← Who Did What Now With Katie Charlwood
Who Did What Now With Katie Charlwood
Magdalene Laundries - From the Vault
01:11:52
What happened to the wayward women?
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Katie Charlewood
Hello delicious friends and welcome to a very special episode of who did what Now? The history podcast that is not easy. Your history class with me your host Katie Charlewood, history harlot and reader of books. So this is a re release of an episode I did several several years ago on the Magdalene Laundries, so bear with me for audio and other such concerns. It was a few years ago and I think I've got slightly better as time has gone on. Now the reason this is getting a re release is because not only is it Women's History Month, but it is also Irish Heritage Month and I think it's a massive disservice to talk about women's history and Irish heritage without bringing up the importance of the Magdalene Laundries and the entire system that allowed it to flourish.
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The second reason that this is being
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re released is I'm going to have an episode coming out on Tuesday. That is the regular release day, and it's going to be on the two of them babies. Now, I did warn all of you that things were going to get much worse this month, but I do have a lovely palette cleanser at the end. I've got something nice coming. Don't you worry about it. It's going to be very fun and lovely. So I understand that this can be a very difficult topic for people to absorb and learn about because it's just so horrible and harsh and depraved, especially considering everything that's going on in the world at the minute. So I do have some lovely fun, like fluffy content coming at the end of the month, just to give you all a break from the horrors which persist.
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But, of course, so do I.
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And I will always be here to
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tell you the truth.
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Now, if you have managed to live a life without knowing anything about this,
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well, buckle up and consider this your content warning, your trigger warning for this episode. Because I am going to be discussing abuse and assault and infanticide and femicide and trauma and abject fucking horror. And it's not about sensationalism or drama or making mountains out of molehills. This is about giving these women and girls their voice back. Giving them their stories. A lot of them died not being able to tell the truth, having everything swept under the rug. And I might just be one voice shouting it from the fucking rooftops, but their story needs to be told and we need to keep telling it. And we need to put pressure on everyone, from the institutions that forced this to the governments that allowed it, for everybody who turned a blind eye. There were so many mechanisms working together to keep this situation going, to keep this afloat. And not only do they absolutely deserve to feel pure, unadulterated shame, but the women and girls who suffered at the hands of these institutions, they deserve to be heard. History isn't just dates on a timeline. History is about people, about their lives, about humanity. And there were women still alive today who suffered through these, who may never tell their stories, who may never feel that it's acceptable to do so. And we have to be able to stand up and say that we're listening and to make sure that no one suffers like they did. Now, I'm gonna have a message at the end of this episode, and I really hope you'll stay to listen to it. But I know what you're thinking right now. You're thinking, quit your jibber jabber. In fact me. In fact you. I will. But first, we've got to get our source on. Our sources are shaped by Stories from Inmates of the Good Shepherd. Laundries and Reformatories by RE Croll. Do Penance or A Study of Magdalen Asylums in Ireland by Francis Finnegan. Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment by James M. Smith. Republic of Stories from Ireland's Institutions for Fallen Women by Kalyn Hogan. The documentary Sex in a Cold climate for channel 4. Institutional abuse in Lessons from Survivors and Legal Professionals by o', Donnell, Mahoney and o'. Rourke. Nothing about us without Giving Voice to Diversity in Criminological Research by Ahmed and Wendell the Justice for Magdalene Research Archive Report of the International Committee to Establish the Facts of State Involvement with the Magdalene Laundries. Origins of the Magdalene Laundries An Analytical History by Rebecca Lee McCarthy. And we have articles from the Irish Times, the Guardian and the New York Times. Now, if you're not from the island of Ireland, you may be unaware of anything to do with the Magdalene Laundries. And for some it may be a term that you've heard like every now and again without really knowing what it's about, let alone the horrors that existed within their walls. Make a pun about it. But the fact that it's about the Magdalene Laundries, the term itself sort of washes away sort of the sharpness and the barbarity of what they really were. It really doesn't give an inkling to just how bad it was. But yeah, they were laundries. And Ronseo Diamond Coat does exactly what it says in the tin. It was a laundry. Shit was washed there. Women and girls did laundry in absolutely horrific conditions while being stripped of their human rights and their bloody dignity. They're imprisoned, performing slave labor for the very people who are supposed to be helping them, the nuns who were supposed to be providing education, skills, spiritual guidance. But instead they used and abused these women and girls, the laundries. An inferno in which to contain, hide or demonize any woman or girl who fell out with the Catholic standard, the patriarchal standard. And it worked for decades, like the last laundry didn't shut down until the late 1900s, 1996. And even then, as we edged closer towards the 21st century, what really happened in those laundries was still kept, you know, hush hush and like you only really knew what was going on in the laundries. If you had been like involved in it or if someone you knew was involved or had been a part of it and they had actually spoken up about it to you, and that's a stretch. So listen, somebody once asked me if I was proud to be Catholic. Nah, it's called Catholic guilt for a fucking reason. Like, institutions like this rely on shame and guilt. And it is so deeply rooted, like, through Irish society. Like, this is generational and Catholicism is really hard to escape from. Like, it is very difficult to be excommunicated, clearly, because none of these