Magdalene laundries in Ireland

The Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, also known as Magdalene asylums, were institutions usually run by Roman Catholic orders, which operated from the 18th to the late 20th century. They were run ostensibly to house "fallen women", an estimated 30,000 of whom were confined in these institutions in Ireland.
In 1993, unmarked graves of 155 women were uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries. This led to media revelations about the operations of the secretive institutions. A formal state apology was issued in 2014, and a compensation scheme for survivors was set up by the Irish Government, which by 2022 and after an extension of the scheme had paid out €32.8 million to 814 survivors. The religious orders which operated the laundries have rejected appeals, including from victims and Ireland's Justice Minister, to contribute financially to this programme.
The Dublin Magdalen Asylum, sometimes called the Magdalen Asylum for Penitent Females, on Lower Leeson Street was the first such institution in Ireland. It was run by the Church of Ireland and accepted only Protestant women. It was founded in 1765 by Lady Arabella Denny. In 1959 it moved to Eglinton Road, Donnybrook and in 1980 changed its name to Denny House. It closed in 1994 and was "Ireland's longest serving Mother and Baby Home."
Ireland's Catholic-run Magdalene asylums survived the longest, through to 1996. Ireland's Magdalene laundries were quietly supported by the state, and operated by religious communities for more than two hundred years. On laundries, James Smith asserts that the "Irish variety took on a distinct character". Inmates were required to work, primarily in laundries, since the facilities were self-supporting. Andrea Parrot and Nina Cummings wrote, "The cost of violence, oppression, and brutalization of women is enormous" and in their struggle to survive, the inmates suffered not only physically, but spiritually and emotionally.
In Belfast the Church of Ireland-run Ulster Magdalene Asylum was founded in 1839 on Donegall Pass, and closed in 1916. Similar institutions were run by Catholics on Ormeau Road and by Presbyterians on Whitehall Parade.
In the late 18th century, the term "fallen women" primarily referred to sex workers, but by the end of the 19th century, Magdalene laundries were filled with many different kinds of women, including girls who were "not prostitutes at all," but rather "seduced women." Some of the "fallen women" had not willingly participated in sex (i.e., those who were victims of rape and/or incest), and some women and girls in the laundries were there not due to intercourse but rather because they were orphans, abused, deserted by their families, or did not conform to social norms of the time. According to Frances Finnegan, author of Do Penance or Perish: A Study of Magdalen Asylums in Ireland, "Missionaries were required to approach prostitutes and distribute religious tracts, designed to be read in 'sober' moments and divert women from their vicious lives." Furthermore, "the consignment even of genuine prostitutes" to these laundries "seldom reduced their numbers on the streets, any more than did an individual prostitute's death," because, according to Finnegan, "so long as poverty continued, and the demand for public women remained, such losses were easily replaced."
Mary 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 and expand due to their self-supporting free labour. 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."
Additionally, the state of Ireland and its government were heavily intertwined with religion. Finnegan wrote:
Finnegan wrote that based on historical records, the religious institutes had motivations other than simply wanting to curtail prostitution; these multiple motivations led to the multiplication of these facilities. According to Finnegan, as the motivations started to shift from a need to maintain social and moral order within the bounds of patriarchal structure to a desire to continue profiting from a free workforce, Magdalene laundries became a part of a large structure of suppression.
With the multiplication of these institutions and the subsequent and "dramatic rise" in the number of beds available within them, Finnegan wrote that the need to staff the laundries "became increasingly urgent." This urgency, Finnegan claims, resulted in a new definition of "fallen" women: one that was much less precise and was expanding to include any women who appeared to challenge traditional notions of Irish morality. She further asserted that this new definition resulted in even more suffering, "especially among those increasing numbers who were not prostitutes but unmarried mothers—forced to give up their babies as well as their lives." And as this concept of "fallen" expanded, so did the facilities, in both physical size and role in society.
Some argue that women were branded as both a mother and a criminal if they happened to have a child out of wedlock. The choices the women at the time had were very limited. They had no social welfare system; therefore, many resorted to prostitution or entered these mother-and-child homes, also known as Magdalene laundries.
