magdalene laundries tour

Government to open national museum and memorial at site of Ireland's last Magdalene Laundry

The national centre for research and remembrance will pay tribute to all those who were residents in magdalene laundries, mother and baby homes, reformatories, and other similar institutions..

The Irish Government is set to open a national museum and memorial at the site of the country's last "Magdalene Laundry", where women deemed "mischievous" or "scandalous" were sent to do penance for their sins, often suffering physical, sexual, or verbal abuse. 

The National Centre for Research and Remembrance, which will be located at the former laundry on Sean McDermott Street, will pay tribute to all those who were residents in Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, reformatories, and other similar institutions.

The state-funded initiative will include a national museum and exhibition space led by the National Museum of Ireland in addition to a place for reflection and remembrance. 

• The last Magdalene Laundry in Ireland closed its doors in 1996

It will also include an educational facility, social housing and local community facilities, and a research center and repository of records providing information about institutional trauma in the 20th century, which will be part of the National Archives. 

The center will provide access for all survivors both in Ireland and abroad, providing digital access to records and exhibits. Other physical centers will also be developed outside of Dublin to enable survivors to visit more easily. 

Dublin City Council had previously decided to sell the former site of the Sean McDermott Street Magdalene Laundry for redevelopment as a budget hotel. 

Operated by the Sisters of Charity and Refuge, the laundry was located in north inner-city Dublin and closed down in 1996. it is the only former Magdalene Laundry that has not yet been demolished. 

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The Government's decisions following a lengthy campaign from survivors and the relatives of those who were forced to live in the institutions. 

Roderic O'Gorman, Ireland's Minister for Children, said the development of the National Centre for Research and Remembrance represented an important step in addressing the traumatic legacy of the institutions. 

"Over the past three decades, Ireland has had a difficult reckoning with its history of institutional abuse. This center will provide a place of reflection and remembrance, while also ensuring that future generations can fully understand the appalling impact of those institutions," O'Gorman said in a statement on Tuesday. 

• How a Galway family saved 15 women from a Magdalene Laundry in the 1960s

Professor Katherine O'Donnell, the co-director of activist group Open Heart City, which campaigned to retain the site in public ownership, described the development as an "enormous step forward". 

"This will be a place where we can reflect on all the other parts of what we call our dark heritage, the places where our country failed its citizens," O'Donnell told the New York Times. 

"And we will be brought to think about how we can do things better in future. Many survivors of institutions of abuse have said for decades now that they want to be part of educating and informing young people about what went on." 

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A Blot on Ireland’s Past, Facing Demolition

By Ed O’Loughlin

• Jan. 15, 2018

DUBLIN — The General Post Office in Dublin, center of the 1916 rebellion against British rule, is today a shrine to Irish freedom. Three blocks to the east, on a quiet, run-down side street, stands a monument to a very different side of Irish history — though maybe not for long.

The old Gloucester Street laundry, the last of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene Laundries to shut its doors, will soon be demolished and replaced by a budget hotel and a student residence — if the City Council has its way.

Founded in the 19th century, the Gloucester Street laundry was one of around a dozen such businesses run by Roman Catholic nuns and staffed by unpaid inmates — mostly orphan girls or young women who had become pregnant outside marriage or whose families could not or would not support them — who were given to the nuns to hide them away.

Owned most recently by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, the Gloucester Street laundry usually had around 100 workers at any one time. It took in its last new inmate — transferred from a psychiatric hospital — as recently as 1995, then closed the following year.

The Magdalene women endured many of the same hardships as the inmates of the brutal church-run “industrial schools” for delinquent or unwanted children, and the “mother and baby homes,” where unmarried pregnant women were warehoused until their children were born (and then often taken for adoption). Poor nutrition and hygiene, cold and damp lodgings and little or no medical supervision were the norm.

The work in those walled-off institutions was backbreaking and often required handling dangerous chemicals. Mortality rates were high. Of those who died, many were buried in communal graves, sometimes unmarked and unrecorded.

In the 1990s, for example, builders redeveloping part of the former High Park laundry in north Dublin discovered the bodies of 155 women in a mass grave on the site. A third of them had been buried without death certificates. A few are still unknown.

Catherine Corless, a dogged local historian, made global headlines in 2014 when she published evidence that 796 infants had died between 1925 and 1961 at a mother and baby home in Tuam , in County Galway. Remains of some were found in what appeared to be a septic tank.

Rocked by such scandals, and by revelations of clerical sexual abuse, the Roman Catholic Church has lost much of its former authority in Ireland. Laundries, industrial schools, and mother and baby homes have all disappeared, and the Gloucester Street laundry is now one of the last physical reminders of this Irish gulag archipelago. It is also, as it happens, among the final relics of a very different, yet complementary, secret Irish history, a parallel system for controlling and exploiting inconvenient lives.

The back gate of the Gloucester Street laundry, where the delivery vans once came and went, is on Railway Street, formerly called Mecklenburg Street. In 1904, Mecklenburg Street was a terrace of grand but fading Georgian houses, and it was here that James Joyce set the “nighttown” section of his novel “Ulysses,” a phantasmagoric visit to a brothel run by “a massive whoremistress” called Bella Cohen.

She was a historical figure. And Mecklenburg Street was the heart of a square mile of brothels, speakeasies and slums that took its informal name — Monto — from Montgomery Street, the next street over. It was here, when southern Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom, and when Dublin was a major garrison town of the British Empire, that the authorities tolerated, even encouraged, what was often described as the biggest red-light district in Europe.

Monto was a last resort for runaways, widows and abandoned wives. Madams like Bella Cohen controlled them with violence and money, keeping them in debt to pay for clothes and lodgings. As they left their prime teen years, lost their health and their looks, the women passed from “flash houses” for the wealthy to the cheap “shilling houses” and then to the alleys. Those who became pregnant were dumped on the street.

