. . . places where those who deviated from the norms of the healthy, warrior, blue eyed Germanic master race would be detained, out of sight and out of mind.
These deviants included political opponents; asocial elements including the unemployed; mentally subnormal and atypical; LGTB+ people and others who violated the Nazi aesthetic be they sexually liberated women, prostitutes and “degenerate” artists and writers. Of course they also held those whose very existence as opposed to behaviours was an affront to Nazi ideals, namely Jews and Gypsies who were to pay the ultimate collective price for it. In her book on the operation of and the inmates trapped in the Magdalen Laundries The Fallen, the academic Louise Brangan whose expertise is in the areas of injustice and imprisonment, describes a similar dynamic in the operation of the carceral archipelago of clerical run institutions of detention, “care,” “welfare” and reformatories that were constructed in independent Ireland.
While lacking the exterminatory logic and praxis of Nazi Germany, Brangan dissects a system in which Ireland’s excreta was contained. Such institutions operated in plain sight and yet away from the prying eyes of those who knew and yet refused to know. The figure of the fallen woman occupied a particular form of Übermenschen in Irish society. For to be pregnant out of marriage was the ultimate, unmentionable sin in Ireland. For it was family reputation and honour that was being violated in the gossip strewn large village that was Ireland for at least five decades after independence. It was to avoid the shame and disgrace, the threat of which largely held together a social structure which had emerged in the decades after the Great Famine, that the carriers of the ultimate taboo and stigma had to be shepherded into permanent incarceration. Moral purity was the ideological mission statement of post-independence Ireland just as racial purity was the overarching principle of Nazi Germany; those who transgressed the national ethic were not just to be punished but disappeared into the unknowing Kafkaesque realm of the Irish morality gulag.
Much has been written both in academic texts, personal biography and in the dry tomes of government commissions on the horrors of the Irish Catholic ideal. The extent of child sexual abuse by priests, bishops and nuns has been well documented. As have the dimensions of the systematic and almost ritual psychical brutality of the Industrial Schools run by the Christian Brothers (over and above the regular, almost banal abuse in the schools that order ran), the cruelties of the Mother and Baby Homes.
The legalisation of the right to choose abortion after the deletion of Article 40.3. or the Eighth Amendment in the 2018 referendum resolved Ireland’s tortuous history over reproductive rights. The struggle for full LGTB+ rights was fully won by the legalisation of same sex marriage in the 2015 referendum. It is worth stating such developments would have been scarcely imaginable as recently as the 1990s.
Louise Brangan fills a surprising lacunae in the literature and chronicles of the death of Most Holy Catholic Ireland by her coruscating study of the Magdalen Laundries, the publication of which was timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the closure of the last Laundry in 1996. Surely this closure should have laid to rest yet another harrowing episode in Irish history. However the inter-generational trauma that is a legacy of the institutional cruelty of this node in Irish Catholicism’s gulag ensures that it is very much a live issue for scholars of this regime and a festering scar on the Irish collective psyche. Brangan thus performs an invaluable therapeutic task in telling the forgotten story of the Magdalen Laundries, through the testimonies of the women who suffered the indignities of the system, the nuns who presided over them and the communities who lived in physical proximity to these sites of indefinite incarceration, but who often chose to avert their gaze from them.
It is the through the stories of six inmates/residents/detainees (choose whatever the appropriate descriptor is for you the reader) Carmel, Brigid, Eileen, Nora, Catherine, and Katie that Brangan brings to awareness the corporeal reality of the Laundries and sheds light on the hidden and not so hidden cruelties and hypocrisies of “respectable Ireland.” We learn in raw, unflinching oral evidence how Carmel ended up in the Laundries because the nuns decided that even though she was eighteen, she was not ready for Civvy Street. To escape the Laundries, she had to escape Ireland. We are told how “for giddy acts of truancy” Brigid paid the ultimate price. For when she crept back into society, she was an adult woman in a world that she could not engage with, within a community unwilling to accept her. We are informed how without any explanation, discussion or justification, Eileen was sent to the Laundry because, Matrix or Minority Report style, some strangers had judged her predelinquent, too weak to avoid the seduction of the world around her and so doomed to the fate of no longer in the world at all. There is Nora whose pregnancies and babies had to be hidden to ward off the public shame that would have descended on her family. There were girls like Katie who were dispatched to the Laundries like refugees, because the State had abandoned them and Catherine who, like many other children, were deposited in the Laundries because their parenting resources depended on love, money, and respectability and any one of them could be critically absent.[1]
Ireland’s Prisons of Patriarchy
It is one of the cruellest ironies of the history of the Republic of Ireland that for the first three or four decades that at one time the liberal and permissive use of temporary release in the Irish men’s prison system - to avoid what prison administrators thought of as long, degrading and inhumane periods of imprisonment - earned for Ireland a temporary reputation in the twentieth century for having one of the more humane prison systems in the world[2], that by the 1950s, one in every seventy Irish persons over the age of 24 was confined in an asylum. Be it psychiatric hospitals (or the more common moniker mental asylums), industrial and reformatory schools for poor orphaned children, County Homes (formerly workhouses rebranded after Irish independence), and Mother and Baby Homes, where women and girls’ pregnant outside marriage were accommodated (as was also the practice in the UK). And superimposed on these care/remand centres were the Magdalen Laundries. Taken as an aggregate, these institutions held over 1 per cent of the Irish population.[3]
In 1951 when the Laundries were at their peak of operation, for every 100,000 males, 27 were in prison, of which there were only five. While for every 100,000 females, seventy were in a Laundry. They were for females virtually beyond redemption. They were considered to be beyond the help of the Mother and Baby Home, beyond the industrial school, beyond the prison, and beyond the remit of modern life. They were the end of the line. They were the termini, a concept developed by the criminologist Richard Sparks, who used it to describe the extreme forms of prison segregation and the ‘recurrent capacity’ of our systems to control, ‘to develop the deepest places – ends-of-the-lines; termini.[4]
The Irish government ‘s official calculation is that 10,012 women and girls were sent to the Laundries; a figure which is rightly contested as an underestimate. However another figure which was casually thrown into the public domain is equally open to challenge; this is the statistic of in excess of 56,000 young women who in the closing credits of the 2024 film Small Little Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy, based on the bestselling novella by the Irish author Claire Keegan and set in 1985 in the New Ross Magdalene Laundry in County Wexford ‘were sent to the Magdalene Laundries’ and to whom the film was dedicated to as well ‘as the children who were taken from them’. However this was the headline figure from the official State investigation which was exclusively concerned with the Mother and Baby Homes which had held 56,000 women and girls across the twentieth century.[5]
The history of the Magdalene institutions is not of linear and all-pervasive cruelty. Brangan describes how they had initially been benevolent refuges run by ordinary people of both Catholic and Protestant religious persuasion to work with prostitutes and other ‘fallen women,’ as well as the homeless and alcoholics – all of whom were adjudged to be in need of moral and spiritual recovery, heroically described as ‘rescue work.’ The first Protestant Magdalene asylum was established in 1765 and by the end of the 18th century there were at least forty-one of these refuges. Catholic nuns also operated Magdalene Refuges, though these were usually larger enterprises than the ones operated by lay people. While daily life in the convent Laundries were regimented and religious, they were not coercive or established for profit and the women and children under their care could leave and return at will.[6]
By the early twentieth century, the numbers of women attending the smaller lay Magdalene Refuges steadily declined until they were abandoned completely, leaving only the larger religious institutions in operation. On its independence from Britain in 1922, there were only ten Catholic Laundries across Ireland ran by four religious orders: Religious Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, and the Good Shepherd Sisters. Located close to the edges of the island, this decemvirate of institutions encircled the new nation. On the east coast there were four Laundries in the capital Dublin; two on the south-east coast in New Ross, Wexford and in County Waterford; two more in the southernmost city of Cork; one each on the western seaboard in Limerick and Galway and one across the new frontier in the newly established state of Northern Ireland.[7]
Brangan’s book is a forensic yet harrowing account of the Work Hard and Pray Hard ethos that was the imprimatur of these institutions told through the stories of the main actors; the detained women and custodial nuns as well as an examination of their archives and the decision-making processes of the state agencies that acted in collusion. However to understand how the monotonous cruelty of the Laundries could furnish, one must look at the Ideological superstructure of the new Irish state and its underpinnings.