nuns were. No nones. None. Like, for the majority of Irish history, there is no separation of church and state. It's not secular. It is ingrained in there. And for years, even when, you know, people started actually talking about the laundries in the early 2000s, the Irish government was not too keen on starting any inquiries that would sort of brush them aside. It wasn't really looking to be involved in that because that would, you know, bring some skeletons out of the cupboard, you know what I mean? So the official. The logged registered amount of women and girls went through the laundries is about 10,000. The state has argued that it wasn't that many, whereas advocacy groups and other researchers think that the number is much higher, like, closer to 30,000. All in all, that's between, like, 1922 and 1996, when the last one closed. So the laundries in Ireland, they were sort of all over, but mainly in sort of bigger, more urban areas. And they were run by four separate Catholic religious orders. And so we have the Order of Our lady of Charity of Refuge, and they had institutions in High Park, Drumcondra and John MacDermot Street. That's all in Dublin. These Sisters of the Good shepherd, they had Sunday's well, in Cork City, and they had Waterford, Limerick and then in New Ross in Wexford, the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, they had laundries in. So the Irish laundries, they were sort of. They were all over, but they were mainly in urban areas. So they were in Dublin, sort of High park, Drumcondra, Sean MacDermott street in Donnybrook, they were in Cork and sort of Peacock Lane and Sunday as well. They were in Waterford, they were in Limerick, Galway, Dunleary. Like, they were all over the shop, you know, and they were run by four sort of religious orders, four Catholic religious orders. Nuns, all nuns. So the Order of Our lady of Charity of Refuge, the Sisters of the Good shepherd, the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of Charity. So the largest of these institutions was the High Park Convent in Dublin, where. Which was run by the olc, the Order of Our lady of Charity of refuge. And in 1993, it wasn't doing too well financially. Basically they were having some money worries, forcing them to sell some land that the convent owned. Now the reason they had to sell this land, they said, was because, you know, they had spent all this money building this refuge for women in need, when really it was much dodgier. Like they had lost money on the stock market. They had like dodgy, dodgy investments that put them in so much debt that they had to sell 11.5 acres of land to developers for a cool 1.5 million pounds or punce, as they were then. So this land that the nuns had sold to the developers, to the land developers, just so happened to have, you know, a mass grave in it. And this wasn't a surprise. Like the nuns knew about this grave. It wasn't like, oh dear, we've suddenly uncovered this huge chunk of bodies. No, no, no, they were well aware of it. And it wasn't like, oh, this is a mass grave from when the famine happened. No, no, it was a burial ground of girls and women who of their own volition, chose to spend the entirety of their lives in the High park laundry. And of course definitely, absolutely passed away from natural causes and nothing untoward whatsoever. And the nun said that in this fucking body pit that 133 women had been buried there between 1886 and 1986. A solid and what some might say strangely convenient period of time. So, yeah, this land had been sold to these developers and obviously their whole purpose, the reason they purchase the land, is to develop it. And in order for that to happen, the bodies need to be exhumed from the mass grave and then reburied. Like that's just legally what has to happen. And in order for that to happen, there's a fuck ton of paperwork and licenses and there has to be a paper trail and there has to be appropriate documentation. That's just how the law works. And this may shock you, but they did not, in fact have all of the appropriate documentation. You could say their files pretty thin. You know, out of the 133 women they said were buried there, the sisters were only able to provide 75 death certificates. And I don't know how good your math is, but 75, much smaller than 133, that is 58. 58 people who do not have a death certificate or any known or logged cause of death. So for about 30 of those, they were able to provide names. For about 20 ish, they were only able to provide like their religious names, like Augusta, Fidelma, Mary fucking Clarence. And there was even one woman in this grave who was only identified by her first name, which is absolutely shocking. And like, 58, 58 women who don't have a death certificate, which, you know, not only unethical, but it's illegal. Failure to register a death that happens on your premises is a criminal offence in Ireland. Like, legally, you have to declare those deaths. It's a pretty standard law, in fairness. Somebody dies on your property, you've got to declare it. But, yeah, they gather up what paperwork they have and the sisters and the developers get started on exhuming the bodies and they actually split the cost of this, like, because it costs money to bury someone, you know, to dig them up and rebury them. So on the 23rd of August 1993, the excavation starts. So they start digging and it becomes very apparent, very sharpish, that there's more than 133 bodies in this grave. They find another 22 for whom they have absolutely zero explanation. That's an extra 22 people in this grave. And they are all exhumed by the beginning of September. So, like, seven, eight days, they just dig them all up and they don't have a reason or an explanation or death certificates and there's no investigation, nothing. They're just allowed to dig them up. And out of these 155 women and girls, only one is claimed and she is reburied in her family plot by her relatives. The rest are cremated and buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. Now, cremated, I hear you ask. Yeah, convenient that. So if there was anybody snooping around or investigating or planning to look at these bodies and. And maybe try and figure out a cause of death, not a fucking hope, because they've destroyed the evidence. And it's only at this point where information starts to trickle out and slowly, very, very slowly, information about the laundries starts to enter the public consciousness. And it would be 20 years before anybody got any sign, any inkling of justice. But before we get into that, I'm going to take you back to the very beginning. And our journey actually starts in London in 1758. So the first Magdalene Asylums, as they were known, they were established in England, initially in London and by. Well, by a philanthropist, by a Do Gooder man. And it was called the London Magdalene