. Still, I’m glad that my great-grandparents – Matthew Trainor and Bridget Trainor of County Louth; John Rogers of Roscommon; and Margaret Joyce of Mayo - were tough enough, smart enough, and lucky enough to get out.
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*1922 was the year in which the Irish Free State, i.e., modern Ireland separated from England, was established.
And a tip of the laundress’ cap (or is it nun’s wimple and veil) to my sister Trish, for sending this one my way.
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