Magdalene Laundries: Ireland's Dark Secret

The Magdalene Laundries existed throughout Ireland up until the late 20th century. Women and young girls were sent to these institutions that were run by orders of nuns. They were told they could not leave, and were forced to work - all because they were perceived to be ‘fallen’ and in need of salvation, fixing. It is a truly dark and complex history we are only now beginning to really peel back the layers on. To guide us today we have Dr. Louise Brangan of the LSE on the show. Her newest work is titled “The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence.” This episode was edited by Anna Brant. Produced by Tomos Delargy and McKenna Fernandez. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. UK listeners: voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. After Dark is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  The Magdalen Laundries were institutions that existed throughout Ireland up until the late 20th century. Fallen women and girls were sent to these facilities run by orders of nuns, unable to leave and forced into unpaid labour, all because they were perceived to be in need of salvation. Bridgette was just 12 years old when she was condemned to a life within a godforsaken wash house. She used to come every night to an open window to listen to dogs bark outside. These dogs had what she wanted: freedom.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Bridgette lived her whole life imprisoned inside the laundry, her every minute policed by nuns who forced her to work while scolding her, as if she was a sinner. Eventually, she would die there. How and why was this allowed to happen? What on earth was going on inside Ireland's Magdalen Laundries?

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  And I'm Antony.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  And in this episode, we're going to be discussing the dark history of the Magdalen Laundries that existed throughout Ireland up until the late 20th century. Now, women and young girls were sent to these laundries and they were forced to work. They were told they couldn't leave and they were overseen by orders of nuns. They were perceived to be fallen and in need of being fixed. It's a truly dark and complex history and one that we're only now starting to peel the layers back on.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  To guide us through this history, we have the one and only doctor, in fact, Louise Brangin. I read this book a few months ago now and I was, I put it out on social media saying, "I need to have Louise on the podcast. Please, somebody put me in contact." And the internet did its thing and here we are. Louise is from the London School of Economics and her newest work is what we're going to be talking about today, "The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and a Legacy of Silence." Louise, welcome to After Dark.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Hi, thanks for having me.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  It's so, it's so exciting because this is a difficult history, right? For various and many reasons, and we'll come to some of those difficulties. But the way in which this, a lot of people outside of Ireland might not even know what a Magdalen Laundry is, don't worry, we'll, we'll get into that. But even in Ireland, I, as a historian, went in thinking that a Magdalen Laundry was a certain thing. And when reading your book, I was like, "Wait, it's nothing got to do with mother and baby homes." I thought it was maybe like some kind of symbiote. And then you do point out in the book that there is a little bit of relationship here and there, but anyway, I'm getting too much into too much detail. But to help people who might not know, Louise, what is a Magdalen Laundry not?

• 3:59Speaker 00

  It is not, or was not, a mother and baby home. And a mother and baby home is exactly what you think it was. It was places for women who became pregnant outside of marriage and wanting to keep the illegitimate, as it was always called. And legally, if you had a baby outside of marriage, it was categorised as illegitimate. You would go to these sort of clandestine houses, convents run by Catholic orders of nuns, but also there were Protestant ones and there are also other types of institutions as well, where you'd have your baby and then that baby would be given away. And then you would, this is ostensibly the plan, you would return to your normal life with your sort of private shame, but with your personal public standing intact. I also thought a Magdalen Laundry was something to do with this sort of clandestine scheme,

• 4:43Speaker 00

  the subterfuge system of illegitimate pregnancy. But what I came to realise very quickly was the Magdalen Laundries were something else entirely. And when I was starting to write the book, I was dealing with this huge, several thousand pages of Magdalen Laundry survivor testimony. And all, every time I was reading, I kept writing my notes, "Was not pregnant, was not pregnant, was not pregnant." I mean, girls as young as nine and women as old as 89 were recorded as being received into the Magdalen Laundries. And so even when I was writing the book, I remember speaking to my agent, saying, you know, this is, I'm going to say in the introduction, this is, they're not Magdalen Laundries. And he said to me, "Oh, you, you don't need to go all about the houses, about what they're, just say what they are."

• 5:25Speaker 00

  You can't, because this deep misconception about them has embedded itself in the collective consciousness. And so as much as I'm speaking the book about history, about what they were, I'm also sort of tackling with collective memory and why we have sort of failed or not yet sort of understood what these institutions were. So Louise, in, in broad terms then, and we will get into the nuance of this, and as you say, it's, it's a really kind of woolly and slightly blurred subject, really. In terms of the requirements for entry or the, the sort of circumstances in which women would be coming into the Magdalen Laundries, what were those reasons? Are they myriad and complex?