In 1921, following the Irish War of Independence , the British Army withdrew from southern Ireland and Monto lost a big chunk of its customer base. The new Irish Free State, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, fell under the social control of the bishops, and prostitution was driven underground. On March 12, 1925, the police raided Monto and closed down what remained, aided by volunteers from a Roman Catholic relief agency, the Legion of Mary.

Since then, almost all the old Monto buildings have been demolished and replaced with public housing or private developments. According to a local historian, Terry Fagan, who does walking tours of the old Monto, the Gloucester Street site is among a handful of buildings left from that era. Even the street names have mostly been changed — Gloucester Street is now Sean MacDermott Street, named after a hero of the 1916 uprising.

While poverty has been greatly reduced, the area remains relatively deprived, the center of a heroin epidemic that exploded in Dublin in the 1970s. Addicts and dealers haunt corners and squares where prostitutes once plied their trade.

Today, the Monto area has faded into folklore, along with the names and lives of its women. One half-remembered streetwalker, Lily of the Lamplight, used to sing to herself under the streetlight where she waited for custom. Long after she was gone, her name passed, by some strange osmosis, into the English version of a wartime German love song, “Lili Marlene.”

The faces and names of the Magdalene women are also slipping away from us. Few are still alive. How should they be remembered?

Gary Gannon, a city councilor who represents the area, has started a campaign for the Gloucester Street site to be established as a permanent memorial to the Magdalene women. “This is going to go,” he says, standing on the former Mecklenburg Street, by the grim, gray wall of the derelict laundry, “and in 40 or 50 years, how do you explain what existed here, where everyone could see it?”

Samantha Long’s birth mother, Margaret Bullen, was born in a mental institution and later transferred to the Gloucester Street laundry at age 16. While in the laundry’s supposed care, Ms. Bullen was raped and, at 19, she gave birth to Ms. Long and her twin sister. The newborns were taken from her and adopted.

Too institutionalized to care for herself after a life of confinement, Ms. Bullen died in a church-run home in 2003 at age 51. Ms. Long, who tracked her mother down before she died, says she is not opposed to a hotel on part of the site — “people need jobs” — but she wants a memorial too, something “more than a plaque on the wall.”

Mary Merritt, 86, is one of the last surviving inmates of the Gloucester Street laundry, albeit having only spent a week there, on a temporary transfer from the High Park laundry. Taken at birth from a mother she could never trace, Ms. Merritt, too, was raped while an inmate. She had run away from High Park and sought help at the nearby palace of the Archbishop of Dublin. There, in a side room, she was raped by a priest. Forcibly returned by the police to the laundry, she later gave birth to a daughter, herself then placed in an orphanage. Ms. Merritt’s voice breaks at the memory.

“The nuns used to have a little garden for themselves there, to the side of Sean McDermott Street,” said Ms. Merritt, who now lives in England.

“They should have a little garden of remembrance there. They should knock the old laundry and convent to the ground and have some little flats for the women who are left, or their children if they had them. But not a hotel. Definitely not a hotel.”

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the attention given to the women of the Magdalene Laundries. Joni Mitchell sang about them in the song, “The Magdalene Laundries.” It is not the case that “no one ever sang about the women of the laundries.”

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Justice for Magdalenes Research

A resource for people affected by and interested in ireland's magdalene institutions.

• About the Magdalene Laundries

What were the Magdalene Laundries?

From the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 until 1996, at least 10,000 (see below) girls and women were imprisoned, forced to carry out unpaid labour and subjected to severe psychological and physical maltreatment in Ireland’s Magdalene Institutions. These were carceral, punitive institutions that ran, commercial and for-profit businesses primarily laundries and needlework. After 1922, the Magdalene Laundries were operated by four religious orders (The Sisters of Mercy, The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Sisters of Charity, and the Good Shepherd Sisters) in ten different locations around Ireland ( click here for a map). The last Magdalene Laundry ceased operating on 25 th October, 1996. The women and girls who suffered in the Magdalene Laundries included those who were perceived to be ‘promiscuous’, unmarried mothers, the daughters of unmarried mothers, those who were considered a burden on their families or the State, those who had been sexually abused, or had grown up in the care of the Church and State. Confined for decades on end – and isolated from their families and society at large – many of these women became institutionalised over time and therefore became utterly dependent on the relevant convents and unfit to re-enter society unaided.

How many women and girls were confined in the laundries?

The ‘official’ figure of 10,000 women and girls who were confined in the laundries is is a significant under-estimate by the Report  of the  Inter – Departmental Committee  to establish the facts of  State involvement  with the Magdalen Laundries ( also known as the McAleese Report, after Senator Martin McAleese who chaired the committee) . The Sisters of Mercy could not produce records for the Dun Laoghaire or Galway institutions and the Committee excluded girls and women who entered before 1922 and remained thereafter—referring to such women as ‘legacy’ cases. JFM brought numerous examples to the  IDC’s attention of women listed on the 1901 and 1911 censuses who died in Magdalene Laundries post-1922, some as late as 1961, 1967 and even 1985 (in the care of the nuns after the closure of the Limerick institution). It has also emerged that many girls detained in ‘voluntary’ (unregulated but funded by the State) residential children’s and teenage institutions known as ‘Training Centres’, sometimes on the same grounds as Magdalene Laundries, were forced by the nuns to enter and work in the Laundries for some or all of their days.

How were women and girls confined in the laundries?

Women and girls were confined in the Magdalene Laundries through a variety of channels, including: women and girls sent by the judicial system (including those committed informally or as a condition of probation, those held on remand, sent to the Laundries after release from Prison sentences and those sent to the Laundries instead of Reformatory Schools), transfers from Industrial Schools and transfers from Mother and Baby Homes. JFM also discovered evidence of girls who were sent to the laundries by social workers, members of the clergy, the Gardaí (police), hospitals, local authorities, County Councils, psychiatric hospitals. Most worryingly of all, a whole group of girls appear to have been sent to the Laundries because they were the victims of abuse.