The Devane Rites Of Irish Catholicism
After independence, the Catholic Church which had developed an authoritative hold on the Irish people in the decades after the Great Famine, now found itself to be the most important power bloc in the new nation and one to whose whim the nascent Irish state would steadily genuflect towards in the coming decades. The new Irish authorities found themselves dealing with the legacies of the War of Independence and the bitter Civil War which followed the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921; the impoverishment caused by the ‘famine like conditions” in the 1920s and the appalling financial strictures forced on the Cumann na nGaedheal government which led to cuts in public expenditure from £42 million in 1923-24 to £24 million in 1927 and then to a paring of the already meagre welfare budget, including a 10 per cent cut to the pension. The consequent falls in wages and welfare payments led to a cost of living crisis and throughout the 1920s infant mortality, overcrowded living and unemployment spiralled and emigration took on such proportions that by 1927, the population had plummeted to its lowest recorded level since the 1840s.[8]
It is the through the stories of six inmates/residents/detainees (choose whatever the appropriate descriptor is for you the reader) Carmel, Brigid, Eileen, Nora, Catherine, and Katie that Brangan brings to awareness the corporeal reality of the Laundries and sheds light on the hidden and not so hidden cruelties and hypocrisies of “respectable Ireland.” We learn in raw, unflinching oral evidence how Carmel ended up in the Laundries because the nuns decided that even though she was eighteen, she was not ready for Civvy Street. To escape the Laundries, she had to escape Ireland. We are told how “for giddy acts of truancy” Brigid paid the ultimate price. For when she crept back into society, she was an adult woman in a world that she could not engage with, within a community unwilling to accept her. We are informed how without any explanation, discussion or justification, Eileen was sent to the Laundry because, Matrix or Minority Report style, some strangers had judged her predelinquent, too weak to avoid the seduction of the world around her and so doomed to the fate of no longer in the world at all. There is Nora whose pregnancies and babies had to be hidden to ward off the public shame that would have descended on her family. There were girls like Katie who were dispatched to the Laundries like refugees, because the State had abandoned them and Catherine who, like many other children, were deposited in the Laundries because their parenting resources depended on love, money, and respectability and any one of them could be critically absent.[1]
Ireland’s Prisons of Patriarchy
It is one of the cruellest ironies of the history of the Republic of Ireland that for the first three or four decades that at one time the liberal and permissive use of temporary release in the Irish men’s prison system - to avoid what prison administrators thought of as long, degrading and inhumane periods of imprisonment - earned for Ireland a temporary reputation in the twentieth century for having one of the more humane prison systems in the world[2], that by the 1950s, one in every seventy Irish persons over the age of 24 was confined in an asylum. Be it psychiatric hospitals (or the more common moniker mental asylums), industrial and reformatory schools for poor orphaned children, County Homes (formerly workhouses rebranded after Irish independence), and Mother and Baby Homes, where women and girls’ pregnant outside marriage were accommodated (as was also the practice in the UK). And superimposed on these care/remand centres were the Magdalen Laundries. Taken as an aggregate, these institutions held over 1 per cent of the Irish population.[3]
In 1951 when the Laundries were at their peak of operation, for every 100,000 males, 27 were in prison, of which there were only five. While for every 100,000 females, seventy were in a Laundry. They were for females virtually beyond redemption. They were considered to be beyond the help of the Mother and Baby Home, beyond the industrial school, beyond the prison, and beyond the remit of modern life. They were the end of the line. They were the termini, a concept developed by the criminologist Richard Sparks, who used it to describe the extreme forms of prison segregation and the ‘recurrent capacity’ of our systems to control, ‘to develop the deepest places – ends-of-the-lines; termini.[4]
The Irish government ‘s official calculation is that 10,012 women and girls were sent to the Laundries; a figure which is rightly contested as an underestimate. However another figure which was casually thrown into the public domain is equally open to challenge; this is the statistic of in excess of 56,000 young women who in the closing credits of the 2024 film Small Little Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy, based on the bestselling novella by the Irish author Claire Keegan and set in 1985 in the New Ross Magdalene Laundry in County Wexford ‘were sent to the Magdalene Laundries’ and to whom the film was dedicated to as well ‘as the children who were taken from them’. However this was the headline figure from the official State investigation which was exclusively concerned with the Mother and Baby Homes which had held 56,000 women and girls across the twentieth century.[5]
The history of the Magdalene institutions is not of linear and all-pervasive cruelty. Brangan describes how they had initially been benevolent refuges run by ordinary people of both Catholic and Protestant religious persuasion to work with prostitutes and other ‘fallen women,’ as well as the homeless and alcoholics – all of whom were adjudged to be in need of moral and spiritual recovery, heroically described as ‘rescue work.’ The first Protestant Magdalene asylum was established in 1765 and by the end of the 18th century there were at least forty-one of these refuges. Catholic nuns also operated Magdalene Refuges, though these were usually larger enterprises than the ones operated by lay people. While daily life in the convent Laundries were regimented and religious, they were not coercive or established for profit and the women and children under their care could leave and return at will.[6]
By the early twentieth century, the numbers of women attending the smaller lay Magdalene Refuges steadily declined until they were abandoned completely, leaving only the larger religious institutions in operation. On its independence from Britain in 1922, there were only ten Catholic Laundries across Ireland ran by four religious orders: Religious Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, and the Good Shepherd Sisters. Located close to the edges of the island, this decemvirate of institutions encircled the new nation. On the east coast there were four Laundries in the capital Dublin; two on the south-east coast in New Ross, Wexford and in County Waterford; two more in the southernmost city of Cork; one each on the western seaboard in Limerick and Galway and one across the new frontier in the newly established state of Northern Ireland.[7]
Brangan’s book is a forensic yet harrowing account of the Work Hard and Pray Hard ethos that was the imprimatur of these institutions told through the stories of the main actors; the detained women and custodial nuns as well as an examination of their archives and the decision-making processes of the state agencies that acted in collusion. However to understand how the monotonous cruelty of the Laundries could furnish, one must look at the Ideological superstructure of the new Irish state and its underpinnings.
