← Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
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- [00:00]
Kate Lister
Hi, I'm your host Kate Lister. If you would like betwixt the sheets ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every single week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:29]
Josh Hart
Acast Powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. This is Josh Hart from the Knicks. But NBA all star Jalen Brunson and I created a new video podcast, the Roommate Show. A playmaker original. You know the vibes here are always immaculate. We're going to discuss our experiences on and off the court. You want to get into it? This is.
- [00:51]
Catherine O'Donnell
Might as well start with the topic's hot.
- [00:53]
Josh Hart
Yeah, I feel like we have to talk about it and really anything else that comes to mind. Today we have the man, the myth, the legend and we have a exceptional guest with us today. He is a Emmy award winner, actor, filmmaker. He's a formal number one overall pick at two time Super Bowl MVP, four.
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Kate Lister
Time Allstar, two time All NBA.
- [01:13]
Josh Hart
Got the 14th overall pick in the 2015 draft. 10 year pro in his first year on the Knicks. Welcome to the show. Subscribe now for weekly episodes. Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.
- [01:32]
Natalie Hughes Crean
Hey prime members. You can listen to this show ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.
- [01:42]
Kate Lister
Hello my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister and you are listening to Betwixt the Sheets now. Now I know I usually mess about giving everybody the fair dues warning. I give it when I don't even really have to. But for this episode I am actually going to give you a proper content warning because we are looking at the history of the mother and baby homes and the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. This is very recent history. It's living history and its brutal history. So this is a very serious content warning that we are going to be covering child abuse, sexual violence and infanticide and you might just not want to listen to that today. So this is your chance to duck out now, go back, listen to something else and we will catch you next time.
- [02:32]
Natalie Hughes Crean
What do you look for in a man?
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Niamh
Oh, money, of course.
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Catherine O'Donnell
You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
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Niamh
Goodness.
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Catherine O'Donnell
What a beautiful dance. Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie.
- [03:00]
Kate Lister
Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. Societies all throughout history have tried to control female sexuality in a bewildering and depressing number of ways. And in today's episode, we're taking you to Ireland to go inside two notorious institutions which did just that. The Magdalene Laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes. Both were set up as charitable refuges. In the case of the Magdalene Laundries, they were homes where, quote, fallen women, be it sex workers or women who were just deemed to be promiscuous, were sent for hard labour, almost always in against their will. And the Mother and Baby Homes were where women who'd fallen pregnant outside of wedlock were sent something the increasingly Catholic Irish state wouldn't tolerate. Tens of thousands of women and girls were forced to enter through the doors of those institutions. Across the centuries, hundreds never left alive. The power of stigma and shame in all of this cannot be overestimated. It's a truly scandalous history that shockingly still playing out today. We're exploring this topic thanks to two lovely listeners and it's thanks firstly to Niamh.
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Fion
Hello, Patrick Sheets. My name is Niamh, I'm from Ireland. If you didn't guess from my accent and my name, I'm a huge history buff. I absolutely adore Patrick's Sheets and it's my favourite thing to listen to and from work as a nurse, something as an Irish person I always feel would be fascinating for Patricks Sheets would be the history of the Magdalene Laundries. It caused huge scandal at the time. Obviously in such a reflection of Ireland's society, even now it has had a huge impact. So I feel that would be a fascinating episode and would love to hear about it. So, yes, thank you so much, Slaan.
- [04:57]
Kate Lister
And secondly to Fion.
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Unknown
Hi, Betwixt the Sheets. I'm a really big fan of the podcast because I love the way you tackle really interesting topics. My name is Fion and I'm a secondary school teacher from Ireland. One day I was teaching the novel small things like these to a group of six years. And this is a novel that talks about the Magdalene Laundries, which is a really important part of Irish history that not a lot of people knew about. A lot of my students didn't know about it, and I just think it's really important that people do know about this. So I would love if you could cover it.
- [05:32]
Kate Lister
Thank you so much to both of you and to others who made similar requests for episodes about both Magdalene Laundries. And the mother and baby homes. How was this culture of imprisonment ever allowed to happen? What exactly happened behind closed doors? And what are some of the stories of those who got out and those who didn't? Today I'm joined by two very special guests. Natalie Hughes Crean of Renewing Roots, a charity in the north of England which supports women and families affected by the mother and baby homes. And firstly, Catherine O'Donnell, campaigner and co author of Ireland and the Magdalene A Campaign for Justice. To begin with, I wanted to know if she could remember when she first heard of the Magdalene laundries.