Hospital, or its full title, the Magdalene Hospital for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes. Yes, that was its name. And so it was run by, well, actually Protestants. It wasn't run by religious orders. It. And it was an institution whose entire purpose was to reform the Character of fallen women, specifically prostitutes. Now, I'm not going to say sex workers in this scenario, because sex worker implies agency, it implies choice, not necessity. Like, if you're selling your body in Victorian, sorry, Georgian London, it's probably because you don't have any other bloody choice, you know, so the whole point was to bring. Bring them in, give them religious instruction, so good Church of England stuff, you know, have them learn a skill, give them the means in which to support themselves and then they would go on and live a good life. Like that was the purpose. Now, the thing about asylums like this one and Bedlam, like, people could buy tickets to go in and look at the people who were suffering. Like you could go and look at somebody who had a mental illness. You can go and look at a penitent prostitute and they would sing in a church choir for you. Like it was a sideshow, which is absolutely demoralising at the best of times. But, like, what the actual fuck? Like, I'm not surprised at human behaviour, but sometimes I'm still also surprised at human behaviour. So back to the name. I should probably just clarify this. Yes. Named after Mary Magdalene, because there is an assumption nowadays that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, which only really came about because of one of the Gregory's, Pope Gregory. Most of the Gregory's are shit, right? They're just dodgy popes at the best of times. But this Pope Gregory in, like the 6th century, he is the one who's like, clearly a whore. Like, that's. That was his whole shtick. When there is nothing in the Bible to even suggest that, like, she just happened to be a woman with money who was around Jesus, right? She had her own means and she chose to hang around this fella. And, like, he is the person who sees him first. Like, when he rises from the dead, he's like, hey, why heart? Maybe there's a reason. Like, even by Bible standards, I don't think the first thing Jesus did when he rose from the dead was like, gotta get me some of that. Don't think so, no. Anyway, not the point. Point being named after an assumption about a woman. And I don't know, this massive morality thing comes about where, like, the worst thing a woman can do is sexual, even though there has to be another person involved in that. The Tilted Tango scenario, like, mmm, why is it damaging to one and not the other? Like, if virginity is not a social construct, then there would also be a test for men, right? You know, people do that whole hymen thing, which isn't Real, because it's stretchy, the hymen trail. But the testing to see if somebody is a virgin by their hymen is not a real thing. It's scientifically void. Right. But it's a test that exists in society. And if virginity, because virginity is a social construct, otherwise, as I just said, we would have a virginity test for men. Just saying. And that's heteronormative at the best of times. Anyhow, that's why the laundries exist. It was for fallen women and the ages of the women that entered these laundries. Because, yeah, it started off as laundries because, like, you'll get a skill, you'll get a job and you can go earn your money, you know, these laundries and houses, they would pop up all over the UK and they were in, like, nearly every major city in Victorian England and would later evolve into workhouses. And these are on a roll throughout the 1800s. So when it's the turn of the 20th century, in 1901 and the factory act has passed, you know, the workhouses, they can't make people work all day and they start getting phased out a wee bit because it limits, you know, the working hours to 12 hours a day, which is a completely reasonable period of work. She said sarcastically. But it didn't take long for this idea to spread across the Irish Sea. And it was like, less than. Less than a decade before the first one was in England. That one popped up in the Pale in Dublin. So at this point, Dublin and Ireland was actually part of the United Kingdom. It was under British rule. So the Magdalene Asylum for Penitent Females. I hate that. I hate females. It just reminds me of the Ferengi from Star Trek, that sort of creepy, like, sleazy little. Originally, the Magdalene Asylum only accepted Protestant women. Like, if you were Catholic, you weren't allowed in the doors. And it was all about, you know, repent, do penance, make yourself better. That was the purpose of it, helping women, rehabilitating ladies of the night. Not in any way using them for cheap labour. Not at all. Yeah, these laundries, they pop up all over the fucking shop. So they are in, like, Sweden and Australia and Canada and the US and the conditions everywhere. Shitty shetty as fuck. They're all over the world. They're all over the world. But we mainly now associate them with Ireland specifically, because that's where they really had a chokehold. Like I said before, like, the. The separation of church and state wasn't a thing. Catholicism was so ingrained in Ireland. And when the sisters, when these orders, the nun started running these establishments, these, I say establishments, these institutions, when you have the great hunger, you know, the famines which were a genocide when they occurred, it really made these institutions more prominent. It created an area of cheap labor. Especially when so much of the population left, like the population of Ireland today as I speak, still has not reached the level it was pre famine. Like to say, it decimated a lot of the population. Between death and mass immigration. Like these laundries became established. These were, they were workhouses. It was cheap labor or free labor for a lot of them. And thanks to how deeply rooted Catholicism was in society, it meant that these religious orders were able to just do what they wanted. A blind eye was turned. It didn't matter if they weren't following regulations or they were just being downright illegal. And these religious orders were able to continue doing what they did without the government really paying attention or, you know, looking too much in that direction. I mean, this is a society in which wayward women or, you know, women who fell out with the bounds of what was deemed respectable in Catholic society, anyone who didn't fit the Irish Catholic idea of what a woman should be was a wayward woman, a fallen woman by the end of the 1800s. And therefore they were sent to work in the laundries. We're lost. It feels like we're going round in circles. I'm gonna ask that man for directions. Hi there. We're trying to get to the state fairgrounds.