It is true that some women and girls were committed to the laundries by non-State actors, including their families, or church groups, such as the Legion of Mary. This happened for an array of reasons – they feared scandal related to unmarried motherhood and illegitimacy, sexual abuse, incest, domestic abuse, disability and mental illness. Although the State was not directly involved in incarcerating these women and girls, it failed to protect and defend their individual liberty and human rights, as they had a right to expect in a democratic State governed by the rule of law. Whatever the reasons why women and girls were sent to the Magdalene Laundries, the State had duties to all of the women and girls in the Laundries (a) to prevent them from being held against their will, (b) not to exploit or benefit from their forced labour or servitude and (c) to care for these women and girls in terms of their rights to a safe workplace, to social welfare and (in terms of school-age girls) an education.

What were conditions like in these institutions?

Once inside the convents, girls and women were imprisoned behind locked doors, barred or unreachable windows and high walls (oftentimes with broken glass cemented at the apex). They were usually given no information as to when or whether they would be released. Upon entry, their names were often changed and they were given an identification number. Many women recall being instructed not to speak about their home-place or family. Their hair was cut and their clothes were taken away and replaced with a drab uniform. A rule of silence was imposed at almost all times in Magdalene Laundries and, in many women’s experiences, friendships were forbidden. Correspondence with the outside was often intercepted or forbidden. Visits by friends or family were not encouraged and were monitored by nuns when they did occur.

The girls and women were forced to work from morning until evening – washing, ironing or packing laundry, and sewing, embroidering or doing other manual labour. These Laundries were run on a commercial, for-profit basis, but the girls and women received no pay. No contributions (‘stamps’) were paid on their behalf to statutory pension schemes. The laundry they washed came not only from members of the public, local businesses and religious institutions, but also from numerous government Departments, the defence forces, public hospitals, public schools, prisons and other State entities such as the parliament,, the Chief State Solicitor’s Office, the Office of Public Works, the Land Commission, CIE and Áras an Uachtaráin (the President’s Residence)(to name but a few).

Punishments for refusal to work included deprivation of meals, solitary confinement, physical abuse, forced kneeling for long periods or humiliation rituals, including shaving of hair. Survivors speak of constantly being under surveillance, being verbally insulted, feeling cold, having a poor diet and enduring humiliating and inadequate hygiene conditions. None of the girls received an education, and survivors dwell on this fact as determining their ‘loss of opportunity’ in later life.

It was common for the girls and women to believe that they would die inside. Many did: comparison  of electoral registers against grave records at the Donnybrook location shows that over half of the women on electoral registers between 1954 and 1964 died in that institution. If girls or women escaped – perhaps in the back of a laundry van, out an open door at delivery or collection time, or by scaling the wall – they were often captured and returned by the local Gardaí. The nuns punished escapees, in many cases, by transferring them to a different Magdalene Laundry. If and when a girl or women was released, it was invariably without warning, without money and with only the clothes she was wearing. Some girls and women were given jobs in other institutions run by nuns; many fled abroad as soon as they could.

The State never regulated the Magdalene Laundries, despite its use of the institutions both as places of detention and care, its commercial dealings with them, its knowledge of the detention of young girls of school-going age, and its awareness that the girls and women were working for no pay. The IDC noted that the commercial laundry premises were subject to the Factories Acts, and that Factories Inspectors visited the Laundries from 1957 onwards. According to the IDC’s report, however, the inspectors were concerned with machinery and factory premises only.  They did not question the age of the girls or the conditions under which the girls and women were forced to work and lived.

where are the survivors today?

In JFMR’s experience, Magdalene survivors (and their family members) fall into five main categories: firstly, those who have spoken out and demanded justice; secondly, those who continue to live in silence; thirdly, women who are still living in institutional settings under the control of religious orders; fourthly, those who died both inside and outside the laundry; and finally, the family members of women incarcerated in the laundries, including adopted people.

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How Ireland Turned ‘Fallen Women’ Into Slaves

By: Erin Blakemore

Updated: July 21, 2019 | Original: March 12, 2018

When the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity decided to sell some land they owned in Dublin, Ireland, to pay their debts in 1992, the nuns followed the proper procedures. They petitioned officials for permission to move the bodies of women buried in the cemetery at their Donnybrook laundry , which between 1837 and 1992 served as a workhouse and home for “fallen women.” 

But the cemetery at Donnybrook was no ordinary resting place: It was a mass grave. Inside were the bodies of scores of unknown women: the undocumented, uncared-about inmates of one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries. Their lives—and later their deaths—had been shrouded in secrecy.

For more than two centuries, women in Ireland were sent to institutions like Donnybrook as a punishment for having sex outside of marriage. Unwed mothers, flirtatious women and others deemed unfit for society were forced to labor under the strict supervision of nuns for months or years, sometimes even for life.

When the mass grave at Donnybrook was discovered, the 155 unmarked tombs touched off a scandal that exposed the extent and horrors of the Magdalene laundries. As women came forward to share their experiences of being held against their will in restrictive workhouses, the Irish public reacted with outrage. 

READ MORE: America’s Forgotten Mass Imprisonment of Women Believed to Be Sexually Immoral

When the Magdalene Movement first took hold in the mid-18th century, the campaign to put “fallen women” to work was supported by both the Catholic and Protestant churches, with women serving short terms inside the asylums with the goal of rehabilitation. Over the years, however, the Magdalene laundries—named for the Biblical figure Mary Magdalene—became primarily Catholic institutions, and the stints grew longer and longer. Women sent there were often charged with “redeeming themselves” through lace-making, needlework or doing laundry.