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Catherine O'Donnell
I first heard of Magdalene's. Honestly, I first heard of it when I was in Europe walking around seeing Calais Magdalena or Avenida Magdalene. You know, in all of this kind of Catholic Europe, you see these streets that pointed to Magdalene Asylum. And I was curious about them. And I learned that right throughout Catholic Europe, particularly in the 19th century, when there was more urbanization, these asylums were set up for fallen women, that is, women who were living on the streets, presumed to be selling sex and who needed an asylum. So the nuns would kindly open up the convent and would work alongside these women. So, yeah, I was fascinated with these places and I thought, how cool, you know, safe place to stay. And largely the women would go in in the winter, would work at laundry and needlecraft alongside the sisters, and then they'd leave at various times. I liked this idea. I didn't think there were any in Ireland who could believe that. And at the time when I was wandering around these lovely lanes and avenues of these long gone Magdalene asylums in Catholic Europe, I didn't know they were still existing in Ireland, but with quite a different vibe, quite a different kind of character to them, because the ones in Ireland, you couldn't leave, so you were locked in. And the idea of the Magdalene in kind of Catholic myth is that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute and Jesus was so cool and so good that he loved even the prostitutes.
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Kate Lister
Nice of him.
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Catherine O'Donnell
Yeah. And she atoned for her sins by washing his feet in beautiful oils and drying his feet with her long and beautiful hair. And so the figure of the Magdalene was the reformed prostitute. And so the idea in Catholic theology is that you can get to pay back God for your sins and your soul can be wiped clean if you do penance, that is, if you do really hard, humiliating labor, if you do kind of some physical trial, that it'll kind of relieve your soul and you can offer up the suffering to God and he'll see that kind of sacrifice that you're making and he'll forgive you your sins. So the idea of these asylums, from the nun's point of view, was that it was a chance for the women to do all of this labor and do all of this prayer and live a life of penance and then kind of clean their sins, literally washing the laundry and washing away their sins. But in Ireland, it was a much more punitive system in the 20th century. And I had, to my shame, I had no idea that it lasted so long and had such horrible effects until I was in the 21st century, until I began to meet women who had either escaped or somehow survived being put into these institutions.
- [09:17]
Kate Lister
In the 19th century, it became quite fashionable amongst well to do people to save women who were selling sex. The sort of the rescue movement. And you see these little groups popping up in cities all over the place. I'm in Leeds and I think we had the Leeds Midnight Rescue Brigade to go out and save women. I don't know what the hell they.
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Catherine O'Donnell
Were doing, but, you know, chance for kind of good women to get out at night, hang out with other women.
- [09:43]
Kate Lister
I suppose it kind of was.
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Catherine O'Donnell
When else would they be allowed out, you know, in the societal conventions at the time?
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Kate Lister
I suppose that's true. What's interesting about what was going on in Ireland, and maybe it was true elsewhere, is it this wasn't just targeted at women who were selling sex, which would be bad enough. But as a very broad question, what would you have to do to be taken to a Magdalene Laundry in Island? Or would you go there voluntarily? Or who were they taking in?
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Catherine O'Donnell
Poor girls and women. Simple as. And as horrifying as the first Magdalene.
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Kate Lister
Laundry in Ireland was opened on Dublin's Leeson street in 1767. It was founded by Lady Arabella Denny and admitted only Protestant women. The religious landscape at the time was very different to how we know it today.
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Catherine O'Donnell
At the time in Ireland, the Catholic Church was completely suppressed. So there was no priests, there was no bishops, there was no Catholic institutions, there was no masses, there was no chapels, no churches. So the kind of hordes of poor Irish were Catholic only in name. And the Protestant establishment was certainly not going to convert them to being Protestant. This was their way of making a marker. And so they were Catholic without any religion. And what you got once they were allowed to practice their religion after 1829, when there was a repeal of those laws, was you got this huge surge of poor Irish Catholics beginning to build churches and then arising, especially after the big famine in the middle 19th century, you get this. Finally, a rise of a Catholic middle class. So that's a new thing in Ireland, a really kind of visible middle class in the cities and towns who somehow are able to kind of work with the British Empire. So you begin to see these merchants and you begin to see the rise of Catholic religious orders in Ireland, and they start to work hand in hand with the British Empire in mopping up and containing all of the landless Irish poor. So these huge Victorian institutions were built and the Irish middle class try and become respectable by kind of showing that they can be respectable by looking after the kind of degenerate, defective Irish poor people. And there was an awful lot of racial science done in Ireland at the time as well. So lots of measuring of skulls and lots of measuring of, you know, the thickness of lips and the ratio of your length of your arm to your torso. And so they worked out that the poor Irish, certainly along the west coast, they were largely black and they'd obviously come up the sea route from Africa in relatively recent centuries. Could these people be raised up by white Anglo rule? So it was social Darwinianism. Francis Galton, who was the inventor of eugenics, he did a lot of his fieldwork and thinking kind of in Ireland.