The Devane Rites Of Irish Catholicism
After independence, the Catholic Church which had developed an authoritative hold on the Irish people in the decades after the Great Famine, now found itself to be the most important power bloc in the new nation and one to whose whim the nascent Irish state would steadily genuflect towards in the coming decades. The new Irish authorities found themselves dealing with the legacies of the War of Independence and the bitter Civil War which followed the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921; the impoverishment caused by the ‘famine like conditions” in the 1920s and the appalling financial strictures forced on the Cumann na nGaedheal government which led to cuts in public expenditure from £42 million in 1923-24 to £24 million in 1927 and then to a paring of the already meagre welfare budget, including a 10 per cent cut to the pension. The consequent falls in wages and welfare payments led to a cost of living crisis and throughout the 1920s infant mortality, overcrowded living and unemployment spiralled and emigration took on such proportions that by 1927, the population had plummeted to its lowest recorded level since the 1840s.[8]
The government also had to deal with the residual bitterness of and the challenge to its legitimacy from the losing side in the Civil War which sometimes found an outlet in violence; the most notorious incident being the assassination of Government Minister Kevin O’Higgins in 1927. Internationally, there was a febrile atmosphere across Europe in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution which found expression in widespread fear of Communism among authority and power holders including the Irish Catholic Church hierarchy.
But for the Irish episcopate there was much greater danger to the Irish nation than far off revolutionary movements or even the grinding poverty. This was the threat to the Irish soul from the ‘tyranny of the senses’ produced by the Roaring Twenties. For the Twenties represented not just the birth of a new Irish democratic nation state but that of an age of modernity that for at least some of almost 50 per cent cohort of the Irish population that was under 25 years of age must have had appeal. It was the era of jazz, modernist literature (think DH Lawrence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Sons and Lovers notoriety or Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness which scandalised prudish British sensibilities), new music, changing fashions and new dance forms such as the Charleston. This culture’s celebration of individualism, ordinary people, and mundane bodily pleasures, such as James Joyce’s remorseless stream-of- consciousness style in Ulysses represented a contemporary middle finger to Catholic values of modesty and self-denial. In the dance halls, liberated bodies danced sensuously to the shimmy, Black Bottom, Charleston, shag, and jitterbug (which would have disturbed racial sensitivities of the time) were eclipsing the native reel and jigs.[9]
The terrain on which the struggle between the Church and ‘alien’ culture and morality was to be contested was women’s corporeality. The spectacles of women wearing shorter skirts and shimmering drapery designed to accentuate their movements were, in the view of the bishops, ‘bordering on indecency.’ These modern women were reviled as no more than ‘fag-smoking, jazz-dancing, lip-sticking flappers.’ Since the Catholic ideal for women was the Virgin Mary, these new trends were condemned as the ruin of Irish maidens’ fundamental ‘Christian virtue’ and represented a national crisis as the ‘future of the country is bound up with the dignity and purity of the women of Ireland.[10] For some prelates the solution to such immorality lay at home. So the advice from Bishop O’Doherty of Galway to parents whose daughters stayed out late was to “lay the lash on their backs. That was the good old system, and that should be the system today.”
It was not just the institutional Church that was outraged by the menace of modernism. The 1920s saw the emergence of a lay fundamentalist Catholic movement which sought to enforce social and doctrinal purity. They consisted of groups such as the Catholic Truth Society, the Catholic Society for the Protection of Girls, the Kinship of Christ and, the most prominent of their number, the Legion of Mary. Such right-wing social movements operating outside the official remit of the Church hierarchy such as the Maria Duce movement of the 1950, the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign in the 1980s, Youth Defence in the 1990s and the Iona Institute in recent decades do emerge at key moments of challenge to clericalism and resultant backlash. And it was in just sort of a milieu that the moment of one of the most consequential thinkers and activists in the early years of the Irish state emerged – Father Richard Devane. Despite his relative obscurity in Irish Catholic historiography, he is worthy of a biography because of his role in the construction of the most repressive edifice of clericalism in Western Europe (outside of the Franco regime in Spain) and the evasion of democratic scrutiny that this process involved, and which Louise Brangan superbly brings to light.
Born in Limerick in 1876, Father Devane returned to his native city in 1904 after a spell as a curate in England. His experience of the class system in England, English liberalism and its unhindered accumulation of wealth proved to be a very formative experience for the young curate as he soon developed his life mission to promote social purity as part of his campaign for a Catholic counter kulturkampf in Ireland. An immediate objective of his was to rid Ireland of the ‘filthy Sunday cross-Channel papers’ because of their capacity and intention to scintillate and arouse through coverage of gruesome murders, divorce and “adulteresses.’
