The Shame and Sadness of a Nation

Normally I write things about the magickal side of life.  Both light and dark.  I love magick it is what I was raised to appreciate and treat with great respect.  I am feeling very led though to write about something of a much more serious note.  The shame of a country and the sadness.  The suffering of innocent women who through no fault of there own were forced to basically live in servitude.  What were their crime, the sin that they committed so bad that they were forced to live out the remainder of their lives in slave labour hiding in the walls of a convent.  Some were to pretty, too smart, the boys showed to much interest, some mistakenly accidentally got pregnant and chose not to get married, others were a bit mouthy and ill behaved, and yet others were simply rape or molested.  This was occurring in Ireland right up until the last of these convents closed in 1996.  That is right I said 1996.

 

These Convents were referred to as the "laundries" by almost everyone.  Mention of the laundries would immediately illicit fear in any girl.  It was a very well known and never spoken about place.  I remember the one in Dublin.  Seeing the women come into mass behind the sisters.  Run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, High Park Convent was the site of Ireland’s largest Magdalene Laundry. Until well into the twentieth century, girls deemed to be “difficult”  – because they were sexually active, or sexually abused, or simply poor – were sent to laundries by their families or the state. Despite having committed no crime, they were not allowed to leave the institutions and were forced to work for no pay, making them literally slaves. Many women spent their entire lives there, remaining long after the actual laundries closed down. They had nowhere else to go.

I used to see some of those women at Mass, although I was almost grown up before I realized who they were, and the extent of horror they were put through. They’d shuffle in behind the nuns and sit quietly at the back. Their eyes were vacant, and they seemed completely institutionalized.  I’m sure they weren’t as old as they looked. 

Then, in 1993, High Park hit the news. The nuns sold some of the grounds to a property developer for IR£1.5m, but the sold land included a mass grave containing the remains of 155 women, many of whom were unnamed. The scandal forced Ireland to confront just what had happened in those laundries, and ask why we’d tolerated them for so long. It didn’t stop shameless religious orders continuing to sell land for vast amounts of money – thanks to further land sales, High Park made €61.7m between 1999 and 2009, and today the former grounds are covered in houses and apartments. But while nuns made millions, former Magdalenes began a long campaign for justice.

So many women suffered and lost their lives.  And sadly the sisters in turn made millions of pounds from them selling off the land where the were buried in cold unmarked lonely graves.  

These were the Magdalen laundries where it is estimated that, since their inception, up to 30,000 women had been incarcerated.

 Initially the mission of the asylums was to rehabilitate women back into society, but by the early twentieth century the homes had become increasingly punitive and prison-like. In most asylums, the inmates were required to undertake hard physical labour, including laundry and needle work. They endured a daily regimen that included long periods of prayer and enforced silence. Ireland’s Magdalen asylums, or laundries, survived for the longest time. The last Magdalen asylum didn't close until 1996. There isn’t anything exclusively “Irish or Catholic” about these institutions; the “Irish variety took on a distinct character”. 

 Ireland’s Magdalen laundries were quietly supported by the state, operated by the church, and they were directly responsible for the enslavement of at least 30,000 innocent women and girls for more than two hundred years. Referred to as “fallen” women, some were sexually active “when Irish women were expected to be morally pure,” some were “unmarried mothers of ‘illegitimate’ children when the constitution rendered motherhood and marriage inseparable,” some were victims of physical and sexual abuse by men who under a double standard evaded culpability, and others were “deemed too simple…or too attractive and were hastily hidden away to safeguard their moral purity”. Though they were not criminals, they were systematically incarcerated in Magdalen laundries. In these laundries, women and girls were forced to labor without pay, and the cruelty with which they were treated methodically stripped away their sanity, agency, and identity; inhumane treatment, such as physical/emotional abuse and shaming techniques, was used to demean and dehumanize them.
 In the late 17th century, the term “fallen women” primarily referred to prostitutes; but by the end of the 18th century, Magdalen laundries were filled with many different kinds of women, including girls who were “not prostitutes at all,” but either “seduced women” or women who had yet to engage in sexual activity. According to Francis Finnegan, author of Do Penance or Perish: A Study of Magdalen Asylums in Ireland, “Missionaries were required to approach prostitutes and distribute religious tracts, designed to be read in ‘sober’ moments and divert women from their vicious lives”. Furthermore, “the consignment even of genuine prostitutes” to these laundries “seldom reduced their numbers on the streets, any more than did an individuals prostitute’s death,” because, according to Finnegan, “so long as poverty continued, and the demand for public women remained, such losses were easily replaced. Raftery wrote that the institutions were failing to achieve their supposed objective; “the institutions had little impact on prostitution over the period,” and yet they were continuing to multiply, expand and, most importantly, profit from the free labor. Since they were not paid, Raftery asserted, “it seems clear that these girls were used as a ready source of free labour for these laundry businesses”.
 The numbers of women whose basic human rights were violated by this system is unclear. Estimates indicate that over 30,000 women ended up in these institutions; we do not know how many women resided in the Magdalen institutions” after 1900. Vital information about the women’s circumstances, the number of women, and the consequences of their incarceration is unknown. We have no official history for the Magdalen asylum in the twentieth-century Ireland.
 Though Ireland’s last Magdalen asylum imprisoned women until 1996, there are no records to account for “almost a full century” of women who now “constitute the nation’s disappeared,” who were “excluded, silenced, or punished, and did not matter or matter enough o a society that “sought to negate and render invisible their challenges” to conceived notions of moral order.

 The Laundries are something I can never forget.  The fear, the loneliness, the isolation.  Women in our own country lived with a silent fear for so long.  We would be raped, molested, abused and not report it due to the fear of being send away and never be seen again.  So many girls ran away, I know I was one of them, when an unplanned pregnancy occurred.  Some to the north for quickie abortions others to get married and yet others to foreign unknown countries.  The stigma of being sexually active was always the fear of being sent away.
I have visited the sites.  The pain is so raw.  The women are crying to be remembered.  To be honored.  It breaks my heart 155 women in Dublin alone in unmarked graved whose bodies were exhumed, cremated, (by the way at the time that was considered a big no no in the church) and buried into mass graves. Who were they? Where do they come from?  Whenever I am in Dublin Or Waterford, I hear these women's cries.  I feel such a need to have them be remembered, NEVER FORGOTTEN.
FYI Sinead O'Connor spent time in a laundry as a teen and so many more who refuse to speak of it.

 The Magdalen Laundries By Joni Mitchell and The chieftains

 On 19 February 2013, Taoiseach Edna Kenny officially issued a full state apology to the women of the Magdalene Laundries.  He described the laundries as "the nation's shame" and "Therefore, I, as Taoiseach, on behalf of the State, the government and our citizens deeply regret and apologise unreservedly to all those women for the hurt that was done to them, and for any stigma they suffered, as a result of the time they spent in a Magdalene Laundry"