- [12:38]
Kate Lister
First, so I didn't know that.
- [12:40]
Catherine O'Donnell
Yeah, yeah, they worried a lot about the degenerate Irish race. So you get this kind of racism, classism, Victorian panic around sex and loads and loads and loads of poor people because of the unequal landholding situation, because of colonization. And you get this anxious Catholic middle class who are starting to argue for home rule, starting to argue that, as the argument had always gone in Ireland, we don't like this colonisation, we don't like Westminster rule. We want to be Irish and in control of this island. And the Irish Catholic middle class then are really anxious. They want to prove that they can govern, but they have a real problem with so many poor people, so they do that Victorian thing of institutionalizing them.
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Kate Lister
This Victorian culture continued into the 20th century, taking a turn from what was already a grim reality for so many towards something much darker and insidious.
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Catherine O'Donnell
The wonderful historian Maria Luddy, who's written a magisterial history of prostitution in Ireland from the 19th century into the 1940s. An amazing achievement of a book. So she notes that around 1911, that the Catholic Magdalene institutions in Ireland, really, we can see a distinct change. They go from these places where women could kind of come and go and more of an asylum and refuge, into being carceral, into being prison, like. And one of The Irish orders that got into the Magdalene institution business actually did a purpose built single cell occupation. So yeah, lock and key, a little potty to kind of slop out. And so it's deliberately built in what we would call like a 19th century prison design. And you can see the other Magdalenes then beginning to follow suit. Me and other social historians think it was also around this very fraught national project when finally got some limited independence in 1922. The last thing we needed was the Catholic Irish poor to scupper, to be disrespectable, to be ungovernable. So it becomes this kind of national project around respectability, politics. So poor women and their children become this real focus of the new Irish state and we start to lock. I say we because I'm, you know, from a middle class background. We locked them up in huge numbers. We managed to lock up 1% of our population and that population was poor women and their children. By the 1950s, the network of institutions included mother and baby homes, Magdalene Laundries, psychiatric institutions that had like mainly women industrial schools where illegitimate children or that hadn't been either boarded out or fostered or adopted were put into reformatory schools, so called orphanages, even though, you know, a lot of the kids may have had parents.
- [15:43]
Kate Lister
Another prison like institution that developed alongside the Magdalene Laundries were the mother and baby homes. I spoke to Natalie Hughes Crean, a specialist case worker at Renewing Roots.
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Niamh
Mother and baby home. That word sounds all nice and cozy and lovely and caring and nurturing, but it was, it was very far from that was quite the opposite in fact. Rather than being a way to support women, it was very much a place where women who were pregnant out of wedlock would kind of be hidden and kind of secreted away almost. You definitely had the kind of the conservative attitudes that came with the Catholic Church based around a very strict moral and ethical code. And yes, perhaps in earlier ideas it was based around the idea that they were looking after these women and supposedly doing them a service. But actually that was very, very far from the reality for a lot of these women that were in there. They certainly didn't feel nurtured or loved or looked after when they were in there.
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Kate Lister
So were they specifically for women who fell pregnant outside of wedlock only?
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Niamh
Yes, very much so. Thinking about the kind of the setting as well, very much like a misogynistic state of mind, you know, they're a very set roles for men and for women, pregnancy and childbirth, very much things that happened within a marital home with two People that were married and anybody that dared step outside of that, there was no scope for, and you were going to be punished, basically.
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Kate Lister
How did you end up there? Was this something that you'd be like, oh, crap, I'm pregnant and I'm not married. I'll go there. What was the process of somebody even ending up at one of these places?
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Niamh
People very often didn't have any of the choice. Sometimes they would be put into the institutions by their family members. It was the kind of the best option for them. Even if people wanted to keep their child and wanted to go full term and have their baby, there wouldn't be the scope for that if they were unmarried. There are testimonies that I've heard of people who got pregnant. And, you know, the kind of the family discussion and conversation was, well, we want to kind of do this together. You know, it's okay, we'll figure it out. But because of the respectability politics at the time, that just wasn't an option. And so people were either kind of dobbed on for whatever turn of phrase took. The priests who would then come and take these mothers away.
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Kate Lister
Oh, my God.
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Niamh
For them to kind of have their pregnancy as a. Yeah, it was very much sort of, we're going to do all this quickly and quietly and no one else is going to know about it. And just very much surrounded in secrecy and shame and kind of taken away. A lot of people, when they had their pregnancies, were often sent to county homes and mother and baby homes that were in other states and sort of stories were told to family members that they've got the mumps or they're not well, or they're going to go work on a cousin's farm for a summer. You know, just very much kind of out of sight, out of mind to be dealt with.