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Katie Charlewood
How is there signal out here?
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Katie Charlewood
Actually, can you pull up the way to a T Mobile store?
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Katie Charlewood
The wayward women, the fallen woman. It becomes this blanket term for anyone who doesn't fit these ideals. So it was no longer, you know, a prostitute, a sex worker, someone who had nowhere else to go. If you were in any way sex positive, if you were pretty, if you had performed a petty crime of some form, like stealing a loaf of bread, if you were not a virgin, regardless of whether the loss of virginity was consensual or not, if you had learning difficulties or a mental illness, if you were an orphan, if you questioned the Catholic faith. That's right, anyone who didn't fit the ideal Catholic woman could very well be on the chopping block. Like, it got to the point that it actually became sort of a legal means of punishment. So if a woman was sentenced, if she had committed a crime, the judicial system could sentence a woman to the laundries instead of a reformatory school or prison. Right. They would send them there. This was a valid means of punishment. And the majority of the time, any woman or girl that was sent to the laundries would never see their family members again. Like visiting the laundries and visiting your family or any women in the laundry, it was discouraged, to say the least. Now I'm going to touch on the mother and baby homes for a quick second. So it's a separate entity to this to the laundries, but they collaborated. The mother and baby homes were also run by nuns, sometimes of the same congregation, sometimes of the same order, sometimes not. So if you were pregnant out of wedlock, you were sent most of the time to the mother and baby homes. Now, experiences differ, but you would be pregnant and you would be sent away to mother and baby home. Once you started showing, you would give birth there. And if you were lucky, you would have some period of time with your child. You could be there up to 10 months. Or you could have your baby ripped from your arms just several hours after giving birth and the baby would be taken to an orphanage. If you're fucking lucky. There were some mother and baby homes that were physically connected to a laundry. So the mother and baby would be separated and the mother would be putting in the laundry and on the other side of the wall knowing fine well her child was there and she had no access to them. And so many of these children, those that survived, were sold to Catholic families across the world. In the uk, in America, it was socially acceptable human trafficking. And some of the women and girls who went to the mother and baby homes, like their families would collect them and take them home. Others would end up in the laundries. Remember, sex for women was seen as like the worst shame. Like, if you weren't a virgin, if you weren't pure, like you were soiled, you were damaged, or worse, you were vile. Which is weird though, because, you know, it takes more than one person to create a fresh human, you know, and yet no men are being punished for this. Just, just the women, just the girls. And it didn't matter if the pregnancy was the result of a consensual act or not. The woman was always to blame. Like, the refusal to acknowledge that men played a massive, if not equal part in this scenario is ridiculous at best because, like, if this woman magically became pregnant on her own, then really you should be praising her because that's clearly the next Jesus. But no women were to blame. And unwearied mothers are the absolute she devil. Like, they were despised and hated to a point of visceral. Like, the cruelty that they suffered was worse than others. Like, the nuns really enjoyed punishing those who had any post birth symptoms. If you had bleeding, if you were lactating, if you suffered any post birth pain, like you were going to suffer, they were going to make you suffer. But here's the thing, girls weren't sent to the Magdalene laundries just as punishment. Like, they also gave out the impression that, you know, they were going to be educating and reforming and doing all that jazz. So families would send their daughters there to get an education, to learn a skittle, you know, embroidery laundry, and that would give them like a better step up in life. But even if you consider the age range of people that entered the laundries, like the youngest recorded age is 8. Like, on average they would, they would go in at like 12. But yeah, the youngest would be 8 and like the oldest, like Andrea is 89. Like, who sends an 89 year old to go work on a laundry? Like, where is the logic in that? Like, what could they have done? Like, seriously. But yet they're, they were sent to the laundries with the idea of, of these young girls getting opportunities, you know, but the laundries were a business and they need workers and so they would have to find as many new people to come in. They need to bolster their workforce and they would do that however they could, even if it meant lying to people in order to use their children as slave labor. Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but this is quite a massive jump from, you know, reforming prostitutes. Like, we're no longer trying to help, you know, wayward women turn their lives around. Like, you've got families sending their kids there because they genuinely think that their daughters are going to have a better chance at life, but they're not. I mean, they were supposed to educate these girls, but they don't. And that's by design. By keeping them uneducated, by ensuring that they don't have any extra skills, like, it forces them to be ignorant and it forces them to rely on the system in which they are imprisoned. Like, after 1922, after the Irish Free State is established, a quarter of the women, a quarter, 25% who were sent into the laundries, they were sent there by the judicial system. That's right, the law. They were sentenced to the laundries instead of prison, instead of jail. And it uses them, or it's supposed to use them as a halfway home, but most ended up staying there much longer because they really didn't have a choice. Like, over 2,000 women were sent to workhouses by government authorities. This state did this. This state was actively involved in this. And, like, it's not as if these women were committing murder or arson. They were being sent there for, like, nicking some fruit or forgetting to prefer train tickets. So the government knew what was going on. It knew that these laundries were used as a form of imprisonment. It knew it colluded. I'll give you three guesses as to who the biggest clients of the laundries were. Anyone? Anyone? Who do the laundries have massive contracts with? Oh, I'm glad you asked, because I'll tell you. The Irish government and the army and of course, all of the major businesses. Like, we've got the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Department of Defence, Iris and Nuchterran itself. We've got Guinness and Clary's and the Gaiety Theatre, bank of Ireland, the Portmannock Golf Club and the Cie Coros Iimper. Er, like, that's the transport system of Ireland. Like, what? Big businesses involved in slave labor. What? No, no, no. Yes, actually, yes. The government was the biggest client of the laundry. It was 20%. 