Comparatively more is known about laundries in the 20th century due to detailed interviews with women who spent time in these institutions. In this later phase, the laundries lost their association with sex out of wedlock. All of Ireland's 20th-century laundries, except one, did not admit pregnant women. Instead, women entered via the criminal justice system, reformatory schools, health and social services sector and self-admittance.
Several religious institutes established even more Irish laundries, reformatories and industrial schools, sometimes all together on the same plot of land, with the aim to "save the souls primarily of women and children". Examples were Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge and the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, who ran the largest laundries in Dublin. These "large complexes" became a "massive interlocking system…carefully and painstakingly built up…over a number of decades"; and consequently, Magdalene laundries became part of Ireland's "larger system for the control of children and women" (Raftery 18). Both women and "bastard" children were "incarcerated for transgressing the narrow moral code of the time" and the same religious congregations managed the orphanages, reformatory schools and laundries. Thus, these facilities "all helped sustain each other – girls from the reformatory and industrial schools often ended up working their entire lives in the Magdalen laundries".
Almost all the institutions were run by female religious congregations," i.e. sisters, and were scattered throughout the country "in prominent locations in towns and cities". In this way, according to Raftery, they were powerful and pervasive, able to effectively control the lives of women and children from "all classes". This second incarnation of Magdalen laundries vastly differed from the first incarnation, due to their "longevity" and "their diverse community of female inmates, including hopeless cases, mental defectives…[and] transfers from industrial and reformatory schools". These particular institutions intentionally shared "overriding characteristics, including a regime of prayer, silence, work in a laundry, and a preference for permanent inmates", which, as Smith notes, "contradicts the religious congregations' stated mission to protect, reform, and rehabilitate".
As this expansion was taking place and these laundries were becoming a part of a large network of institutions, the treatment of the girls was becoming increasingly violent and abusive. According to Finnegan and Smith, the asylums became "particularly cruel", "more secretive" in nature and "emphatically more punitive". Though these women had committed no crime and had never been put on trial, their indefinite incarceration was enforced by locked doors, iron gates and prison guards in the form of apathetic sisters. By 1920, according to Smith, Magdalen laundries had almost entirely abandoned claims of rehabilitation and instead, were "seamlessly incorporated into the state's architecture of containment".
According to historian Frances Finnegan, in the beginning of these asylums' existence, because many of the women had a background as sex workers, the women (who were called "children") were regarded as "in need of penitence", and until the 1970s were required to address all staff members as "mother" regardless of age. To enforce order and maintain a monastic atmosphere, the inmates were required to observe strict silence for much of the day.
As the phenomenon became more widespread, it extended beyond sex workers to petty criminals, orphans, mentally disabled women and abused girls. A 2013 report made by an inter-departmental committee, chaired by Senator Martin McAleese, found no evidence of unmarried women giving birth in the asylum.
Given Ireland's historically conservative sexual values, Magdalen asylums were a generally accepted social institution well into the second half of the twentieth century. They disappeared with changes in sexual mores and a loss of faith in the Catholic Church due to repeated revelations of scandals. Though Finnegan suggests that a more critical reason is that they ceased to be profitable: "Possibly the advent of the washing machine has been as instrumental in closing these laundries as have changing attitudes."
An estimated 30,000 women were confined in these institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries, about 10,000 of whom were admitted since Ireland's independence in 1922. Smith asserts that "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 twentieth-century Ireland", Smith wrote. Due to the religious institutes' "policy of secrecy", their penitent registers and convent annals remain closed to this day, despite repeated requests for information. As a direct result of these missing records and the religious institutes' commitment to secrecy, Magdalen laundries can only exist "at the level of story rather than history". 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 who Smith says "did not matter or matter enough" to a society that "sought to negate and render invisible their challenges" to conceived notions of moral order.
In Dublin in 1993, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity – owners and operators of the laundry in High Park, Drumcondra – had lost money in share dealings on the stock exchange; to cover their losses, they sold part of the land in their convent to a property developer. This led to the discovery of 133 unmarked graves. The Sisters arranged to have the remains cremated and reburied in a mass grave at Glasnevin Cemetery, splitting the cost of the reburial with the developer who had bought the land. It later transpired that there were 22 more corpses than the sisters had applied for permission to exhume and death certificates existed for only 75 of the original 133, despite it being a criminal offence to fail to register a death that occurs on one's premises. In all, 155 corpses were exhumed, and cremated.