- [18:44]
Kate Lister
As the 20th century and the establishment of the Irish state progressed, so too did the development of institutions like the mother and baby homes and as we've heard, the Magdalene Laundries. But how exactly did the Magdalene Laundries differ from the mother and baby homes? Back to Catherine?
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Catherine O'Donnell
They were completely different in that they took the girls largely in from industrial schools. So girls who were already friendless, if you like, or familyless, who'd already been separated from their families, had been in.
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Kate Lister
They're not even pregnant. They're just poor girls.
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Catherine O'Donnell
Yeah. They didn't have babies. So a lot of them were funneled in from industrial schools. Another cohort, certainly more the end of the decades of the kind of 80s, 90s. I suppose 70s and 80s, when they were still putting in poor girls into these institutions. There seems to be a common theme that they were raped, sexually abused girls who made complaints or somehow it was known that they were assaulted and sexually assaulted and they were the ones who ended up in the Magdalens and not the perpetrators. Yeah. And then a complaint could be made to a Catholic agency like the Legion of Mary that there was some pretty young girl working in a boarding house as a servant and there was lots of, you know, traveling men coming in, salesmen, and that girl should not be in that place. Or that there was a girl whose mother had died and she just had brothers at home on the farm and she should not be in that place. And so you'd see Catholic agencies and priests kind of stepping in to take those girls out of that place of danger. And of course she is the danger. It's her sexuality that's going to corrupt and contaminate the men. That's the thinking. And so she must be taken away and locked into these Magdalene institutions which were.
- [20:46]
Kate Lister
I knew it was bad, but this is wild.
- [20:48]
Catherine O'Donnell
I know it is.
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Kate Lister
This is crazy. They're just locking up young women. That's that. I mean, I knew it was horrific anyway. I had no idea that they were just arresting young women. And that's crazy.
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Catherine O'Donnell
Yeah, and arresting without kind of due process of law. I mean, the courts did send in some women, not many, but they did.
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Kate Lister
And tell me about the conditions in these laundries.
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Catherine O'Donnell
So you got up early in the morning, 6 or 7, said your prayer. If you were in one kind of Magdalene, you slopped out your cell. Other Magdalenes you were in a dormitory, you went, you had a very meager breakfast and then you went to work at a commercial laundry under lock and key. You were in your very kind of 19th century apron, quite old fashioned factory gear. And depending on what part of the laundry you're in, you're either ironing or you were up to your calves in hot water and working with kind of quite dangerous detergents and bleaches. Quite smelly work and very hot work and very hard work. You had a meager lunch, you worked through the afternoon. The evening you'd a meager tea, you might have had some recreation, but at the recreation again, you didn't want these idle hands to be available for devil's work. So quite often they would do needlework in the evenings, which the nuns would also sell. If you were in Limerick, you could have been lucky. You could have been in the lace work room rather than the laundry making the famous Limerick lace that was sold in high end stores in Britain and the us. And you often kind of had a mass in the morning or the evening, I think generally the morning. And then you went to bed and you got up and you did it the next day. So Sunday was not a day that you worked at a commercial laundry. But again, you had no visitors, you had no place to go outside. Some of the nuns humiliated you by saying, nobody wants you, that's why you're here.
- [22:52]
Kate Lister
This imprisonment and institutionalization ran across the mother and baby homes too. And it was a tone that was set the second you entered one of them. Back to Natalie.
- [23:03]
Niamh
So often the first thing that you would do would kind of go into your new setting and you'd be given your new name. Often you'd now be called something else and referred to as that and only be told that you could answer to as that new name. The feeling and the language as well was very much that of incarceration. So when you look at the documents and the records from that time, people are referred to as inmates.
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Kate Lister
Inmates.
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Niamh
Inmates, yeah. Fallen women was the language that was used.
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Kate Lister
Who's running these places? Is it the Church again?
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Niamh
Yeah. So a lot of them were run by Catholic institutions. It's important to say that they weren't purely Catholic run. There were lots of Protestant and other kind of faith organizations as well. But as was society at the time, it was very much kind of Catholic was the predominant. There's supposed to be this kind of separation of Church and state. But even the parts that were separate, the Church and their ideals, very heavily influenced. So it was deemed that anything to do with women and children came under the remit or the jurisdiction of the Church. So they dealt with that. And that's why you had the churches who were running mother and baby institutions, primary schools, maternity hospitals and facilities. So all of that was going to seem to kind of to operate under that, which also means that then they get to sort of have their own rules and they can do the things that they want to and aren't bound by the same restrictions that you would if you were operated solely under state.
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Kate Lister
So in the Magdalene laundries, women were put to work in the laundries in these mother and baby homes. What were women doing until they actually gave birth?