20%, the laundry services. So being a cleaning service, the laundries were a workplace and as such were subject to the Factory Acts, which means the state by law had to inspect it like fairly regularly, just like any other workplace on the island, like it was supposed to. So either either they were inspecting the area and not giving a shit or they just chose not to inspect it. Like which one was it whoms to say? This collaboration and collusion between church and state really allowed in these religious orders. It allowed the Catholic Church to just do whatever it wanted, like, because apparently slave labor is a okay if the church does it. Because so many women and girls worked through the laundries and earned nothing. They earned absolutely nothing. There was a girl who was sent to the laundries by her family after being visited by, by her parents. Her mum was like, you need to be getting more money for this because you know you're doing a job. And so this kid's like 12, 13 and so she says, you know, to Mother Superior, you know, she should be earning more money. And the nun just drops her off at a bus stop with like a bit of cash to get the bus into the nearest town. Like that's, that's it just abandoned, like out you go by done. And that's the thing. Like most girls and women who like dead leave the laundries, they had little to no education. Like so many were illiterate. Like they deliberately didn't teach them to read, even though you think they'd want them to be like reading the Bible and praying and whatnot. Turns out, no, turns out we weren't really into that, just scrubbing sheets. So yeah, they knew very little of the outside world. They knew very little of what was going on. And that again, as I said before, was by design. Because if they know nothing other than the Magdalene system, they're reliant on it. And it stops them, you know, rebelling and it stops them thinking from themselves or even trying to escape. Luckily now, I say luckily for a lot of girls, you know, the average day in the laundries was like three years. For most it was much longer, but for a good chunk it was like you've saved your time and off you go. But it wasn't like, oh, you can leave whenever you want. Like, you'll find that they say that, you know, oh, they could have left when they wanted to. We didn't lock them in. Like, there were two official ways to leave the laundries. One was a family member, a male family member had to request to take you back, like you needed their permission. The other was that the nuns would just remove you. Like those were your official options. I suppose there's magic door Number three, which is death, that's the other way. Although you don't really leave, you just end up in a fucking mass grave out the back, apparently. But yeah, those were the official ways. And there is this whole thing of, well, you could have leave when you wanted to. What in the name of gaslighting Tom fuckery is this? That is something that an abuser states in an abusive relationship. You know, oh, you could go when you want. No, you created a system of terror and torture and conditioned these women and girls into believing that they had no other choice. You force them to be there, even if you're not physical, even though you were physical, because you fucking beat them. Like, that's how abuse works. They created the cage and then have the audacity to act like they didn't lock you in it in the first place. Now, of course, the non official way to leave is to bloody escape, which is easier than it sounds because, you know, you're living in an absolute quagmire of despair. If you escape, you might not have anywhere to go. You might be in an area you don't know. Like, anything could happen to you out there and you don't know much about the outside world. Like, how are you going to get about? How are you going to eat, how are you going to survive? Is this the lesser of two evils? Like, and even if you get over that, the guardi, the Irish police force would literally search you out, round you up and bring you back to the laundry. Like, without cause, no warrant, no nothing. They would just send you back to your abusers. Abusers would condition you to remove every distinguishing feature about yourself. Like, they would take you there and you would get a name, like a religious name. Sometimes you wouldn't even get a fucking name. Sometimes you'd just be a number. And they would tear from you anything personal, any personal items, any sort of belongings, letters. If your family or loved ones or friends dare to send you a letter, they were intercepted by the sisters, they were destroyed. They removed your connection, they made you alone, they made you suffer and they made you work until you were a bother, an issue, or even just no use anymore. And then you were just dumped on the streets. No education, no money, and no understanding of the outside world. And that's one thing that comes up a lot, actually, with people who did manage to leave or escape the laundries. And that's the lack of education that could really affect them. And it really held them back. And it made it much tougher to like navigate the world now, not Every laundry was a capitalist torture chamber. Like there was one or two that was like designed for reforming. I mean, it was still strict as shit because they're nuns, but it wasn't like incredibly awful. And there are some people who look back at their times in the laundries as, you know, fairly decent, fairly okay. But for the majority of people that is absolutely not the case. Most were worked to the bone and punished anyway. Like there are reports and corroborations