But for the Irish episcopate there was much greater danger to the Irish nation than far off revolutionary movements or even the grinding poverty. This was the threat to the Irish soul from the ‘tyranny of the senses’ produced by the Roaring Twenties. For the Twenties represented not just the birth of a new Irish democratic nation state but that of an age of modernity that for at least some of almost 50 per cent cohort of the Irish population that was under 25 years of age must have had appeal. It was the era of jazz, modernist literature (think DH Lawrence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Sons and Lovers notoriety or Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness which scandalised prudish British sensibilities), new music, changing fashions and new dance forms such as the Charleston. This culture’s celebration of individualism, ordinary people, and mundane bodily pleasures, such as James Joyce’s remorseless stream-of- consciousness style in Ulysses represented a contemporary middle finger to Catholic values of modesty and self-denial. In the dance halls, liberated bodies danced sensuously to the shimmy, Black Bottom, Charleston, shag, and jitterbug (which would have disturbed racial sensitivities of the time) were eclipsing the native reel and jigs.[9]
The terrain on which the struggle between the Church and ‘alien’ culture and morality was to be contested was women’s corporeality. The spectacles of women wearing shorter skirts and shimmering drapery designed to accentuate their movements were, in the view of the bishops, ‘bordering on indecency.’ These modern women were reviled as no more than ‘fag-smoking, jazz-dancing, lip-sticking flappers.’ Since the Catholic ideal for women was the Virgin Mary, these new trends were condemned as the ruin of Irish maidens’ fundamental ‘Christian virtue’ and represented a national crisis as the ‘future of the country is bound up with the dignity and purity of the women of Ireland.[10] For some prelates the solution to such immorality lay at home. So the advice from Bishop O’Doherty of Galway to parents whose daughters stayed out late was to “lay the lash on their backs. That was the good old system, and that should be the system today.”
It was not just the institutional Church that was outraged by the menace of modernism. The 1920s saw the emergence of a lay fundamentalist Catholic movement which sought to enforce social and doctrinal purity. They consisted of groups such as the Catholic Truth Society, the Catholic Society for the Protection of Girls, the Kinship of Christ and, the most prominent of their number, the Legion of Mary. Such right-wing social movements operating outside the official remit of the Church hierarchy such as the Maria Duce movement of the 1950, the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign in the 1980s, Youth Defence in the 1990s and the Iona Institute in recent decades do emerge at key moments of challenge to clericalism and resultant backlash. And it was in just sort of a milieu that the moment of one of the most consequential thinkers and activists in the early years of the Irish state emerged – Father Richard Devane. Despite his relative obscurity in Irish Catholic historiography, he is worthy of a biography because of his role in the construction of the most repressive edifice of clericalism in Western Europe (outside of the Franco regime in Spain) and the evasion of democratic scrutiny that this process involved, and which Louise Brangan superbly brings to light.
Born in Limerick in 1876, Father Devane returned to his native city in 1904 after a spell as a curate in England. His experience of the class system in England, English liberalism and its unhindered accumulation of wealth proved to be a very formative experience for the young curate as he soon developed his life mission to promote social purity as part of his campaign for a Catholic counter kulturkampf in Ireland. An immediate objective of his was to rid Ireland of the ‘filthy Sunday cross-Channel papers’ because of their capacity and intention to scintillate and arouse through coverage of gruesome murders, divorce and “adulteresses.’
He had no qualms about working ‘outside the law’ and in 1911 he struck his first blow for purity by the seizure of British newspapers by his Vigilance Committee at Limerick railway station, their ceremonial burning in a public park and a successful boycott of Limerick shops who stocked these newspapers.[11]
With independence won, he sought through his writings in newspapers, pamphlets and periodicals exposing such evil as foreign newspapers, the bad book and unmarried mothers to investigate how the ‘new won powers’ could be instrumentalised to ensure that Ireland would be organised ‘according to Irish ideals and Catholic standards.' Devane proposed the regulation of dance halls, censorship of films and the prohibition or high taxation of foreign materials. But his most far reaching and chillingly punitive suggestions were for female transgressors of the new Irish moral code. Girls could be charged with immoral behaviour. Unmarried mothers and their illegitimate offspring dealt with expediently and in secrecy. Then there were those morally degenerate, mentally defective, or perverse creatures (free spirited young women in other words) who needed to be protected from their own base instincts by committal to a Good Shepherd Home, namely a Magdalene Laundry. Detention would be the only way to ensure that ‘the public is safeguarded.’[12]
Long before Hannah Arendt and scholars like Professor Sam Finer had coined the term ‘totalitarian’ to characterise the state in Nazi Germany and the USSR under Josef Stalin, Fr Devane mused about the possibility of how:
Long before Hannah Arendt and scholars like Professor Sam Finer had coined the term ‘totalitarian’ to characterise the state in Nazi Germany and the USSR under Josef Stalin, Fr Devane mused about the possibility of how:
we Christians develop such a totalitarian Christian faith (like the all-consuming faith of fascist and communist regimes) of a like white-heat intensity?
For this Utopia to happen, a purge was required. All distractions had to be removed, all recourse to indolence squashed and all cultural expressions of the values or aesthetic of individualism be erased. The challenge for Devane was how to introduce laws to uphold the Catholic social ideal without exposing those of purity of mind to the spiritual pollution of immoral thoughts and actions. To avoid such a vista, he pondered ‘would it be asking too much of the government’ to instead make legislation by a private committee of people who could bring the law into harmony with Catholic spiritual values?[13]
The answer to Devane’s prayers came in the form of the Carrigan Report which was the outcome of the work of a review committee tasked by the Department of Justice in 1930 to reappraise the criminal law bill, with specific attention paid to the age of consent and juvenile prostitution, and to produce a report with their recommendations. The committee was comprised of Catholic and Protestant clerics and health and welfare professionals and was chaired by a judge named William Carrigan. Throughout the 1920s the pressure has intensified from militant lay groups as well as the Church hierarchy to enshrine Catholic moral principles in the law of the new Irish Free State and for the expurgation of ‘foreign influences’ like cross-channel newspapers from Irish society; there were growing moral panics about the rate of illegitimate births and venereal disease and the spectre of the ‘fallen woman’, and women were being steadily being removed from the public sphere through the civil service and teaching marriage bans and the removal of woman from automatic membership of juries. The Committee on Evil Literature had been formed in 1926 to examine the need for stricter censorship laws. But as Louise Brangan describes the reach of the Carrigan Report and its subsequent influence on the criminal law of the Irish Free State proved to be a democratic outrage.