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Niamh
Hard labour, for the most part. Very, very poor conditions. Heavily pregnant women. Think about your person's last trimester. You're exhausted, you're huge, your body's kind of at its peak endurance levels and you're Having to do hard graft, often in very kind of unsanitary, inhumane kind of conditions of people and just sort of waiting effectively for their child to arrive. All the while not getting any sort of prenatal care either. No education, no understanding around what was going to happen to them when they went into labour. You hear some of the stories of people's labour and it's just absolutely traumatic. No pain relief often just ignored and left a sort of labour on their own. Labour is supposed to be about all this production of oxytocin and love hormones and all those things to help you go through this process. It was so far from that. Labor would have been such an awful, stressful experience and just. Yeah, something that was effectively really traumatic for the mothers. And there are stories as well of people being told that the labour pain and stuff that they experienced was basically their punishment. Like this was what they deserved. You know, they'd earned this traumatic experience as penance for getting pregnant. Oh, my God. And then when the babies were born, you've then got this immediate forced separation of the mother and child. Forced separation of families. So because the mothers had given birth, they were often not allowed to breastfeed or chest feed. Their babies were taken away from them and they were effectively, once they'd kind of physically were able to get back on their feet again, if the birth hadn't been too traumatic, that they couldn't walk anymore, then they would only be allowed to see their child kind of for agreed feeding times and they would be fed by bottle. They weren't allowed to bond with the child. They weren't allowed to kind of build a connection because the only outcome would be that those children would then be adopted and taken away from them. There was no option for them to be able to leave that institution with their baby.
- [26:43]
Kate Lister
That was always the intention was to have these babies adopted.
- [26:47]
Niamh
Always, always, always, always. Yeah.
- [26:52]
Kate Lister
I'll be back with Catherine and Natalie after this short break.
- [27:03]
Don Wildpoint
In case you haven't heard, in the US it's a presidential election year. We're going to hear a lot of this is America. No, no, you're all wrong. This is America. But on American History hit. We're leaving that to the rest of them. Join me, Don Wildpoint. Twice a week where we look to the past to understand the United States of today. With the help of some amazing guests, let us introduce you to the Founding Fathers, guide you through the west wing of the White House and shelter you on the battlefields of years gone by to find out just how we Got here American History Hit. A podcast from history hit.
- [27:52]
Natalie Hughes Crean
Hey prime members, you can listen to this show ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.
- [28:08]
Kate Lister
Whilst it was exclusively pregnant women in the mother and baby homes, pregnant women were occasionally kept in specialist Magdalene Laundries too. Here's Catherine.
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Catherine O'Donnell
In some of them they had multi campuses. So the Good Shepherds in Sunday as well was one of those places where they at. And the Good Shepherds in Limerick, Waterford, they had multi purpose campuses. So they would have had industrial schools and orphanages on the campus as well. And the architecture of those institutions is really painful because while the children and the women would all be in the same chapel hearing Mass, the women had to come in by a tunnel so that they wouldn't be seen by the children. And they were screened off from the children. Certainly we know in recent decades a lot of these girls and women didn't have any children. But if they did perchance lose a child that was taken from them and they thought that child might be in the child's choir kind of singing in the other part of the chapel, there's no way they could see them. I interviewed a man who was in boarding school and whose clothes were sent off to the Magdalene laundry. And he noticed when his clothes were coming back and his name was on his clothes, you know, sewed in and the tape onto his clothes and he would get these kind of semi illiterate notes from a woman in what he now realizes was Magdalene who was just writing, you know, dear Michael, dear Michael, are you my Michael? So, oh my God. Yeah, we do know that a lot of these, oh my heart. The women who would have lost children were not merely just locked up and put to hard labor, but also kept away from family and any children they.
- [29:56]
Kate Lister
Might have had within both the mother and baby homes and the Magdalene Laundries, once you were in the hopes of getting out again, were extremely low.