Though most residents had not been convicted of any crime, conditions inside were prison-like. “Redemption might sometimes involve a variety of coercive measures, including shaven heads, institutional uniforms, bread and water diets, restricted visiting, supervised correspondence, solitary confinement and even flogging,”  writes historian Helen J. Self.

Ireland’s first such institution, the Magdalen Asylum for Penitent Females in Dublin, was founded by the Protestant Church of Ireland in 1765. At the time, there was a worry that prostitution in Irish cities was on the rise and that “wayward” women who had been seduced, had sex outside of marriage, or gotten pregnant out of wedlock were susceptible to becoming prostitutes. Soon, parents began to send their unmarried daughters to the institutions to hide their pregnancies. 

Initially, a majority of women entered the institutions  voluntarily and served out multi-year terms in which they learned a “respectable” profession. The idea was that they’d employ these skills to earn money after being released; their work supported the institution while they were there.

READ MORE: The Brutal History of Japan's 'Comfort Women'

But over time, the institutions became more like prisons, with many different groups of women being routed through the system, sometimes by the Irish government. There were inmates imported from psychiatric institutions and jails, women with special needs, victims of rape and sexual assault, pregnant teenagers sent there by their parents, and girls deemed too flirtatious or tempting to men. Others were there for no obvious reason. Though the institutions were run by Catholic orders, they were supported by the Irish government, which funneled money toward the system in exchange for laundry services.

Nuns ruled the laundries with impunity, sometimes beating inmates and enforcing strict rules of silence. “You didn’t know when the next beating was going to come,”  said survivor Mary Smith in an oral history.

Smith was incarcerated in the Sundays Well laundry in Cork after being raped; nuns told her it was “in case she got pregnant.” Once there, she was forced to cut her hair and take on a new name. She was not allowed to talk and was assigned backbreaking work in the laundry, where nuns regularly beat her for minor infractions and forced her to sleep in the cold. Due to the trauma she suffered, Smith doesn’t remember exactly how long she spent in Sundays Well. “To me it felt like my lifetime,” she said.

Smith wasn’t alone. Often, women’s names were stripped from them; they were referred to by numbers or as “child” or “penitent.” Some inmates—often orphans or victims of rape or abuse—stayed there for a lifetime; others escaped and were brought back to the institutions.

Another survivor, Marina Gambold, was placed in a laundry by her local priest. She recalls being forced to eat off the floor after breaking a cup and getting locked outside in the cold for a minor infraction. “I was working in the laundry from eight in the morning until about six in the evening,” she told the BBC in 2013. “I was starving with the hunger, I was given bread and dripping for my breakfast.”

Some pregnant women were transferred to homes for unwed mothers, where they bore and temporarily lived with their babies and worked in conditions similar to those of the laundries. Babies were usually taken from their mothers and handed over to other families. In one of the most notorious homes, the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, scores of babies died. In 2014, remains of at least 796 babies were found in a septic tank in the home’s yard; the facility is still being investigated to reconstruct the story of what happened there.

READ MORE : The First Birth Control Pill Used Puerto Rican Women as Guinea Pigs

How did such an abusive system endure for 231 years in Ireland? To start with, any talk of harsh treatment at the Magdalene laundries and mothers’ homes tended to be dismissed by the public, since the institutions were run by religious orders. Survivors who told others what they had been through were often shamed or ignored. Other women were too embarrassed to talk about their past and never told anyone about their experiences. Details on both the inmates and their lives are scant.

Estimates of the number of women who went through Irish Magdalene laundries vary, and most religious orders have  refused to provide archival information for investigators and historians. Up to 300,000 women are thought to have passed through the laundries in total, at least 10,000 of them since 1922. But despite a large number of survivors, the laundries went unchallenged until the 1990s.

Then, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity decided to sell some of its land in 1992. They applied to have 133 bodies moved from unmarked graves on the property, but the remains of 155 people were found. When journalists learned that only 75 death certificates existed, startled community members cried out for more information. The nuns  explained there had been an administrative error, cremated all of the remains, and reburied them in another mass grave.

The discovery turned the Magdalene laundries from an open secret to front-page news. Suddenly, women began to testify about their experiences at the institutions, and to pressure the Irish government to hold the Catholic Church accountable and to pursue cases with the United Nations for human rights violations. Soon, the UN urged the Vatican to look into the matter,  stating  that “girls [at the laundries] were deprived of their identity, of education and often of food and essential medicines and were imposed with an obligation of silence and prohibited from having any contact with the outside world.”

As the Catholic Church remained silent, the Irish government  released a report  that acknowledged extensive government involvement in the laundries and the deep cruelty of the institutions. In 2013, Ireland’s president  apologized  to the Magdalene women and announced a compensation fund. 

Due in part to the uproar surrounding the discovery of the mass grave, the last Magdalene laundry finally closed in 1996. Known as the  Gloucester Street Laundry , it was home to 40 women, most of them elderly and many with developmental disabilities. Nine had no known relatives; all decided to stay with the nuns.

Although Smith managed to reclaim her own life, she understands the damage that long-term institutionalization can inflict. “My body went into shell shock when I went there. When that door closed, my life was over,” Smith recalled in her oral history. “You see all these women there and you know you’re going to end up like them and be psychologically damaged for the rest of your life.”

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Three new books expose the shameful history of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries

From the late 18th century to 1996, thousands of women and girls in Ireland were sentenced to unpaid labor in the convent-run workhouses known as Magdalene laundries, many of them for “sins” like becoming pregnant outside marriage or being poor or too pretty. In 2013, the Irish government formally apologized for its role in the laundries, but the apology was not the watershed moment it should have been.

Apart from a poorly administered redress scheme for survivors, many questions of accountability remain unanswered. Religious archives remain closed in Ireland, and the government appears unwilling to pursue any further inquiry into its own culpability. The full story of the Magdalene laundries remains literally walled off. 