of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, solitary confinement, starvation, abuse, derogatory statements, sort of demoralization, humiliation, so on and so forth. And you could be punished for anything. For your nipples leaking, for speaking to your bunk mate, for dropping a cup. Marina Gambold was 8 when she became an orphan. And luckily she was able to go into the care of her grandmother for a while, but she too passed. So when she's 16 and she has nowhere else to go, and so the local priest brings her to one of the laundries and as soon as she enters the laundry she is told two things. One, that she has a new name, it's now Fedelma, and two, to keep her mouth shut, she was expected to be silent and suffer silently throughout this While she worked 10 hour days doing grueling manual labor and shaking with hunger. Like they would get bread with beef dripping for breakfast, sometimes bread and water if the nuns were feeling like it. They would be given the least amount of food possible to survive, while the nuns would sit opposite to them devouring full meals. And there is me thinking gluttony and greed were some of the seven deadly sins. And when Marina accidentally broke a cup, the nuns decided that the teenager was required training. They tied a thick string around her neck like a leash and made her eat off the floor for three days. One winter, Marina and two other girls were locked out on a balcony for two nights, convinced they were going to be left there to freeze to death. When she was 19 and finally able to leave, she said, fuck this for a game of soldiers and fled to England. Like this happened a lot. And that's why one of the reasons that information about the laundries was so hard to obtain from survivors was because so many of them fled the country because that was their only option. They couldn't risk staying here anymore after what they suffered through. Another survivor, Maureen Sullivan, was sent to the laundry when she was 12. Her mum had remarried and her stepfather was abusing her. And so the nuns told her mum that she was going to a lovely school and she never saw a school book. After the day the nun took her, Maureen would work from 6 in the morning to 9 at night. She would scrub floors and. And knit jumpers and make rosary beads and, of course, wash laundry. She only saw her mother four times in the five years she spent in the laundry before she was just dumped at Houston Station in Dublin and told to go back to the home in which she was being abused. Mary Merritt grew up in an industrial school, and when she was 16, her and some friends snuck out one night to go into a neighbour's orchard to steal some apples. She was caught and the nuns sent her to a laundry. She was given a new name, a religious name, a tractor and a number. 63. Her hair was cut short and she was put in a white uniform. She was often put in solitary confinement with just a bucket to relieve herself. One night she tried to escape by smashing a window, only to discover that the windows were all barred. She was put on day work at this farm. She saw her opportunity and she took it. She legged it. And when she managed to reach Griffith Avenue, she had no idea where she was. She seeks out help, ends up at the Archbishop's place, where she is sexually assaulted and becomes pregnant as a result. And the priest who raped her, he called the guardee, who then took her back to the laundry. A few months later, when she starts suffering from morning sickness, she gets taken to a doctor and he has to explain to her that she's pregnant, because this is a woman who had no sex education. She grew up in a convent, in an industrial school, and then the laundry. She had no fucking clue what was happening to her. She was a victim. And then she was sent on to a mother and baby home before her son was taken away from her and she was forced to return to the laundry. 14 years after entering the laundry, she was finally released. Like suddenly a bunch of the younger inmates, I'm gonna call them inmates because that's what they were. They were just suddenly released. They were let out, nowhere to go. And she was lucky because, you know, a stranger helped her. But so many were not so lucky. And there were so many stories we will never hear. This is only some of the horror stories. There are so, so many more. From making women stripped down and judging them, ridiculing their bodies because they could. Public beatings, making them chant, but how they were nothing. Over and over again, demoralizing them, removing every semblance of being of their own personality, breaking them down till there is nothing. Burning, scalding, caning, just on and on and on across the country. The laundries recorded officially 879 deaths, all from a smorgasbord of natural causes. But between, you know, investigations and the lack of death certificates, conveniently, consistently, yeah, the theory is it's closer to about 1600, like double the amount of what they say it is. Enter the justice for Magdalene script. So this was set up by someone we believe to be a Magdalene baby. A woman who as far as we know, was torn from her mother, a Magdalene woman torn from her and then trafficked by nuns to the US in a private adoption. The justice for Magdalene group has been a major, major force in getting justice for so many women, for survivors and for victims. Now, the last laundry didn't close until 1996. 1996. Now it really was the last one standing because the majority of the laundries closed down in like the early 70s. And not because, you know, it was unethical, not because, you know, it was a labour camp on Irish soil and not because the secret was out. No, no, no, no. It just wasn't making good business anymore. So it was no longer practical. Technology is becoming more affordable. Laundrettes were appearing in towns and families and homes were having washing machines. So they didn't need the laundries anymore. Like these institutions only stopped because of supply and demand. I never thought I'd do an episode where capitalism is the good guy for a little bit. I mean, obviously it's the bad guy for a lot of this because they were able to have slave labor so they could earn more money where that money was fucking going. Whom's to say the goings on in the laundries wasn't really public knowledge. It wasn't out there until 1993 when the mass grave is unearthed and people start paying attention and start asking questions. And when the public starts learning about it, pressure starts being put in the government. But they're refusing to acknowledge it.