In the first instance, the Committee appeared to have expanded their scope of inquiry beyond their mandated realms of ‘social morality’ and ‘evil’ to concern about the ‘suppression’ of ‘public vice.’ The sources of Ireland’s societal deterioration were neatly laid out: popular amusements such as ‘dances of a disgusting character’ and ‘misbehaviour’ in cinemas; male predators, immoral girls, illegitimate children, and an absence of tougher laws to surveil, punish and remove them. These immoral characters were the product of bad families in which parents had balefully ceded control. In particular, they focused attention on the industrial schools which were, in their opinion, designed for ‘delinquents.’ On departure from these institutions, these children because they ‘are usually without responsible friends or relatives’ were a special threat to national purity as they drift into ‘evil ways.’ Girls particularly so, since the ‘girl of 16’:
The answer to Devane’s prayers came in the form of the Carrigan Report which was the outcome of the work of a review committee tasked by the Department of Justice in 1930 to reappraise the criminal law bill, with specific attention paid to the age of consent and juvenile prostitution, and to produce a report with their recommendations. The committee was comprised of Catholic and Protestant clerics and health and welfare professionals and was chaired by a judge named William Carrigan. Throughout the 1920s the pressure has intensified from militant lay groups as well as the Church hierarchy to enshrine Catholic moral principles in the law of the new Irish Free State and for the expurgation of ‘foreign influences’ like cross-channel newspapers from Irish society; there were growing moral panics about the rate of illegitimate births and venereal disease and the spectre of the ‘fallen woman’, and women were being steadily being removed from the public sphere through the civil service and teaching marriage bans and the removal of woman from automatic membership of juries. The Committee on Evil Literature had been formed in 1926 to examine the need for stricter censorship laws. But as Louise Brangan describes the reach of the Carrigan Report and its subsequent influence on the criminal law of the Irish Free State proved to be a democratic outrage.
In the first instance, the Committee appeared to have expanded their scope of inquiry beyond their mandated realms of ‘social morality’ and ‘evil’ to concern about the ‘suppression’ of ‘public vice.’ The sources of Ireland’s societal deterioration were neatly laid out: popular amusements such as ‘dances of a disgusting character’ and ‘misbehaviour’ in cinemas; male predators, immoral girls, illegitimate children, and an absence of tougher laws to surveil, punish and remove them. These immoral characters were the product of bad families in which parents had balefully ceded control. In particular, they focused attention on the industrial schools which were, in their opinion, designed for ‘delinquents.’ On departure from these institutions, these children because they ‘are usually without responsible friends or relatives’ were a special threat to national purity as they drift into ‘evil ways.’ Girls particularly so, since the ‘girl of 16’:
is often mentally and emotionally unstable… has not finished developing; and cannot really appreciate the nature and result of the act to which she consents.
The vulnerability of these girls to exploitation by their ‘vicious associates’ was the source of the endless cycle illegitimacy and, by extension, Ireland’s degeneration. [14]
Among the measures recommended to ‘purge the State of these evils’ were additional monitoring of children leaving industrial schools and if necessary ‘further detention;’ the setting up of special borstals for ill-natured girls and the appointment of ‘women police’ to help deal with the marked characteristics of female deviance. Regarding male sexual offending, flogging and public shaming should be reinstated for miscreants and the details of the offence, along with the name and address of the guilty party, should be published in the newspapers.[15]
The then Minister of Justice, Enda Fitzgerald-Kenney, rejected the Carrigan Report and left it in abeyance in the hope that a future administration would resume the mantle. This duly happened with the entry into office of the populist nationalist party Fianna Fail, the party of the losing side in the Civil War and led by Eamon de Valera, one of 20th century Ireland’s most towering political figures. The new Minister for Justice, James Geoghegan, after reading the Carrigan Report, agreed with its main animating contention, that something needed to be done about Ireland’s moral malaise. Geoghegan wanted the law brought in alignment with ‘the best Catholic teaching and practice' but he also wanted to do it without the appropriate parliamentary scrutiny; in other words the democratic process was to be by-passed.
Among the measures recommended to ‘purge the State of these evils’ were additional monitoring of children leaving industrial schools and if necessary ‘further detention;’ the setting up of special borstals for ill-natured girls and the appointment of ‘women police’ to help deal with the marked characteristics of female deviance. Regarding male sexual offending, flogging and public shaming should be reinstated for miscreants and the details of the offence, along with the name and address of the guilty party, should be published in the newspapers.[15]
The then Minister of Justice, Enda Fitzgerald-Kenney, rejected the Carrigan Report and left it in abeyance in the hope that a future administration would resume the mantle. This duly happened with the entry into office of the populist nationalist party Fianna Fail, the party of the losing side in the Civil War and led by Eamon de Valera, one of 20th century Ireland’s most towering political figures. The new Minister for Justice, James Geoghegan, after reading the Carrigan Report, agreed with its main animating contention, that something needed to be done about Ireland’s moral malaise. Geoghegan wanted the law brought in alignment with ‘the best Catholic teaching and practice' but he also wanted to do it without the appropriate parliamentary scrutiny; in other words the democratic process was to be by-passed.
This is precisely what happened. On 26 November 1932, Geoghegan convened a secret committee of sitting politicians who shared ‘the Catholic view’. For six months, he kept the bishops and De Valera up to speed of their progress. The committee produced the bill, but as they lacked the power to ratify it, it had to pass through the Oireachtas. The formulation of amendments would require a parliamentary reading and discussion of any new laws, where all the evidence of Ireland’s dark underside; its ‘unsavoury’ ‘sex problems’ would be uncovered and the resulting scandals would be raked over in the newspapers.[16] As Michel Foucault describes it in The History of Sexuality Volume I, under this regime of taboo and repression; sex was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Its universality was being spoken through silence. As one member of the Seanad put it, when it came to the public, ‘the less that is known about it the better. The public, perhaps, know too much.’[17]
It was under this shroud of secrecy and total absence of debate that the 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act and the 1935 Public Dance Halls Act became statutory laws. They encompassed a near total ban on contraception, a stricter licensing regime for dance halls and the criminalisation of acts of public indecency that offended ‘modesty or cause scandal or injure the morals of the community.’ The Criminal Law Amendment Act legalised incarceration in places other than a prison for the ‘moral reclamation’ of prostitutes. This oblique reference to the Magdalene Laundries is one of the very few extant in Irish law.[18]
These legislative measures, along with the edifice of censorship and the explicitly Catholic and patriarchal articles of the 1937 Constitution drawn up by De Valera in extensive consultation with Archbishop John McQuaid represented the triumph of Fr. Devane’s dreams of a totalitarian type Catholic regime. It was the culmination of social and ecclesiastical trends that had been underway in the aftermath of the Famine; the centralisation of Church power under Cardinal Paul Cullen; its seizure of control of education and the accompanying Devotional Revolution plus the dominance of a class of peasant proprietors defined by Professor Emmet Larkin as the thirty acre tenant farmers who dominated the stem family system of primogeniture which had replaced the pre-Famine modes of subdivision and whose ideology of “amoral familism” had become hegemonic. The post-independence panoply of clericalist legislation and the popular piety pervading Irish society made the new Irish state a very cold place for liberal intellectuals and Protestants but most of all for women and specifically the ‘deviant’ or ‘fallen.’