Bloomsbury 288p $30

Lilliput Press 448p $24.63

Grove Press 128p $20

In recent years, several books have attempted to piece together what really happened behind the doors of power. On the literary end are Emer Martin’s novel The Cruelty Men and Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These . On the academic side is a new collection of essays, A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland, edited by Mark Coen, Katherine O’Donnell and Maeve O’Rourke. Despite their different approaches, they all present a powerful picture of what true accountability for church and state abuse looks like.

Emer Martin’s novel is a fierce indictment of the collusion in 20th-century Ireland between church and state and the betrayal of its citizens after the country gained independence in 1922. The Cruelty Men follows the O Conaill clan, an Irish-speaking family who are forcibly resettled from their home on the southwest coast of Ireland to a farm all the way across the country in County Meath. The move sets in motion the family’s separation from each other, beginning with the parents from the six O Conaill children. Left to fend for themselves on their new farm, the children live in constant fear of being snatched by “the cruelty men,” government agents who seek out poor or orphaned children to turn over to the church in exchange for money. 

Emer Martin’s The Cruelty Men is a fierce indictment of the collusion in 20th-century Ireland between church and state.

Soon enough, the family is torn apart. One brother, the autistic Padraig, is secretly turned over to the cruelty men by the eldest brother and placed in an asylum. One sister emigrates. Another becomes pregnant and spends her life shuttled through institutions, ending in a laundry. The eldest sibling, Mary, finds a happy station in life working for a middle-class family and manages to get the youngest O Conaill, Seán, an education with the Christian Brothers so he can become a priest. But soon it becomes clear that Seán, too, has undergone a form of institutionalization, which further breaks the family. The novel’s ending sees the next generation struggling to restore their family bond.

Born in Dublin and now based in California, Martin specializes in contemporary stories of exile, family dysfunction and the Irish diaspora. The Cruelty Men in particular offers a searingly unsentimental view of modern Ireland. Martin was partly inspired by the exposé by Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan of Irish industrial schools, Suffer the Little Children (1999), as well as government reports released in 2009 that investigated church abuse of children, known as the Ryan Report and the Murphy Report. As Martin writes in her book’s acknowledgments, “None of the trials my fictional characters endured are exaggerations. The system was brutal.” (Her latest novel, Thirsty Ghosts , a continuation of The Cruelty Men , will be published this year.)

Claire Keegan likewise responds to recent revelations of abuse with her novella, Small Things Like These. Set in the 1980s, the story tells of a coal merchant and devoted family man, Bill Furlong, who performs an act of courage that challenges the church’s system of abuse. While making his coal deliveries one Christmas season, he visits the local convent, which runs a laundry. There he makes a horrifying discovery. The people in the small town neighboring the convent aren’t entirely unaware of what happens to the girls and women who labor there. But Furlong appears to be the only one unable to look the other way.

Keegan’s spare, elegant storytelling highlights important details that are clues to the mystery of Furlong’s courage. He was the illegitimate child of the maid of a well-to-do Protestant widow. Rather than send the mother and child away and out of sight, the widow takes the unusual course of letting them stay on in her home. This may partly explain Furlong’s actions as an adult. But his working-class status and his being a Catholic coming up against his own church suggest risks that make his action even more courageous.

Irish activists and academics continue to pressure the Irish church and government to allow access to records that could reveal the full story of the Magdalene laundries.

The book ends with a note about the Magdalene system and the government’s report on mother and baby homes released in 2021. Keegan also credits Catherine Corless, a local historian who uncovered evidence of a mass grave on the property of a mother and baby home run by the Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours in Tuam, County Galway. Published in 2014, Corless’s findings revealed that nearly 800 children died in the home, and many were buried in a septic tank. Like the fictional Bill Furlong, Corless was a local who had heard many rumors about the mother and baby home but had refused to look the other way.

While these works of fiction credit official reports and journalists’ investigations to flesh out their stories, activists and academics continue to pressure the Irish church and government to allow access to records that could reveal the full story. A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland offers 11 essays that focus on the Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry in Dublin, which was run by the Religious Sisters of Charity, to reveal the wider system of church and state institutionalization in Ireland. Donnybrook was chosen because it was the first laundry to undergo a transformation from being managed by laypeople to being controlled by a convent. Thus, it “provided a template for what would become the archetypal Irish Magdalene laundry, owned and overseen by nuns.” 

Two of the book’s editors, Katherine O’Donnell and Maeve O’Rourke, are members of the survivor-led advocacy group Justice for Magdalenes Research, along with co-founders Mari Steed and Claire McGettrick and Professor James M. Smith of Boston College. O’Rourke is also a lawyer and a professor at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the University of Galway, and O’Donnell is a history professor at University College Dublin.

The co-editor Mark Coen, a law professor at U.C.D., is the author of two of the book’s essays. The first reports in detail the history of the Religious Sisters of Charity, including its founder Mary Aikenhead, who was declared venerable by Pope Francis in 2015. Coen’s second chapter offers a history of the Donnybrook laundry from its establishment in a different location in 1798 to its closure in 1992. Included is information on the Donnybrook convent’s capitalistic endeavors. Despite the religious group’s mission of charity, its laundry operated according to a customer-focused business model, with lucrative commercial contracts.

Other chapters take deeper dives into various aspects of life at Donnybrook, with factual details that underscore those in Martin and Keegan’s works of fiction. Lindsey Earner-Byrne, a gender studies professor at University College Cork, writes about “respectability,” an 18th-century concept that defined a woman’s moral worth and social power well into the 20th century in Ireland. According to its rigid principles, nuns were held up as exemplary models of morality, while single mothers were undeserving of compassion and subjected to abusive control. Magdalene laundry workers in particular were “the warning to all other women of how easy it was to fall and how serious the consequences were.”