- [57:57]
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- [58:24]
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- [59:13]
Katie Charlewood
By Eight years later, the government did recognize that the women in the laundries were in fact abuse victims. They just happened to mention that they weren't involved. They didn't abuse them. They knew nothing of the sort, nothing to do with them. It was the Catholic Church doing it, was these sisters. They had no knowledge, you know, they were privately run. Again, we didn't see it. It didn't happen. Which is a weird thing to state when you know there's a fucking mountain of evidence against you showing that you did in fact have contracts with the laundries, that you were supposed to inspect the laundries and that your judicial system literally sent women and girls to those laundries. But still no official apology came forward. Like the Minister of Education back then, Bar o', Keefe, he said that they were privately run, so, you know, it wasn't our fault. And he was like, there is no need for an apology or a redress scheme. And that if anything, it's our fault that children got sent there from like the reform schools or the industrial schools, but like not the adult women. Like, that wasn't us. We didn't know about it. Which again is a weird stance to take when there are court records stating that the Irish courts habitually sent women and girls to the laundries as punishment for crimes. Eventually, after mounting public pressure, a full Investigation is started two years later in 2011 and two years after that, the McAleese report is released. After the 2013 publication of inquiry report, there was a lot that the government couldn't do. It couldn't hide behind it anymore. So it is presented to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, who literally state that the Magdalene Laundries, the orders that run it, performed torture like the United nations, so. And there was state collusion. Yeah. So, you know, the government couldn't really hide it anymore. And so finally in 2013, a formal apology is made by the then Tisha Enda Kenny, stating on behalf of the state, the government and our citizens deeply regret and apologize unreservedly to all those Women for the hurt that was done to them and for any stigma they suffered as a result of the time they spent in a Magdalene Laundry. Here's the thing, A public apology is good, but it is effectively the bare minimum of what needed to be there. It like, put like the genius amount of blame on the government, but, like, they didn't fully accept how engrossed the role was, like, how much they were involved in this and how they perpetuated it, because they could. And like survivors, many survivors say it wasn't good enough, it's not enough. And we have to listen to what they say because they are the ones who lived through this trauma and there were so many others who didn't. And the Macaleese report, it's only the tip of the iceberg. It doesn't go into is much of the horror. And it's already like, pointed out torture. Like, it means there's so much worse that we will probably never know, that we'll be buried from history, from the acknowledgement of what happened. But that being said, it did lift the stigma, or at least some of it. The good thing is Ireland has slowly been coming more to secular without that Catholic guilt weighing down on everyone, forcing everyone to be a certain way and to cover up shit like this. And like, as much as we want to blame the Catholic Church and the government alone, because they were major factors and obviously, but like, people sent their families there, unwed mothers, somebody who wasn't doing great, anyone who had a mental deficiency of any kind. Women who were seen as less worthy. I mean, these are victims who were seen as less worthy for so long, right? It's like the concept of less dead. Like, like average Joes families, people were involved. Someone knows something. The pressures of Catholicism ran so deep that it made silence, it created the vacuum. And people don't want to face the fact that they in their own way allowed this to happen. They ignored someone's stories, they turned a blind eye. Institutions like the laundries thrived on secrecy. It helped churn it through. But secrets, they don't stay down for long. So in 2013, the Irish Law Reform Commission spoke to around about 340 survivors about their needs and what they required. And one of the things they discovered was that last laundry shutdown in 1996, it still had 17 women, like under the care of that order of the nuns. Now, a lot of these women, like, had lifelong trauma. They had physical ailments like arthritis and other such issues, or they had additional needs, or they were just elderly. And for These women, that's the only life they knew. And so they didn't want to leave the nuns. Like it's scary. And so they stayed in the nuns care. So later on in that year, the Minister for Justice announced that reparations were going to be paid. Survivors were to receive somewhere between like €11,000 and €50,000 in lump sum, along with like weekly installment payments. On top of that, they would receive benefits like counseling, therapy, medical cards, so on and so forth. Now this is all fine and well for the survivors that were still in Ireland, but so many had just buggered off. They'd fled to the uk, the us, Canada, just getting the heck out of dodge because they needed to escape. So this makes tracking down survivors a pretty, you know, difficult process. But this is also what helped keep the laundries going for so long because people can't tell their stories if they're not around one way or the other. But you know, the reparations and the compensation and you know, memorials and acknowledgements, it's a start. And it's too easy to go, oh well, we said sorry. And then to hide it under the rug. No, not even a little bit. Especially when you consider the Catholic Church still maintains it did nothing wrong. So the Church has absolutely refused, like not even a little bit. Is refusing to contribute any compensation, any reparations? You know, none of the ones that were