The Prisoners of Patriarchy
Louise Brangan describes the trifecta that characterised the black hole of incarceration and slavery: penance, slavery, and erasure. Thus on her entry into the New Ross Magdalene Laundry in 1963 after serving her sentence in the local Industrial Centre, Carmel would have her name taken from her. Once she was anointed with a new house name; she was not permitted to speak her name while enclosed within the four walls of the Laundry. She was then ritually instructed to take off her clothes and shoes in front of a nun who would then issue her with black, ill-fitting clothes and shoes which she was to discover was to be her uniform. The next act in the depersonalisation process was the shearing of her ‘very dark, down to my waist beautiful hair.’ Then she was escorted to her dormitory which was designed to minimise contact with others where, on her bed, ‘I cried my eyes out.’ The most disquieting moment for the new entrant as it was for many survivors was the realisation that her roommates were old. The sight of ‘worn-out women, crooked, with rotted teeth, short white hair, glazed expressions, silent demeanours’ must have been a uniquely frightening one without even the knowledge that these women had effectively been resident there for generations and that this was Carmel’s and so many other new inmates’ destiny. [19]
After the morning call for prayers at 6 and breakfast taken in total silence in a dreary refectory with long communal tables, Carmel processed into the industrial rooms underneath arches, one of which proclaimed ‘Unless Ye Do Penance, Ye Shall All Perish.’ It may as well have read “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.” And it was into the Hades of sweat and smell, that Carmel and countless thousands like her stepped. Even at the start of the working day, the atmosphere in the laundry room was overpowering, like a heaving greenhouse with the sibilant spitting of the irons and the hot exhales of the compressors. Those who worked in the sorting room where the clothes were separated found it vile. The big sacks of laundry were, in the words of one woman, ‘all filthy dirty and the smell of it and everything was awful.’ Nobody could adjust to the fetid air; ‘reeking, stinking, bleach, swell of piss, urine and the smell of it and everything was awful’[20]. In this way the literal stains of the business and professional classes of Ireland were literally washed away for nothing. Yet the women were not permitted to wash their sweat soaked bodies, nor even to soak and sooth their weary limbs with wash day being every other Sunday, when an auxiliary filled a cast-iron bath and one after another the women would scrub themselves with carbolic soap.[21] The nuns rarely missed an opportunity to make derogatory remarks about their detainees’ bodies and physical hygiene.
The hazardous nature of the work – the bleach spattering off hand brushes, the searing hot metal, machines spinning at 100 miles per hour – was heightened by the nuns’ absolute lack of technical know-how. If machinery looked to be vulnerable to collapse, the nuns would simply say a prayer rather than call a tradesman and so expose the girls to masculine danger. Burns from machines and corrosive industrial bleach were common, and on handful of occasions women were reported to have lost hands and arms.[22] So these women endured physical as well as the routine psychological penance.
In these dark satanic places, the slaves of the Magdalenes toiled to a background of the incessant incantation of litanies, rosaries, and stations of the cross. The merging of the monotonous drone of prayers and the rhythmic cadence of their collective voice created a deafening wall of sound[23]; an aural version of George Orwell’s symbol of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four of the perpetual boot on one’s neck. And in these black holes of detention, there was one golden rule – a version of Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. For on the first page of the Magdalen Home Rules and Honarium – issued by the Sisters of Mercy who ran three convents in the country and the honarium being the hourly schedule – it was ‘strictly forbidden to mention anything concerning their past life or associates.’ Thus, in the words of women, ‘silence was everything.’ On arrival, there was no formal explanation of the reason for an entrant’s detention. During work and at meal times, no gossip or chat was exchanged. The hearsay was that fellow detainees were prostitutes or had illegitimate children, but the regime of silence prevented new entrants from finding out why the elderly women were there; that they too had been abandoned and rejected[24].
Long after their release from the institutional cruelty of the Laundries, the women could not escape adversity as they still bore the stigmata of abandonment and the message, reinforced almost daily by nuns, that they were worthless either because they were sinners in need of perpetual redemption or children who required perpetual supervision. Brangan remarks that the thousands of pages and hours of survivor testimony are suffused with account after account of what it was like for survivors to cloak their identity and conceal where they had been. On her return home Nora found that even though her family had known exactly what had happened ‘it just was a non-event, but a non-event to be ashamed of. And nobody else was, so I didn’t either …”
It was under this shroud of secrecy and total absence of debate that the 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act and the 1935 Public Dance Halls Act became statutory laws. They encompassed a near total ban on contraception, a stricter licensing regime for dance halls and the criminalisation of acts of public indecency that offended ‘modesty or cause scandal or injure the morals of the community.’ The Criminal Law Amendment Act legalised incarceration in places other than a prison for the ‘moral reclamation’ of prostitutes. This oblique reference to the Magdalene Laundries is one of the very few extant in Irish law.[18]
These legislative measures, along with the edifice of censorship and the explicitly Catholic and patriarchal articles of the 1937 Constitution drawn up by De Valera in extensive consultation with Archbishop John McQuaid represented the triumph of Fr. Devane’s dreams of a totalitarian type Catholic regime. It was the culmination of social and ecclesiastical trends that had been underway in the aftermath of the Famine; the centralisation of Church power under Cardinal Paul Cullen; its seizure of control of education and the accompanying Devotional Revolution plus the dominance of a class of peasant proprietors defined by Professor Emmet Larkin as the thirty acre tenant farmers who dominated the stem family system of primogeniture which had replaced the pre-Famine modes of subdivision and whose ideology of “amoral familism” had become hegemonic. The post-independence panoply of clericalist legislation and the popular piety pervading Irish society made the new Irish state a very cold place for liberal intellectuals and Protestants but most of all for women and specifically the ‘deviant’ or ‘fallen.’