O’Donnell’s chapter humanizes these “fallen women” with excerpts from testimonies collected from survivors. She prefaces these testimonies with historical background information about Catholic social doctrine, specifically Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical letter “Rerum Novarum.” O’Donnell makes a strong argument that the church’s social doctrine helped the Irish middle class consolidate power and reinstitute another form of colonialism through the incarceration of so many poor and working-class women, despite the country’s revolutionary ideals for independence. 

Chris Hamill, a Belfast-based architect, takes a cue from James M. Smith’s book Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (2007) to analyze Donnybrook’s design and layout. Everything about its architecture, from the size of its windows to a covered bridge that connected the women’s transept in the chapel to the laundries (rather than to their dormitory), conveyed a sense of surveillance and containment. Hamill further notes that its fortress-like structure was unmissable, a place the surrounding community could not convincingly claim to have known nothing about. 

Together, these works provide a model of true accountability and shed necessary light on a dark era in the Irish church.

The feminist legal professor Máiréad Enright looks at Donnybrook’s benefactors and examines how charity becomes a means to reinforce moral and class divisions. She also discusses how Catholic teaching on mercy became politicized in Ireland and has been used to curb attempts to hold religious orders responsible for abuse.

When the Irish government released its report on the laundries in 2013, the claim was made that the religious orders did not profit from the laundry women’s labor. Two accounting experts, Brid Murphy and Martin Quinn, analyze Donnybrook’s available accounting records and prove otherwise. Another claim in the government’s report is that women in the Magdalene system did not serve extended amounts of time there. But the chapter on the Irish criminal justice system by Lynsey Black, a law professor at Maynooth College, challenges this claim, showing that many women sentenced to Donnybrook and other laundries disappeared into “a shadow penal system.” 

A recurring theme throughout the book is the lack of access to records in places such as Donnybrook. Researchers were left to literally sift through the laundry’s remains to piece together its history. 

In the final chapter, McGettrick describes her process of building a “guerilla archive” as part of the Magdalene Names Project, which gathers public records like gravestones, census records, death certificates, Catholic directories and newspaper archives to establish the identities of women who died in the laundries. She writes that the project “acts as an accountability mechanism” as well as a tribute to the women “through which survivors, relatives and advocates can speak truth to power.” 

McGettrick’s chapter offers a fitting close to A Dublin Magdalene Laundry . It encapsulates the heroic work of all its contributors and of artists like Martin and Keegan. Together, these works provide a model of true accountability and shed necessary light on a dark era in the Irish church.

This article also appeared in print, under the headline “Ireland’s Dirty Laundry,” in the October 2023 , issue.

René Ostberg is a freelance writer in Illinois. She has published articles in National Catholic Reporter, Sojourners, Next Avenue and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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In Australia's Magdalene laundries 'fallen women' worked in harsh conditions for no pay

In 1890, on a patch of lawn in the Sydney suburb of Tempe, Cardinal Patrick Francis   Moran made an announcement at the opening celebration of a new "retreat for fallen women".

"No matter how repulsive she may be, she receives the kiss of peace," he told an esteemed group of lords and ladies, minor royalty and members of parliament.

The so-called "fallen women" included those who were pregnant outside of marriage, who'd had sex with someone other than their husbands, or who were sex workers.

And the place where they would receive "the kiss of peace" was a newly opened Magdalene Retreat of the Catholic Church.

"She has come to the door of the asylum clad in rags or faded garments, a living reality of shame and woe," Cardinal Moran proclaimed.

"She is told to wipe out her sins by sorrow, to forget the past ... [The women will] meekly submit themselves to be governed by a few religious Sisters 'til they become models of industry, docility and obedience."

What he left out in this rousing speech were the shocking details of exactly how, in the Magdalene "retreat", that process would play out.

From 'fallen' to penitent

The refuge, and its Tempe estate, was owned by the Sisters of the Good Samaritan.

From 1887 to 1974 the Sisters operated a commercial laundry, a major source of its income, run by unpaid women and girls.

Magdalene laundries for fallen women date back to 12th century Europe. They were Catholic-run institutions to reform wayward women, known as Magdalens, through strict religious observance and unpaid work.

"There's a very long history of the Catholic Church institutionalising fallen women who would hopefully become penitent women," Kellie Toole, a lecturer in the University of Adelaide's law school, tells ABC RN's History Listen .

Shocking revelations have come to light about the conditions these women endured, particularly in Ireland .

But Dr Toole says it's not as well known that, in the 19th century, the Catholic Church also established Magdalene laundries in every state in Australia.

"A lot of history relating to women has never received the attention it deserves," she says.

"Hidden stories of women are sadly not at all uncommon."

What were the laundries trying to do?

The Magdalene refuges, also known as retreats or asylums, had a three-pronged mission, says Dr Toole, who has researched Australian Catholic refuges for penitent women.

One was based on the idea that for certain "fallen" women, the world was a dangerous place, and they needed protection.

Another was to help such women "to morally reform" in the presence of nuns, and through religion and prayer.

Finally, refuges aimed to use "hard work" to help women gain "skills that they would then be able to [use] in the community".

Women who entered were expected to stay for two years. To achieve its mission, the refuge had strict rules for the women who came through its doors.

Archbishop   John Bede Polding wrote "rules of observance", which he modelled on those of Magdalene laundries across Europe, for another retreat in Pitt Street in the centre of Sydney.

Pitt Street was a setting "in which young women who had gone in the wrong direction and in some way morally or socially, could be put on a straight and narrow path," Ian Tyrrell, emeritus professor of history at the University of New South Wales, says.

The nuns at Tempe used the same rules of observance including a strict code of conduct.

"They were expected to remain silent at many times during the day and also at night," Professor Tyrrell says.

"This is actually [a] feature that you found in 19th century penitentiaries. And by keeping silent, the inmates would dwell on their inner thoughts, and not be distracted by external matters."