- [30:05]
Catherine O'Donnell
You could escape or try and escape, but if you escaped and that was it, you could be unlucky in that the nuns would phone the police and you're very visible in your Magdalene outfit and your badly cropped hair, because that was done as a punishment. But it was also done to kind of the nuns who cut your hair as a punishment. But they crop it as a punishment. But also it was just generally kept kind of cropped short. And if you escaped, you would try and evade the police because if they found you, they would bring you back, which is another way the state was involved. Of course, if you did manage to escape, then Mostly they left the country. That was the safest thing to do, to get away entirely. Some just kept begging and begging and begging and begging to be let out, and others said nothing. But after 10, 12, 15 years, the nuns decided this woman was no longer perhaps in need of being a penitent, which is what they called the women. And if the nuns consider the women docile enough and kind of reformed enough, they could potentially be put into another religious institution, not held under lock and key, but generally finding themselves as a cleaner in a Catholic hospital, for example, and that could be in Ireland or Britain. So that was another way that the women were transferred out, or if they just kept begging and begging and begging. I know only of two instances where women were strong enough to refuse to work, became such a pain in the ass for the nuns that they were summarily dismissed and just thrown out eventually. But those instances are quite rare. It's interesting because Galway, as I mentioned, was the only Magdalene that had, you know, Magdalene Asylum painted up at the side. And it was very, very visible in not only being right in Galway city centre, but they had these vans that went across the whole west of Ireland, all of the province of Connacht. And they also employed, you know, paid workmen because it was such a big enterprise, who lived in cottages just outside the walls of the Magdalene. So what's interesting about the Galway Magdalene is that that's the only one that I can see so far where there was kind of organized at times, organize groups of people who helped the girls escape. So I think when Irish people did know or have a clear idea as to the extent of what was happening, there was very, very hidden, but there was, you know, networks that were concerned and did help the girls escape. So we can see that in Galway, but we don't see that anywhere else. I think both people didn't know the extent of the suffering. But you've got to remember this was a country that hated young women and certainly young working class or poor women's sexuality. I mean, it really saw women's sexuality as a major issue to be contained, confined, that this was going to be like the measure of whether or not we were a good patriarchal national culture that could control these young women. The good thing about Irish history in the 20th century is that we're very, very unusual in terms of emigration statistics in that young Irish working class and poor women left the country in massive numbers in what's called single female in migration. So we're the only country where there was a network of women who would leave, go to England, go to America and send money back to bring out their friends, their nieces, their neighbors. And they left without their families. And they went to other single Irish women in these cities in the US or uk and they left. And they left when there was a servant shortage in Ireland. So middle class Ireland couldn't get these girls to stay and be their servants. So I really like that aspect of our history that actually there was this form of resistance and that a lot of girls who may otherwise have ended up in these institutions found ways to leave the country and help others to leave.
- [34:30]
Kate Lister
But there's no formal mechanism of appeal or a process that you can go by to get released.
- [34:37]
Catherine O'Donnell
No, there was no oversight. So the Irish state sent in factory inspectors who said, yep, all of these machines are in good working order. And the Irish state at various times refused to work with the Magdalene laundries, but very rarely. So there was one particular Minister for Defense, Oscar Traynor, who said, we can no longer send in army clothes to be cleaned because the women are not paid a fair wage and we've got a fair wage clause. Because the Magdalene laundries were a real irritant to people who ran commercial laundries in the cities because of course they could undercut them in terms of their price and also they could appeal to the Catholic religiosity of their clientele by saying, you know, we're doing good work with these fallen women, so please support, send us your business. So this particular Minister for Defence was aware that the unionized commercial laundries really objected to the fact that these women weren't being paid a fair wage only in terms really of the competition, you know, rather than human rights abuse. So there was a time in the 1940s when the Irish state said, okay, no more army gear going in to be laundered in the Magdalens. So we do see it. There was some kinds of open political debate saying those questions to be answered here.
- [36:10]
Kate Lister
How well used were these laundries? I mean, was there like the wider community knew and were just sending their clothes in? Was it a case that people just didn't want to know?
- [36:19]
Catherine O'Donnell
Yeah, I mean, you know, back to the start of our interview where I'm wandering around France and Spain and Italy seeing these kind of old Magdalene convents, thinking how lovely a lot of middle class Irish people thought again, they wouldn't have necessarily used the word Magdalene unless you're in Galway. You could kind of see the like Magdalene Asylum painted up in that lovely gold gothic letters at the gable end of the Magdalene Laundry in Galway. But mostly they were just called the convent laundries. And aren't the nuns great? They're kind of giving good work to poor homeless women. So you would send in your good tablecloths to be cleaned once a year, or if you had a very kind of particular laundering job that you wanted done immaculately because they were expensive, you know, you would send in your laundry then. Mostly it was commercial, or else very, very affluent families could afford to send in upper middle class people could afford to send in their laundry on a regular basis. But mostly it was the hotels, the boarding schools, the Catholic Church itself, government departments, hospitals, Aer Lingus, the national airline cie, the transport company that ran the trains and buses, defence forces contracts. So it was the big commercial contracts, it was all of public Ireland that would be using these Magdalene laundries.
- [37:47]
Kate Lister
It's hard to imagine these institutions being a central part of public life in this way, but they were. It sounds so Victorian, like something Dickens would have written about. But the last Magdalene Laundry and the last mother and baby home in Ireland closed in the 1990s. And there were a number of really shocking cases that made the atrocities of those places impossible to ignore.