Though not initially reported, this eventually triggered a public scandal, bringing unprecedented attention to the secretive institutions. The 1997 Channel 4 documentary Sex in a Cold Climate interviewed former inmates of Magdalene Asylums who testified to continued sexual, psychological and physical abuse while being isolated from the outside world for an indefinite amount of time.
In 1999, former asylum inmates Mary Norris, Josephine McCarthy and Mary-Jo McDonagh gave accounts of their treatment.
Allegations about the conditions in the convents and the treatment of the inmates were made into a 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters, written and directed by Peter Mullan.
A number of campaigns and remembrance services have been undertaken to request the identification and reburial of those buried in mass graves. For example, Mary Collins (herself a survivor of the industrial school system), has campaigned with her daughter Laura Angela Collins for the right to the removal of her mother's remains from a mass grave, which is owned by the Religious Sisters of Charity.
In June 2011, Mary Raftery wrote in The Irish Times that in the early 1940s, some Irish state institutions, such as the army, switched from commercial laundries to "institutional laundries" (Magdalene laundries). At the time, there was concern in the Dáil that workers in commercial laundries were losing jobs because of the switch to institutional laundries. Oscar Traynor, Minister for Defence, said the contracts with the Magdalene laundries "contain a fair wages clause", though the women in those laundries did not receive wages.
The Irish Times revealed that a ledger listed: Áras an Uachtaráin, Guinness, Clerys, the Gaiety Theatre, Dr Steevens' Hospital, the Bank of Ireland, the Department of Defence, the Departments of Agriculture and Fisheries, CIÉ, Portmarnock Golf Club, Clontarf Golf Club, and several leading hotels amongst those who used a Magdalene laundry. This was unearthed by Steven O' Riordan, a young Irish film-maker who directed and produced a documentary, The Forgotten Maggies. It is the only Irish-made documentary on the subject and was launched at The Galway Film Fleadh 2009. It was screened on the Irish television station TG4 in 2011, attracting over 360,000 viewers. The documentary's website notes that a group called Magdalene Survivors Together was set up after the release of the documentary because so many Magdalene women came forward after its airing. The women who appeared in the documentary were the first Magdalene women to meet with Irish government officials. They brought national and international attention to the subject.
Since 2001, the Irish government has acknowledged that women in the Magdalene laundries were victims of abuse. However, the Irish government has resisted calls for investigation and proposals for compensation; it maintains the laundries were privately run and abuses at the laundries were outside the government's remit. In contrast to these claims, evidence exists that Irish courts routinely sent women convicted of petty crimes to the laundries, the government awarded lucrative contracts to the laundries without any insistence on protection and fair treatment of their workers, and Irish state employees helped keep laundry facilities stocked with workers by bringing women to work there and by returning escaped workers.
Having lobbied the government of Ireland for two years for an investigation of the history of the Magdalene laundries, advocacy group Justice for Magdalenes presented its case to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, alleging that the conditions within the Magdalene laundries and the exploitation of their labourers amounted to human rights violations. On 6 June 2011, the panel urged Ireland to "investigate allegations that for decades women and girls sent to work in Catholic laundries were tortured." In response the Irish government set up a committee chaired by Senator Martin McAleese, to establish the facts of the Irish state's involvement with the Magdalene laundries.
Following the 18-month inquiry, the committee published its report on 5 February 2013, finding "significant" state collusion in the admission of thousands of women into the institutions. The report found over 11,000 women had entered laundries since 1922. Significant levels of verbal abuse to women inside was reported but there were no suggestions of regular physical or sexual abuse. The report also noted that, according to its analysis, the laundries were not generally highly profitable. Elderly survivors said they would go on hunger strike over the failure of successive Irish governments to set up a financial redress scheme for the thousands of women enslaved there. The Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, while professing sorrow at the abuses revealed, did not issue an immediate apology, prompting criticism from other members of Dáil Éireann. Kenny promised "there would be a full Dáil debate on the report in two weeks' time when people had an opportunity to read the report". Survivors were critical that an apology had not been immediately forthcoming.