The rules framed the women's commercial laundry work as "penitence", Dr Toole explains.

"So when [women] went in, they were in what was considered a depraved state, and then after they had been reformed, they were penitent women. Then they understood the error of their ways and they were sorry."

'She looked worn and frightened'

Just who laundries' penitents were, and what those women had been through leading to up to becoming a Magdalen, was not often documented.

But Tempe's records show that until the turn of the century, many were daughters of working-class Irishmen, and many struggled with addiction, or were homeless at a time when it was a crime.

It's also difficult to find accounts of the penitents' perspective of life at the laundries.

"It was easy to find out about the ideological premises and impacts of the enterprise, but it was hard to see what was going on on the ground," Professor Tyrrell says.

Documented accounts are "from the view of the Catholic Church", Dr Toole says.

"So it's very hard to get … who these women were, what actually really happened to them after they left the institution, what that experience was like while they were there [and] what it was like to feel that sense of shame."

An inquiry that began in Ireland in 2011 exposed the enslavement of thousands of women and girls  in the notorious Magdalene laundry system.

In Australia, where there has been no such inquiry, there are some clues as to what life was like.

In 1890 a visitor to Tempe , while praising other aspects of the refuge, "regretted to notice an absence of books or means of wholesome recreation".

In 1906, a reporter from Protestant newspaper The Watchman interviewed a woman who'd just left the refuge.

"Though a stoutly built woman, she looked worn and frightened, and appeared to have led a very hard life," the reporter wrote.

Working 4am to 8pm

The woman in The Watchman article was 25-year-old May Gould, who had just escaped from Tempe's Magdalene retreat.

The newspaper Ms Gould spoke with was the mouthpiece of the Australian Protestant Defence Association, a militant evangelical group of Christians on guard against Roman Catholic institutions and influence. 

The story caused a sectarian dogfight that played out in the papers for weeks.

Ms Gould tells the paper that before entering the retreat she was told "I could go out when I liked", but says that proved not to be the case.

"After six weeks, I informed the Mother Superior that I desired to leave and she stated that it was an unheard-of thing," she says in the article.

"I fought against it and asked repeatedly to be let out. Each time I was refused, and I informed them I would escape at the first opportunity."

Ms Gould says she learnt, after arriving, of "a laundry connected to the convent".

"I was compelled to work in the laundry from four o'clock in the morning until eight o'clock at night with only short intervals," she says.

"I received no payment for the work done."

Ms Gould goes on to say children were also employed at the laundry. The nuns had no option but to take in "state" children who were wards of the state sent to Tempe by the newly formed Children's Courts.

After the state children started arriving at Tempe, it had to become more secure and prison-like — with locks on the windows and doors, for example.

"They [the nuns] were very cruel to the state children," Ms Gould says.

"When I left there were about three children of about nine years of age who worked the same hours as myself.

"One little girl lost her arm trying to save a tablecloth belonging to the Hotel Australia … She caught her arm and it was burnt and bruised to the elbow and had to be cut off and now it is stitched."

Women's history silenced

Eventually, Ms Gould found her moment.

"I escaped with two other inmates. Most of the nuns were in retreat, and by an oversight, the chapel was left open without the guards at the door. I saw my opportunity and ran out, the two other girls following me," she says.

According to Catholic newspaper The Freeman's Journal, Ms Gould's story was the first negative allegation against the Magdalene retreat.

The Catholic community was outraged by what it saw as yet another sectarian attack. The Mother Superior at Tempe fought back and produced Ms Gould's prison record for petty theft, which left her credibility in tatters.

In the days following, The Watchman reported that Ms Gould's statement was "false in several particulars", but that "much that the woman said about Tempe we believe to be true in every respect, for it has since been corroborated by independent and voluntary witnesses".

What happened to Ms Gould later in life is unclear, but her story's contested hidden history is a glimpse of a penitent.

It would be another seven decades before the laundry finally closed, in 1974. In 1988 the Tempe property was sold, and the laundries and dormitories were demolished the following year.

But surrounding its history are issues about the treatment of women that remain relevant, Dr Toole says.

"In my mind, we've still got these very clear views about women, and how they should act and how their sexuality should be expressed. And they can still experience huge amounts of disadvantage on that basis.

"So … we have to accept that the stories of those individual [Magdalene] women are lost, but there's still much to learn about the way we categorise and stereotype women that's happening now.

"We can still learn a lot about the way women's history has been silenced."

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The Magdalene Laundries abuse: True story behind BBC’s The Woman in the Wall explained, and when they shut

Writer joe murtagh has revealed it was inspired by the real-life accounts of those who survived ireland’s magdalene laundries.

Gothic thriller The Woman in the Wall premiered on the BBC , telling the fictional story of Lorna Brady and shining a light on the dark and all-too-real history of the Magdalene Laundries.

Ruth Wilson stars as Brady, a woman from the small, fictional Irish town of Kilkinure who wakes one morning to find a corpse in her house.

She has no idea who the dead woman is or if she might be responsible for the death.

Her investigation forces her to delve back into her own past and renew the search for her daughter Agnes, who she gave birth to as a teen while incarcerated in the town’s Magdalene Laundry.

Brady’s character and story is fictional, but writer Joe Murtagh has revealed it was inspired by the real-life accounts of those who survived Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries.

He said: “I was inspired to do this just by a sense of outrage, I guess you’d call it.

“And I wanted to do it in a very particular kind of way where, because it was so unknown, I wanted to kind of cast the net wide, and get the story out there to as wide an audience as possible.”

What were the Magdalene Laundries?

The Magdalene laundries were institutions set up and operated by religious communities in Ireland, with the support of the state, initially for “fallen women” , primarily sex workers.

This was later expanded to include unmarried mothers, abused girls, petty criminals and women with mental health conditions.