- [38:08]
Niamh
Here's Natalie Tune was the first one that really caught the public attention. And it was Catherine Corliss who was a local historian. She had this personal interest in Tune because she was from that county, didn't live too far away. And her history professor had said to her, do something that you're interested in, find, you know, whatever your kind of spark of interest is and write about that. And she knew somebody who'd been onto the grounds of where this home had been. So the building itself had been designed like as a workhouse during the famine, had been repurposed by Galway County Council, and then run as a mother and baby home from like 1925 to early 1960s, and then had been demolished for housing. So it was only really through Catherine Corless, her research, that she had found death certificates, I believe, for these children that had died at the home. And so that kind of made her ask the question, okay, so where are these children buried then? If all these death certificates exist, where are their graves? Where are their kind of resting places? It got press interest and then there was an article published by papers who published 796 names of children that had died.
- [39:28]
Kate Lister
My God.
- [39:29]
Niamh
So that number sink in. 796.
- [39:37]
Kate Lister
And we don't. We have any information about them. Was there anything that survived about them?
- [39:43]
Niamh
So some of the reasons for the Causes of death are congenital defects, heart defects, whooping cough. There's quite a worrying number where cause of death is something like marasmus, which is hunger, malnutrition, basically a severe form of malnutrition.
- [40:02]
Kate Lister
I can't even get my head around it. Do we know what happened to these? Like, why were they left like that? Who's responsible? Has anybody ever been held to account for this?
- [40:10]
Niamh
Yes and no. So the work of Katherine Corliss and the press coverage, particularly the interest by foreign press, is what really kind of sparked things happening in Ireland. I think stuff probably would have gone under the radar or kind of been ignored for a lot longer had there not been that interest around it because of those things that were published and the research of Catherine Corless. Then you had the commissioner investigation, which really then dug deep into not just Hume, but a number of homes across the country.
- [40:45]
Kate Lister
I'll be back with Catherine and Natalie after this short break.
- [40:57]
Natalie Hughes Crean
Hey, prime members, you can listen to this show ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app. Today.
- [41:13]
Kate Lister
With international press, the public were forced to face the truth of these institutions. And with them, incredible campaigns began to seek justice for the women and families who'd been affected by them and whose lives had been ruined. And yet the public still took some convincing. Catherine O'Donnell played and still plays a key part in this. Here she is to tell us more about her incredible work for this cause.
- [41:39]
Catherine O'Donnell
I joined the justice for Magdalene campaign in 2009, and it had been founded much earlier, 2003, by Claire McGetrick and Mary Steed. And we were faced with, yeah, a lot of ignorance, a lot of kind of saying, well, this was the 19th century thing, you know. So it was really hard to do that kind of public campaign because very few women were able to speak out. So we did have some incredible women, such as Gabriella Gorman and Martina Q. There was a handful of them and not many of them. And it was difficult to get the word out initially. So one of the ways we got the word out was through international media, and then it was picked up in Irish media. The women themselves were wonderful advocates and gave great testimony, but one of the clearest ways, as academic advocates, we could show, was to use Claire's work in the Names project to show that most of these women who died there were given a completely undignified burial. And initially the public had come to awareness of this with a scandal around Graves in 1993. So the wonderful journalist Mary Raftery, who unfortunately died far too young, she ran with stories in The Irish Times that showed that the nuns in High park needed to sell land to developers because I think they may have lost money in shares and cash strapped, wanted to sell some land. They needed to clear the land of a grave. And it was a mass, unmarked grave of Magdalene's. And then they got their exhumation orders for 122 women, but there was actually 155 bodies there and largely unknown. And then what the nuns did, which was contravening kind of Catholic policy around burial, they cremated the remains. So we could never, ever find out who these people were through DNA searches or through matching the kind of bodies to any evidence we could have found if they wouldn't release their own archive. So, you know, families would never know for certain if their mothers or grandmothers.
- [43:59]
Kate Lister
This is in 1993.
- [44:00]
Catherine O'Donnell
1993, yeah. So that was the first kind of scandal that broke it. And Claire and Mary and a few others set up a Magdalene Memorial committee then in 1993. And they were campaigning to have a bench put into St Stephen's Green, which was eventually unveiled, memorializing the Magdalenes and the children who lost their mothers to the Magdalene institution. So it's a beautiful bench in St Stephen's Green, and Mary Robinson, the president, kind of unveiled it. But we've got to remember that the last Magdalene closed in 1996. And this is the Magdalene Memorialization Committee. So that just shows even activists very much involved in the issue are still not fully aware of the extent of these institutions. So as the justice for Magdalene campaign kicked off again in 2009, we were facing a lot of amnesia and a lot of silence that was really difficult to puncture, really difficult to kind of get that message across. But one of the things Irish culture does well, I think, is to honour the passing of people. We're still good at wakes, we're still good at funerals, and we're really good at grave plots and cemetery markers. So showing Irish people how these women were so disrespected in their death really brought home how they were treated during their life. So that was one way in which we really could begin that public education.