On 19 February 2013, the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, issued a formal state apology. He described the laundries as "the nation's shame" and said,
The Taoiseach also outlined part of the compensation package to be offered to victims of the Magdalene Laundries. He stated:
In February 2013, a few days after the publication of the McAleese Report, two religious sisters gave an interview for RTÉ Radio 1 under conditions of anonymity for themselves and their institute. They described the Irish media coverage of the abuse at the laundries (which they claimed not to have participated in), as a "one-sided anti-Catholic forum". They displayed no remorse for the institutes' past: "Apologize for what? Apologize for providing a service? We provided a free service for the country". They complained that "all the shame of the era is being dumped on the religious orders... the sins of society are being placed on us". On hearing the interview, a survivors' group announced to the press that they were "shocked, horrified and enormously upset" by the sisters' portrayal of events.
In a detailed commentary by Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, a U.S.-based advocacy group, published in July 2013, Donohue wrote, "No one was imprisoned, nor forced against her will to stay. There was no slave labor, ... It’s all a lie." Donohue alleged that the women in the asylums were, "prostitutes, and women seen as likely candidates for the 'world’s oldest profession'. Unmarried women, especially those who gave birth out-of-wedlock, were likely candidates. Contrary to what has been reported, the laundries were not imposed on these women: they were a realistic response to a growing social problem [prostitution]."
In 1955, while the abuse of inmates was still occurring, the Scottish writer Halliday Sutherland was touring Ireland to collect material for his book Irish Journey. When he applied for permission to visit the Galway asylum, Michael Browne, the local bishop, reluctantly granted him access only on condition that he allow his account to be censored by the Mother Superior. The uncensored manuscript was discovered by Sutherland's grandson in 2013 and published in 2014.
The religious institutes, the Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, and Religious Sisters of Charity, have refused demands from the Irish government, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and the UN Committee Against Torture to contribute to the compensation fund for surviving victims, an estimated 600 of whom were still alive in March 2014.
In 2011, a monument was erected in Ennis at the site of the former Industrial School and Magdalene laundry in appreciation of the Sisters of Mercy. In 2015, Ennis Municipal Local Council decided to rename Friars Walk, a road which ran through the site of the former Industrial School and Laundry, in honour of the Sisters of Mercy. The new name is Bóthar na Trócaire (Road of Compassion).
The Magdalene Sisters, a 2002 film by Peter Mullan, is centred on four young women incarcerated in a Dublin Magdalene laundry from 1964 to 1968. The film is loosely based on and "largely inspired" by the 1998 documentary Sex in a Cold Climate, which documents four survivors' accounts of their experiences in Ireland's Magdalen institutions. One survivor who saw Mullan's film claimed that the reality of Magdalen asylums was "a thousand times worse".
James Smith wrote that "Mullan offsets the long historical silence" that allowed the laundries and the violations by the religious institutes to "maintain their secrecy and invisibility".
The film is a product of a collective, including the four survivors (Martha Cooney, Christina Mulcahy, Phyllis Valentine, Brigid Young) who told their story in Sex in a Cold Climate, the historical consultant and researchers of the documentary who contributed historical information (Miriam Akhtar, Beverely Hopwood and Frances Finnegan), the directors of both movies (Steve Humphries and Peter Mullan, respectively), the screenwriter of The Magdalene Sisters who created a narrative (Peter Mullan again) and the actors in the film. The 2024 series, The Woman in the Wall, concerns survivors of the laundries.
In 2022 the Dublin City Council agreed to turn the building on Sean McDermott Street, the building of the last laundry that closed in Ireland in 1996, into a memorial and research centre. In 2022 a Journey Stone was unveiled by survivors of the Magdalene Laundries in Dublin. The Journey Stone memorial, situated at St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin, is meant to remember the suffering of the women who were incarcerated in Magdalene laundries and similar institutions. One of the group of survivors that unveiled the stone stated that it felt more appropriate to her than the centre, as she was actually involved in the decision-making process, unlike with the centre.
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