The Prisoners of Patriarchy
Louise Brangan describes the trifecta that characterised the black hole of incarceration and slavery: penance, slavery, and erasure. Thus on her entry into the New Ross Magdalene Laundry in 1963 after serving her sentence in the local Industrial Centre, Carmel would have her name taken from her. Once she was anointed with a new house name; she was not permitted to speak her name while enclosed within the four walls of the Laundry. She was then ritually instructed to take off her clothes and shoes in front of a nun who would then issue her with black, ill-fitting clothes and shoes which she was to discover was to be her uniform. The next act in the depersonalisation process was the shearing of her ‘very dark, down to my waist beautiful hair.’ Then she was escorted to her dormitory which was designed to minimise contact with others where, on her bed, ‘I cried my eyes out.’ The most disquieting moment for the new entrant as it was for many survivors was the realisation that her roommates were old. The sight of ‘worn-out women, crooked, with rotted teeth, short white hair, glazed expressions, silent demeanours’ must have been a uniquely frightening one without even the knowledge that these women had effectively been resident there for generations and that this was Carmel’s and so many other new inmates’ destiny. [19]
After the morning call for prayers at 6 and breakfast taken in total silence in a dreary refectory with long communal tables, Carmel processed into the industrial rooms underneath arches, one of which proclaimed ‘Unless Ye Do Penance, Ye Shall All Perish.’ It may as well have read “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.” And it was into the Hades of sweat and smell, that Carmel and countless thousands like her stepped. Even at the start of the working day, the atmosphere in the laundry room was overpowering, like a heaving greenhouse with the sibilant spitting of the irons and the hot exhales of the compressors. Those who worked in the sorting room where the clothes were separated found it vile. The big sacks of laundry were, in the words of one woman, ‘all filthy dirty and the smell of it and everything was awful.’ Nobody could adjust to the fetid air; ‘reeking, stinking, bleach, swell of piss, urine and the smell of it and everything was awful’[20]. In this way the literal stains of the business and professional classes of Ireland were literally washed away for nothing. Yet the women were not permitted to wash their sweat soaked bodies, nor even to soak and sooth their weary limbs with wash day being every other Sunday, when an auxiliary filled a cast-iron bath and one after another the women would scrub themselves with carbolic soap.[21] The nuns rarely missed an opportunity to make derogatory remarks about their detainees’ bodies and physical hygiene.
The hazardous nature of the work – the bleach spattering off hand brushes, the searing hot metal, machines spinning at 100 miles per hour – was heightened by the nuns’ absolute lack of technical know-how. If machinery looked to be vulnerable to collapse, the nuns would simply say a prayer rather than call a tradesman and so expose the girls to masculine danger. Burns from machines and corrosive industrial bleach were common, and on handful of occasions women were reported to have lost hands and arms.[22] So these women endured physical as well as the routine psychological penance.
In these dark satanic places, the slaves of the Magdalenes toiled to a background of the incessant incantation of litanies, rosaries, and stations of the cross. The merging of the monotonous drone of prayers and the rhythmic cadence of their collective voice created a deafening wall of sound[23]; an aural version of George Orwell’s symbol of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four of the perpetual boot on one’s neck. And in these black holes of detention, there was one golden rule – a version of Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. For on the first page of the Magdalen Home Rules and Honarium – issued by the Sisters of Mercy who ran three convents in the country and the honarium being the hourly schedule – it was ‘strictly forbidden to mention anything concerning their past life or associates.’ Thus, in the words of women, ‘silence was everything.’ On arrival, there was no formal explanation of the reason for an entrant’s detention. During work and at meal times, no gossip or chat was exchanged. The hearsay was that fellow detainees were prostitutes or had illegitimate children, but the regime of silence prevented new entrants from finding out why the elderly women were there; that they too had been abandoned and rejected[24].
Long after their release from the institutional cruelty of the Laundries, the women could not escape adversity as they still bore the stigmata of abandonment and the message, reinforced almost daily by nuns, that they were worthless either because they were sinners in need of perpetual redemption or children who required perpetual supervision. Brangan remarks that the thousands of pages and hours of survivor testimony are suffused with account after account of what it was like for survivors to cloak their identity and conceal where they had been. On her return home Nora found that even though her family had known exactly what had happened ‘it just was a non-event, but a non-event to be ashamed of. And nobody else was, so I didn’t either …”
Most likely because of Nora’s highly probable collusion into her disappearance into the labyrinthine of Ireland’s unique penal industrial complex. Carmel found that in her first hospital job as a domestic; she had to conceal her history from the inquisitiveness of her fellow native Wexford work mates. She could not tell them that she had done the rounds of the most shameful institutions: born in a county home, raised in an industrial school, dumped in a Magdalene Laundry. She knew, as Nora Connolly O’Brien - who as a Senator in 1960 had first drawn public attention to its stigmatic nature - observed that being in a Laundry was a permanent mark of immorality, that you had done something truly despicable, that you were truly despicable.[25]
Betty, who spent six years shutting between three different Laundries from 1971 to 1977 and who came across “as ebullient and upbeat” in her testimony also found that casual conversation at work was a danger zone. An even more devastating effect of the loneliness that swirled around survivors like Betty was on her ability to make loving relationships. She found that despite her desire to belong to someone, a declaration of love from a man she courted instantly chilled her mood as it meant he was ‘gone tomorrow.’ For ‘How could he love me, like, and my mother didn’t even love me?’ For if ‘you feel you weren’t wanted all your life and what is this man now saying he loved me for?’ For those like Laura and Michelle who did marry and have children; the imperative to silence remained. Under no circumstances, were husband and children to know of their incarceration and the reasons for it.[26]
Another survivor, Marge, said that she had always understood that the Laundry system was designed not just to silence and depersonalise its inmates from the inside but to permanently exile them in a socially reinforcing regime of silence on the outside upon release. The women had been ‘locked away, shamed away’ and they were expected to ‘go to their graves’ as ‘the silent people.’ And in the first five decades of Irish independence, this paralysis of silence was tightened by its great accomplices: gossip and scandal.[27]
Justice Served?
