Ireland made headlines this July when its leader, Enda Kenny,
attacked the Catholic Church: "The rape and the torture of children were
downplayed... to uphold instead the primacy of the institution," he said -- the speech earned him praise
across the world.
But Kenny's government has yet to deal with fallout
from the Magdalene Laundries, where thousands of women were incarcerated
over the course of the twentieth century. That may soon change.
In
June, the UN Committee against Torture gave Ireland
one year to examine "all allegations of torture, and other cruel,
inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" allegedly committed at the
Laundries.
Magdalene Laundries
were penitential institutions for Irish girls who made mistakes. Often
young women were sent to them by their families or by police. Their
babies (if they had been pregnant) were adopted across Ireland, Britain
and the US, while they remained working without pay in a routine of
prayer and silence.
Census records, unearthed by historians, show that
these stays could last for anything from a couple of years to 70 years,
and some women spent their lives behind the institutions' walls.
On
occasion nuns failed to document the deaths of those in their care --
graveyards have been discovered
in which the number of women buried is far greater than the deaths
certified.
The last Laundry ceased to be a commercial entity in 1996.
At
that time it still had forty residents.
Mari Steed is co-founder of a campaign group called Justice for Magdalenes.
Her mother was placed in the Good Shepherd Sisters' Laundry in
Waterford after first spending time in an industrial school, and she
stayed there from the age of 15 to 25.
A couple in the US adopted Steed,
who traced and found her birth mother later in life. Even now, Steed
tells me over the phone, her 77-year-old mother shows signs of an
institutionalized youth, keeping her house impeccably clean.
"She still
likes her rituals -- a very regimented type of lifestyle," Steed says.
"I'm sure that was drilled into her. You keep everything immaculate and
nothing can go wrong in life."
In a documentary aired in Ireland last month, survivors recalled a regime of beatings and hunger.
"We were classed as nothing," said one woman,
Josephine Meade. "We were told that we came from nothing, we never
would be anything, and we would always go back to being nothing. That
was our life summed up."
Such women get no compensation or pensions for their unpaid labor from
either the Irish government or from religious orders, and Justice for
Magdalenes wants that to change. It is clear there was some government
involvement.
"What happened in the Magdalene Laundries was the result of
the combined forces of society, Church and state," said Maeve O'Rourke,
a Harvard Law School global human rights fellow, speaking at a seminar
in Dublin that I attended recently.
O'Rourke has found "evidence of huge
state knowledge of what was going on."
The women, too, say that those
who fled would be chased down and returned to the nuns by police.
Yet to date the Irish government offers no apology.
Dr. Katherine O'Donnell, who teaches women's studies at University
College Dublin, has spoken with many of those who were incarcerated, and
says they harbor so much guilt they are surprised when someone listens
to them.
"When they get this message that the pain they're carrying is
perhaps not fully their fault they get a tremendous amount of relief,"
O'Donnell told the Dublin seminar. "An apology is something that we've
been asking for, for far too long."
Until this year, attempts to engage Ireland's leaders met a cold response, but interactions with the new government have been more promising.
It is setting up
a committee to investigate the state's role, which could lead to
reparations.
Meanwhile, though, the women grow older.
"Our biggest
concern right now is just the speed," Steed points out. "We don't want
to see a lot of foot-dragging, for obvious reasons. Time is of the
essence."
It seems unlikely that it will be possible to "prosecute and punish the perpetrators," as the UN has asked,
since many of those who ran the Magdalene Laundries are dead.
But
redress would help Ireland face up to this dark chapter in its history.
It's not only a matter for the Catholic Church.
"We need to begin to
explain it and understand it so that it doesn't happen again," said
O'Donnell, the UCD lecturer.
"How we 'other' people, how we marginalize
people; and how good women get to be good women by the fact that they
are the ones that control the bad women."