The ‘banal brutality’ of the Magdalene Laundries

Portrait by Katherine Anne Rose for The Observer

On St Patrick’s Day 1943, Ireland’s prime minister, Éamon de Valera, addressed the nation. In a radio broadcast he laid out his vision for a country that, 21 years after independence, was defining itself anew, albeit on the age-old traditional values of hearth, home and, above all, faith.

“The Ireland that we dreamed of,” said the taoiseach, “would be… a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children… and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires.”

De Valera’s utopian manifesto masked a harsher reality that was only obliquely alluded to in that final sentence. In many ways, under De Valera, an austerely devout Catholic, Ireland resembled a theocracy in which bishops had more power than politicians, and every aspect of Irish life was informed by an oppressive Catholic ideology. For Irish women, in particular, any expression of individuality or hint of defiance could bring dire consequences.

“A key principle of Catholic ideology was purity,” writes Louise Brangan in The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries & Ireland’s Legacy of Silence, which is a forensic history of the institutions. “Purity meant living without sin, to be morally unblemished, and this state was achieved through a strict schedule of prayer and penance.”

As Brangan makes clear, the ideology of purity through prayer and penance was at the very core of daily life in the 10 Magdalene Laundries, Catholic-run workhouses that were situated across Ireland from independence in 1922 until 1996, when the last remaining laundry on Seán McDermott Street in Dublin was closed down. In that time, an estimated 10,000 women and girls deemed wayward by the clergy were sentenced to a life of unrelenting servitude and prayer.

The “fallen” of Brangan’s title were often ordinary women who did not conform to the ideal of purity ascribed by the Catholic church and had to be punished accordingly. By way of illustration, Brangan quotes from a 1932 sermon that a priest delivered to his parishioners in Donnybrook, Dublin, in which he praised the nuns for their “heroic work” with women who “had been giddy, irresponsible, undisciplined from the start, too eager for attention, flattery and fine dress, too addicted to cinemas, music halls and the like. They played with danger in spite of the warnings of life around them and the reproaches of conscience within them.”

Once confined behind the walls of a laundry, the women lived lives of penitential harshness overseen by four orders of nuns whose collective titles belied their cruelty: the Religious Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, and the Good Shepherd Sisters. Under their charge, many women grew old and died there, institutionalised and seemingly forgotten by their families and the communities they vanished from. Sometimes it was their families that handed them over, a still shocking reflection of what Brangan calls “the ordinary, banal brutality” of a society in which piety curdled into cruelty.

As Brangan points out, nuns oversaw an entire system of punitive control in post-independence Ireland, including schools, hostels, hospitals, hospices, youth clubs and mother and baby homes. “In a regime distinguished by its excessive inhumanity, the Magdalene Laundries were its deep end,” she writes. “They were not peripheral, they were Ireland’s main carceral institutions… employed for those women and girls considered to be beyond the help of the Mother and Baby Home, beyond the industrial school, beyond the prison and beyond the pale of ordinary life. The Laundries are the end of the line; the termini.”

Brangan is an Irish academic, who grew up in Dublin and now lives in Edinburgh. Her main area of research is injustice and imprisonment. “I’m basically interested in how we punish and who we punish,” she tells me. “All societies have national biographies in which we tend to tell ourselves the best stories of ourselves, but if we really want to know what a society holds dear, you need to look at who they exile, who they imprison, who they banish, who they cast out – and what is done to those people in each instance.”

She wrote The Fallen in part out of frustration at the way the Magdalene Laundries have been portrayed since their existence became a national scandal in the most darkly dramatic way in 1993. That year, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity sold a plot of land in Dublin to property developers, whose subsequent excavations uncovered a mass grave on the site. It contained the remains of 155 women. Official records state that 879 women died in the Laundries from 1922 onwards.

“Since [1993], we have rendered the Magdalene Laundries in virtually every art form,” says Brangan, “Fiction, song, theatre, dance, tapestry… I even think there’s a musical coming soon. I thought it was time to look at the issue front-on and to situate it in the society and culture that existed quietly alongside it, because the laundries were not hidden away; they were there in plain sight. Everyone knew about them. People used to drop their washing off there, and they also knew to drop their daughters off there if they had strayed too far from acceptability. It’s time to acknowledge that they were part of our ordered normality. One of the questions I’m asking is, how do we account for that?”

Brangan began researching the book in 2018, prompted by a recording of De Valera’s St Patrick Day’s speech. “I’d been doing a lot of work on Irish prisons and it struck me that the laundries were the real mystery. By the 1970s and 1980s, Ireland had a relatively humane prison system, but there was also this shadowland, where thousands of women had been detained endlessly, for all of their lives, in a whole set of institutions that no one spoke about.”

Her book is a detailed and haunting history of that shadowland, a stark refutation of the ideal Ireland that De Valera imagined. At its heart are six first-person testimonies from women who were incarcerated in the laundries for a variety of “sins”, including wayward behaviour and adolescent rebellion of the most minor kind. The depth of the cruelty described in each is cumulatively overwhelming. A woman known as Eileen describes how her hair was shorn and her name taken from her, while she was still struggling to understand where she was and why she was there. Her state of confusion is echoed throughout the testimonies, the trauma of sudden abandonment giving way to powerlessness, exhaustion and a sense of despair.