responsible. Sisters of Mercy, Good Shepherd, Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Our lady of Charity, like, no, they're not doing anything. And they are refusing not only to the Irish government, but also from the UN Committee against Torture and the UN Committee against On the Rights of the Child. So like, like right after this apology happens, this official apology by the Taoiseach, like once that goes in, like two nuns who have the audacity to go on record anonymously, you know, they go on RTE and they're on the radio and they basically are asked, you know, apologize. And they don't believe they should like. And you're thinking that's bad. Well, as bad as it is, it gets worse. So after this report, after this, you know, apology, the nuns say that this is a one sided anti Catholic forum and they have no remorse whatsoever for the acts committed by any of these religious orders in the past. And when they're asked if they should apologise, the response is, and I quote, apologize for what? Apologize for providing a service. We provided a free service for the country and all of the shame of the era is being dumped on the religious orders. The, the sins of society are being placed on us. Now, this may shock you, but that's not how you deal with blame. Like, it's not accountability. You need to have accountability. If you do something wrong, you need to be able to turn around and go, I did something wrong. It's not. It's not hard, especially if you're super into Jesus and he's all forgiving. Have you considered asking him for repentance? Maybe not. Three Hail Marys and an her father, perhaps. So Bill donahue of the U.S. catholic League, what an absolute bastard. He says that no one was imprisoned. No one was forced against their will to stay. No, no one, you know, was forced to perform slave labor. Go show me their payslips, bitch. Show me their payslips. Show me. Like, imagine. Imagine having the gall to go, hey, you know these children that we imprisoned and wouldn't allow to leave without, you know, a man taking them. Oh, the ones we dumped on the streets, Remember them? Oh, no, no, we didn't force them to do anything. We didn't make them chant about how they were nothing. Like we didn't tear every strip of confidence from them or make them, you know, do so much horrific labour that their entire body started to seize up. What an absolute prick. What an absolute cock womble. But yeah, yeah, the survivors, surprisingly or unsurprisingly, weren't too keen on that. Like, they can't grasp, like, this opinion by these religious women and obviously Dickhead McGee over there. And yet again, the Catholic Church, these religious orders, were able to just brush this aside, sweep it under the rug and not even take accountability, not even apologize. Like, it's 20, 24 and a decade ago, 10 years ago, there were 600 living survivors of the laundries. I. After Covid and everything else that's happened, it's unsurprising that that number is probably a lot smaller now. And those people still. Still don't have an apology. The church still hasn't taken accountability for what they did. And I know some people are afraid to criticize, you know, large organizations like this. I'm not. I will drag you and I will call you out for all your shit because these women deserved better. We know at least 10,000 women went through those doors, at least. And we currently, or at least did have 600 people left. 600 women, which, I'm not a math person. Maths is not great, but even I know that's a tiny fucking amount. So after digging through all this research and reading, you know, survivor testimonies and victim accounts, and considering the social Climate of the time? Like, were these nuns, like, were they truly believing that what they were doing was good, that they were representatives of Jesus of God? That. That these women deserved to be punished, that they were doing God's work by allowing suffering? Like Mother Teresa said, suffering brings people closer to Jesus. You know, was this what they were doing? Were they victims of a patriarchy which conditioned them into a situation where anyone who fell without, say, the bones of, you know, the Catholic ideal of what a woman should be, you know, deserved to go through this level of treatment? Like. Or were they, you know, abusing the rules of society in order to be, you know, sadistic? Were they deliberately hurting people because they could, because it was an option? Because they had hate and venom inside them to the point that the suffering of others brought them joy? Where are they in a pack mentality like Milgram's experiment? Were they just following orders or were they just fucking cunts? At the end of the day, this is not just a ripple effect. This is a tidal wave of generational trauma and survivors and their descendants and anyone connected, they are going to struggle to overcome. And it's our job, all of us listening, all of us talking, to keep talking about it, to keep bringing it up. And this is the part I was going to talk to you about my message at the end. I could say this is the end of the story. It's not. Not if we don't let it. If you can share this episode, not just because I want the shares or whatever, you know, download it. If you download it, it actually goes up in the charts. And it means more people see it, it means more people hear this story. It means more access to finding out about these women, these girls who suffered. And it means making sure this does not happen again. Even if you don't want to share the episode. Grand. No worries. But the content. Talk about it. Talk about the laundries, talk about the collusion, talk about the survivors. We have to keep the story present. We can't let it be swept under the rug. We have to keep talking about it. By keeping it there, it stops it going away. We cannot let it happen again. It is International Women's Day. Let's fight for women's rights, okay? And with this, I am gonna bid you good night. Adios. Au revoir. A vuiders and my friends. Bye Bye.
- [76:15]
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- [76:58]
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