- [45:31]
Kate Lister
And how are the survivors today? Where are they? What? I mean, obviously there's too many to have. Have a profile, but I'm just trying to think of, how'd you go about your life after the trauma of something like that? And they must have internalized all these horrendous messages of shame and the loss of it. I can't even begin to think, yeah.
- [45:51]
Catherine O'Donnell
Well, we eventually won our state apology. And very quickly we had a good redress scheme that fulfilled a lot of what we were asking for. Unfortunately, that redress scheme was our ombudsman, I mean, put his head in his hand and was close to tears in front of a committee of parliamentarians a couple of years later, saying it was the worst maladministered scheme he'd ever seen in his career as a civil servant. So unfortunately, that redress scheme wasn't done properly. But over 800 women who've survived their time in the Magdalene Laundries kind of stepped forward and received some forms of redress from the government. I would say to varying extents that they're flourishing or not flourishing. A lot of the women who spend time in Magdalene's as girls or young women have been completely silent about it. So one of the things that the redress scheme was supposed to do was to enable these women find each other. That's something that came out strongly. And the oral histories, because they had false. They were given religious names when they went in and there was a real culture of silence and not making friendships. But of course they did make some friendships and they just worried about the women and girls they'd left behind and what had happened to them. They really wanted to know what had happened. So the Department of Justice refused to do that piece of redress. So we had a weekend called Dublin Honours Magdalens, which the department sent out all the invitations and on very short notice, we had two hundred and forty women come with companions to Dublin. Some of the women I met at that weekend had still told fibs to their family about where they were going for the weekend. So even though they'd got the redress, even though there'd been a public apology, they still felt they couldn't possibly admit to what had happened them. In my interviews with Magdalene survivors, one of the things I noticed was there was a huge amount of animal welfare rescuers among the population. And in Ireland we're not famous for the way we treat animals or pets, but these women had found other creatures to kind of love and care for. And again, a huge amount of them had stories of how they'd stepped in, in their communities or families to help other women in distress, particularly mothers in distress who needed help with children, so they stepped in to care for children. They had taken older people into their homes and looked after them. In other words, they'd found ways to be loving, which I think was incredible considering the levels of hatred and cruelty that were. That were thrown at them. And that seemed to me to Be a real clue as to how some of them had managed to survive, that they didn't leave their hearts be closed.
- [48:50]
Kate Lister
Honestly, I'm reeling from this. As a final question, because your work is ongoing with this. I mean, it's still, as you said earlier, you still don't have access to a lot of the archives, you still can't access records. There is still a culture of silence around this. But what is the future of this campaign? Where would you like to see it go?
- [49:09]
Catherine O'Donnell
It's going in all kinds of different directions. So Claire's still working in the Names project. We still need to know the identity of women there. I've been working with a lot of young architects, so we examined the site of the last commercial Magdalene right in the heart of our inner city in Dublin, John MacDermott street campus. And we persuaded the government to take that over from Dublin Corporation. So the National Museum of Ireland are going to run a museum on all of Ireland's institutional carceral culture. What my colleague Jim Smith would call Ireland's architecture of containment. The National Archives will have a new purpose built building where we will begin to release all of the archive that's been held under lock and key since the government began to do various forms of inquiry, starting with the commission to inquire into child abuse around the residential schools. So there's millions of pieces of paper that are currently suppressed in the state that will find its way into that archive. I'm also continuing to work with architects to map all of the various carceral institutions on the island of Ireland. And there were a lot of them, about 540, we think our project is called, which is the Irish for secret and of course it puns in the English for ruin ruined lives and ruined buildings. But we need to learn how to live together in a more just and egalitarian way in this 21st century. So we're seeing these large buildings as a site where we can kind of gather, reflect and dream a new vision of how we're going to repurpose these sites. So, yeah, we are still being inspired by the survivors of the Magdalenes and indeed working to, if you like, give retrospective kind of justice to the girls and women who died behind those walls. We need to keep ourselves honest about what we can do to each other if we're not careful, if we believe this is the best way to treat people. We need to continually explore what it is to have justice and how to live together and take as our inspiration the people who largely women and poor children who live such terrible lives in these institutions.
- [51:30]
Kate Lister
Thank you for listening and a huge thank you to both Catherine O'Donnell and Natalie Hughes Crean for joining me. If you'd like to follow the work Natalie does with Renewing Roots, you can. You can check out their website freya.org.uk that's frear f r-e a.org.uk and you can follow Catherine's work for justice for magdalene research@jfmresearch.com Coming up, we've got episodes on the Dark History of the BMI and Michelangelo's Sex life all coming your way. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us@betwixtory hit.com this podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the Sheets the History of Sex Scandal in Society, A podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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