The Dublin Magdalen Asylum was the first such institution in Ireland. Run by the Church of Ireland and accepting only Protestant women, it was founded in 1765.

But the Catholic Church also ran a large number of laundries in ireland and it was these which would become the longest-surviving in Ireland. The last one closed in 1996.

Similar institutions were set up in the UK, Australia, Canada and the US.

They are named after the biblical figure Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus who in earlier centuries was characterised as a reformed prostitute.

How did the laundries operate?

Usually run by female religious orders, these institutions were commercial laundries which were staffed by the women and girls they took in.

They would have to adhere to a strict regime of silence, prayer and work in the laundry.

Unmarried mothers who were taken in would often be forcibly separated from their children, sometimes at birth, and the babies put up for adoption, as depicted in the film Philomena, based on the real-life account of Philomena Lee.

Many women would end up spending their entire lives in the laundries.

Secrecy by the religious orders running the laundries means it is not known exactly how many women and children have been incarcerated in them.

But an estimated 30,000 women are believed to have been confined to the laundries in Ireland during the 19th and 20th centuries, about 10,000 of whom were admitted since Ireland’s independence in 1922.

Why are they so controversial to this day?

In 1993, the sale of land by one Dublin laundry to a property developer led to the discovery of 155 unmarked graves.

A subsequent Channel 4 documentary in 1997, Sex in a Cold Climate , revealed accounts by former inmates at the laundries of physical, emotional and sexual abuse carried out by those who ran the institutions.

In 2011, the Irish Government set up an inquiry to establish the facts of the Irish state’s involvement with the Magdalene laundries .

And in 2013, the Taoiseach Enda Kenny issued a formal state apology in which he said: “The Magdalene laundries have cast a long shadow over Irish life over our sense of who we are.

“The Magdalene women might have been told that they were washing away a wrong or a sin but we know now and to our shame they were only ever scrubbing away our nation’s shadow.”

A compensation scheme was founded for survivors of the laundries in Ireland which has so far paid out more than €32m (£27m).

Writer Joe Murtagh said he hope by making The Woman in the Wall “we are able to shed some light on the awful things that occurred within these kind of institutions and introduce this history to the wider public, so that nothing like it may ever happen again.”

The Woman in the Wall is a six-part drama, with the second episode showing tonight (28 August) on BBC 1 at 9pm and will then run weekly on Sundays at 9pm.

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Nuns who ran Magdalene laundries have not contributed to redress for women

Some €32m in awards of €11,000-€100,000 made to more than 800 survivors to date.

More than 11,000 women and girls were held in 10 Magdalene laundries operated by four female religious congregations from 1922 until the closure of Dublin’s Seán McDermott Street laundry (pictured) in 1996. Photograph: Julien Behal/PA Wire

All four religious congregations involved in running Ireland's 10 Magdalene laundries, who feature in an RTÉ documentary later this evening, have refused to contribute to a State fund to compensate the women who worked in them.

A total of €32.8million has so far been paid by the State in awards under a redress scheme created in December 2013 which has given awards since of up to €100,000 to 814 survivors.

However, the Religious Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity and the Good Shepherd Sisters have "declined" to make a financial contribution to the Magdalen Laundries Restorative Justice Ex Gratia Scheme, the Department of Children confirmed to The Irish Times.

More than 11,000 women and girls were held in 10 laundries operated by the four female religious congregations from 1922 until the closure of Dublin’s Seán McDermott Street laundry in 1996.

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In the first of two episodes of Ireland’s Dirty Laundry, which airs tonight, survivors speak of their experiences.

“People think they know the Magdalene laundry story, but they don’t. They don’t know the half of it, to be honest,” says one of those interviewed, Teresa O’Connor

The episode concentrates on the experience of the girls and women who were sent to the laundries, why they were sent there and what happened to them then and later. Survivors tearfully describe their experiences of being sent away as young girls with little or no idea of what awaited them, sometimes as a result of domestic and sexual abuse, for which they themselves were made to pay a desperate price.

“You were constantly being told, ‘Nobody loves you. Nobody wants you. Your mother dumped you,” said Maureen Sullivan told the programme.

Academic James M. Smith said: “Irish society and Irish families re-victimised the female victims of male sexual violence, be that rape, be that incest, be that sexual abuse. The family was sacrosanct after the 1937 constitution - inalienable rights. So, we asked no questions. There was no comment. And it was easier in some cases just to send Mary away or Bridget away.”

Some of the women and girls were unmarried mothers, others came to the laundries from reformatories, industrial schools and mother and baby homes, while others were placed there by their families.

In 2013 the then government wrote to the orders requesting a contribution to the redress fund, but these pleas were rejected.

“However, they cooperated fully in making records available to the applicants and in verifying details for the Department,” the department said.

In February 2013, then taoiseach Enda Kenny apologised to the women on behalf of the State following the publication of the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries .

In 2015 the Magdalen Restorative Justice Ex-Gratia Scheme was set up to compensate surviving women and, as of January, €32.8 million had been paid in awards. These ranged from €11,500 to €100,000.

Two further institutions have since been added to the scheme - St Mary's Domestic Training Centre at Stanhope Street in Dublin, run by the Religious Sisters of Charity, and the House of Mercy Domestic Training School at Summerhill in Wexford, run by the Sisters of Mercy.

Of the 12 institutions concerned, three were managed by the Religious Sisters of Charity: the Magdalene laundries at Donnybrook in Dublin and at Peacock Lane in Cork, as well as St Mary’s Domestic Training Centre.

Last week it emerged that the Religious Sisters of Charity had applied to Dublin City Council for planning permission to allow "high quality residential development and address housing need" at their site on Merrion Road in Dublin 4.

A senior property industry source estimated it could sell for “€50 million-plus” if zoned for homes.

Patsy McGarry

Patsy McGarry is a contributor to The Irish Times

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