In the aftermath of the tsunami of revelations of the systematic physical, sexual and emotional abuses of children and women by the institutional Church and the accompanying cultural revolution in relation to Irish religiosity in the decades either side of the turn of the millennium attention finally turned towards the necessity of the recognition of and restitution for the lifelong sufferings of the thousands of Irish women who had effectively been interned without proper recourse to justice in the Magdalene Laundries. It came on 19 February 2013 when Taoiseach Enda Kenny rose to address the Dail and the nation and international media and deliver the apology for the Laundries almost four years to the day when Bart O’Keefe, then Minister of Education, dismissed any claim that the Magdalene survivors had to the State redress scheme for victims of historical child abuse on the grounds that the Laundries were privately-owned and did not come within the responsibility of the State.
Betty, who spent six years shutting between three different Laundries from 1971 to 1977 and who came across “as ebullient and upbeat” in her testimony also found that casual conversation at work was a danger zone. An even more devastating effect of the loneliness that swirled around survivors like Betty was on her ability to make loving relationships. She found that despite her desire to belong to someone, a declaration of love from a man she courted instantly chilled her mood as it meant he was ‘gone tomorrow.’ For ‘How could he love me, like, and my mother didn’t even love me?’ For if ‘you feel you weren’t wanted all your life and what is this man now saying he loved me for?’ For those like Laura and Michelle who did marry and have children; the imperative to silence remained. Under no circumstances, were husband and children to know of their incarceration and the reasons for it.[26]
Another survivor, Marge, said that she had always understood that the Laundry system was designed not just to silence and depersonalise its inmates from the inside but to permanently exile them in a socially reinforcing regime of silence on the outside upon release. The women had been ‘locked away, shamed away’ and they were expected to ‘go to their graves’ as ‘the silent people.’ And in the first five decades of Irish independence, this paralysis of silence was tightened by its great accomplices: gossip and scandal.[27]
Justice Served?
In the aftermath of the tsunami of revelations of the systematic physical, sexual and emotional abuses of children and women by the institutional Church and the accompanying cultural revolution in relation to Irish religiosity in the decades either side of the turn of the millennium attention finally turned towards the necessity of the recognition of and restitution for the lifelong sufferings of the thousands of Irish women who had effectively been interned without proper recourse to justice in the Magdalene Laundries. It came on 19 February 2013 when Taoiseach Enda Kenny rose to address the Dail and the nation and international media and deliver the apology for the Laundries almost four years to the day when Bart O’Keefe, then Minister of Education, dismissed any claim that the Magdalene survivors had to the State redress scheme for victims of historical child abuse on the grounds that the Laundries were privately-owned and did not come within the responsibility of the State.
Announcing his intention ‘not just to commission the Report (to be authored by Martin McAleese, husband of the former President Mary) ‘but to actually study it and having done so to reflect on its findings,’ in his nineteen-minute address, Enda Kenny stated that these women had experienced a ‘profound and studied indifference.’ “It was a humbling and inspiring experience’ to hear the women’s stories which while individually different shared a particular experience of a particular Ireland: judgemental, intolerant, petty and prim.’ He went on:
We forgot you or, if we thought of you at all, we did so in untrue and offensive stereotypes. This is a national shame, for which again say, I am deeply sorry and offer my full and heartfelt apologies.
He concluded in a voice almost breaking with almost uncontainable emotion by hoping that:
this day and this debate … heralds a new dawn for all those who feared that the dark midnight might never end.
Cue applause from the survivors in the public gallery and applause in turn from the parliamentarians.[28]
The challenge for the McAleese report, for Brangan, was how to speak factually about a past that was once unspeakable? She argues that the Report was hobbled at the outset by the use of neutral language designed to stigmatise or cause bias against the nuns, the Laundries, or the women. Thus it was decided that the women should not be referred to as penitents, or inmates; nor, however, should be understood as survivors, let alone victims. The Report acknowledged that the Laundries were ‘frightening and lonely places’ and a ‘harsh and physically demanding work environment ‘but that ‘they were not systematically abusive’ compared to the horrors of the industrial schools. Brangan concludes that the factual narrative of the Laundries, based as it was on a narrow factual base of State and the nuns’ archives, is what gave the Committee its biggest blind spot: they lost the capacity to process and assimilate the nature of the Laundries and the experiences of the women who were sent there. But can something like human suffering on that sort of mass scale be quantified or conveyed through dry metrics?[29] How can a life not lived be measured? Indeed how can any sort of institutional crimes against humanity be narrated properly?
The challenge for the McAleese report, for Brangan, was how to speak factually about a past that was once unspeakable? She argues that the Report was hobbled at the outset by the use of neutral language designed to stigmatise or cause bias against the nuns, the Laundries, or the women. Thus it was decided that the women should not be referred to as penitents, or inmates; nor, however, should be understood as survivors, let alone victims. The Report acknowledged that the Laundries were ‘frightening and lonely places’ and a ‘harsh and physically demanding work environment ‘but that ‘they were not systematically abusive’ compared to the horrors of the industrial schools. Brangan concludes that the factual narrative of the Laundries, based as it was on a narrow factual base of State and the nuns’ archives, is what gave the Committee its biggest blind spot: they lost the capacity to process and assimilate the nature of the Laundries and the experiences of the women who were sent there. But can something like human suffering on that sort of mass scale be quantified or conveyed through dry metrics?[29] How can a life not lived be measured? Indeed how can any sort of institutional crimes against humanity be narrated properly?
[4] p.12; Richard Sparks, (2002), ‘Out of the Digger: The Warrior’s honour and the guilty observer’, Ethnography, 3 (4), pp.556-81
[5] Brangan Pp.17-18
[6] Ibid Pp.12-13
[7] Ibid Pp.13-14
[8] Ibid Pp.56-57
[9] Ibid Pp.48-49
[10] Ibid P.49
[11] Ibid Pp.51-52
[13] Ibid Pp.53-54
[14] Ibid Pp.65-67
[15] Ibid P.67
[16] Ibid Pp.69-70
[17] Ibid Pp.70-71
[20] Pp.87-91
[21] Ibid P.102
[22] Ibid P.95
[23] Ibid P.96
[24] Ibid P.98
[25] Ibid Pp.191-96
[26] Ibid Pp196-98
[27] Ibid Pp.199-201l
[28] Ibid Pp.247-48
[29] Ibid Pp.250-56
Louise Brangan (2026) The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries & Ireland’s Legacy Of Shame London: Bodley Head.
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
An amazing review, Barry. Fascinating and detailed. Almost like reading the book!!
ReplyDeleteI hope it compares well to The Fenian Way's dissection of adoption services; another dark chapter in the history of Irish Catholic totalitarianism.
DeleteThey are both very good reviews.
DeleteCatholic Ireland is a place we most definitely do not want to return to.