In the Sunday’s Well laundry in Cork, 18-year-old Carmel was rechristened Imelda after the nun who had brought her there. Her hair shorn, she was given a meal of bread and dripping with a mug of cocoa, and taken to a dormitory which housed aged and infirm women – “worn-out, crooked, with rotted teeth, short white hair, glazed expressions, silent demeanours”. Initially, Carmel thought her role was to care for them, but then, in horror, realised that they represented the possible fate that awaited her.

In the laundries, the working day began at 6am with morning mass, followed by a frugal breakfast, the ranks of women overseen by a nun on a raised seat who made sure they did not converse with each other while eating. In the laundry, the work was intense and laborious: lines of silent women washing, wringing out and ironing bed linen from local establishments, tweed and woollen clothes and school uniforms in the extreme heat of steam-filled rooms, while water sloshed around their feet.

The work was hazardous and physically exhausting. Brangan describes “bleach spattering off hand brushes, the searing hot metal, machines spinning at 100 miles per hour”. Throughout her retelling, hell is in the details. “For the children who were sent to the Laundry, who were not fully grown and too small to reach the front-loading machines, a stool was stood by, giving them the extra height required to reach up into the washing machines.”

Reading The Fallen, even given all that I already knew of the Magdalene Laundries, the toxic mix of piousness and relentless cruelty became even harder to fathom. I ask Brangan if her extensive research shed light on that paradox?

“Well, you can look across any period of history and see different extremities in these systems of punishment. But, in Ireland, the women who ended up in the laundries were so vilified, so dehumanised, that what was done to them does not have to meet the standards of human decency. They were seen not to deserve even that, because their very existence was treated as so base and so immoral, that to even have them around was offensive to many people.”

As the subtitle of Brangan’s book suggests, a collective and complicit silence was at the core of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. In a culture in which respectability became a suffocating principle of day to day life, and shame its damning counterpart, that silence became almost total, the act of looking away normalised.

“It’s easy to view these institutions in terms of goodies and baddies, and victims who became survivors,” says Brangan. “And the way that we in Ireland have discussed, represented, theorised and aestheticised this history tends to keep it contained within the walls of the Laundries. What I am trying to show is that the demands of purity, of penance, of self-denial and self-abrogation were also expected of every Irish person alongside a collective vow of silence. So, as much as we have to honour and remember what happened in the Magdalene Laundries, we need to understand how everyone in Ireland was to a degree expected to live under a very punitive cultural code of conduct.”

Ultimately, Brangan’s book asks a question that echoes through history: how do we remember? In Ireland’s case, that question is shadowed by a long history of looking away. “For centuries,” the Irish novelist John Banville noted, “the greatest skill the Irish had was to know how not to know, and the first thing we made it our business not to know was ourselves. Ignorance ensured our peace of mind… The preferred state of the nation was a state of spiritual and intellectual infancy.”

Now, following the accelerated modernity that attended the so-called Celtic Tiger years – roughly the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s – Brangan identifies what she calls “a collective garrulous evasion” that has replaced that collective ignorance. “There has been so much talking, talking and talking,” she says, sounding exasperated, “and, in a way, the more we have spoken about the Laundries, the further we seem to have come from remembering them.”

This evasion is reflected in the church and the state: the nuns have refused to hand over their archives of the Laundries, nor have they been held responsible for any reparation. And, while there are tentative plans under way to turn the laundry building on Seán McDermott Street into a permanent site of remembrance, Brangan points out that the government has already said it is not going to hand over the archives from there. “It will be like an empty museum,” she says. “There is still an official reticence, a quiet demand to move on, which speaks volumes about our inability or unwillingness to remember this part of our history.”

What would it take for a meaningful process of remembering to take place? “Candour,” she replies without hesitation. “Not talk, not discourse, not concepts, but candour, which is the real opposite of silence.”

She describes candour as “a kind of civilised honesty” that is both uncomfortable and liberating. “It addresses our own proximity to this history, because it means, for instance, turning to a family member and asking, ‘Did this happen to you? What was it like? You haven’t spoken of it before, but can we speak about it now?’ It may feel embarrassing or shameful or excruciating, but candour is the willingness to deal with all that to get to some kind of restorative truth.”

She pauses for a moment. “Morally and ethically, remembering is a form of social justice and a big part of remembering is being able to confront our own humanity. So, for me, the bravest, boldest question to put to yourself after reading the book is, could I have done this? Could I have looked the other way? Could I have lived alongside this? It seems important that we try to see ourselves in our collective past, because we are always much closer to history than we think we are.”

Additional photographs courtesy Roz Sinclair / Testimony Films, Mark Cohen, O’Donnell + Tuomey, Galway City Museum, Butler Cammoranesi Architects / Bellmount Developments