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Is there something sort of common that threads them all together? Yeah, so myriad and complex is exactly the way I'd put it. It was for any type of girl or woman who fell outside the ideal Catholic image of a woman. So every single woman then? Yeah, because the ideal Catholic image of woman was herself, the Virgin Mary, who, you know, and when you think of the Virgin Mary in the Bible, she has no classic lines, she does nothing, she tends to her.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  She has no classic lines. Can we just sum Mary's involvement in the Bible up by that? She has, by the way, we recently got a comment saying, "I need to stop blaspheming on this podcast." I have a feeling this episode might not be for you.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  The next one will probably be where you take, commit yourself to that.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  But that's amazing.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  And so it was for girls who were considered too lively, you know, in, in the survivor testimony. One woman who was sent to a Magdalen Laundry was puzzling why she'd been sent, and that's important. None of them were ever really told why they were being sent. They're being arranged for something, but this whole air of mystery hung over it. So it would be that their father would bring them and say, "Hop in the back of the bike there, you're going to go somewhere for a better education." It would be the priest saying, "You've been skipping school, let me bring you to somewhere where you'll get a better education." The nun saying, "We've arranged a new job for you, hop in the back of this taxi." But no one is ever told and then they arrive, and I'm sure we'll get into what happens inside, but they arrive with this real sense of bewilderment. And so they spent days and weeks trying to figure out what they've done, sometimes lifetimes.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  And this one woman, when she was recalling being sent to the Magdalen Laundry, said, "The only thing I can think that I was guilty of was I just loved life. I loved enjoying myself." And all that meant she was doing was she had a boyfriend. They liked going out. Sometimes she stayed out a bit late, who knows what could have been happening. You know, so that's it. These kind of very things that we think are very average now. One woman in the book, well, woman now, or was a woman, girl, when she was 12, she'd been born outside of marriage, and that's important. We keep thinking of the Magdalen Laundries as mother and baby homes, but in fact, it's often a place where the illegitimate daughters were sent. So she'd been born outside of marriage, her mother went off to work as a domestic servant somewhere in one of these grand big houses.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Her grandmother was raising her. She gets to age 12, she's kind of skipping school, kind of inconsequential. She's going to be leaving school at the age of 13 anyway, because it's the 1940s. So there's no secondary school education, you know, instilled as an expectation. But the priest hears that she is skipping school and he arrives at the grandmother's house because he sees this as a sign of the malaise that is to come, of like the deep sort of immoral delinquency that rests inside her because she had been born outside of marriage and convinces her grandmother, "You've just got to let me take her away somewhere. Let me, this is the only way to deal with it." And he brings her down the road to the Magdalen Laundry that was in Limerick City. Another girl in the book, she'd been raised in an industrial school and really, rather

• 9:03Speaker 00

  than the relationship between being between Magdalen Laundries and mother and baby homes, it's really between industrial schools and Magdalen Laundries. This girl was 16, she's, time for her to leave the industrial school. Off she goes, the nuns send her off to be a domestic servant somewhere. She didn't like it. The house where she was a domestic servant didn't have a toilet. She was like, "At least in the industrial school we had a toilet." She returns to the nuns and says, like, "No, you've got to get me a better job at somewhere like with better conditions." Fine, they send her to another place, too far away, didn't like it, comes back and says, "Oh, I don't like, could you get me, send me somewhere else with better conditions?" And it was almost like three strikes her out. So the nuns say, "Do you know what? Stay here for a week and we'll figure it out." And she's back in the industrial school, but living in a separate room, helping out a bit, going down to the town in the summer.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  She said she went to the fun fair, was having a fine time. And then one day, her bag was packed for her, it was already in the parlour and they said, "We have somewhere for you to go now." She hops in the back of the car and they drive her to the Magdalen Laundry. But again, she was never told her she's going. And when she arrived, one of the things about the Magdalen Laundries is we always think of these sort of soft pleading faces of young mothers, they were mostly filled with elderly women. Because, you know, women, there was no end date. There were, it was a sentence, but to be served over a lifetime often. When she arrived, she could see all of these elderly women and like everyone else who'd arrived before her, began to think, "Why the hell am I here? I don't know why I'm here. I hadn't done anything wrong." And she thought, like basically she thought it was a no folks home. And she initially thought she'd been there to help these women.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  There are two things that are striking me, Louise. We're going to get into more of the details in a minute, but just from the sort of top of this episode, that-

• 10:40Speaker 03

  What is remarkable is that these women of all different ages and contexts are just being removed from their life. They're just, they're missing essentially and nobody seems to bat an eyelid. But also, you know, you spoke about the mother and baby homes being a distinct thing at the beginning and that there's this idea of shame. You know why you're in there. You can't, the reason is undeniable. And that you then go back to your life, as you say, with this private shame, even if your public standing is maintained, that you have to live with and you're, you know, that's how it is understood, whether people actually felt that or not, you know, it's another question. But in this context, in the laundries, people don't often know why they're in there. And so it strikes me that actually their function is not so much to punish these women who are transcending the rules of society,

• 11:22Speaker 03

  but actually that it's just for the convenience of a sort of patriarchal society outside that. And these women themselves just don't really understand what the issue is. It's remarkable, really.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  I've said before, I think a way to think about them is to think about them as Ireland's disappeared. They've been disavowed. And, you know, one of the ways I came into this topic, there's several longer routes in, but one of them was because when I was very small, my nana was minding me and she was like a west of Ireland woman. And she said, you know, when I was growing up, you used to know when a girl got into trouble, but they didn't, that was not the way she said it. It was nothing to do with pregnancy. It was like she had done something rowdy or lively. She would disappear one day and no one ever spoke about her again.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  And I just remember thinking-

• 12:10Speaker 03

  And that was accepted and normal.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then she just, I re, I can see her, she turned her back and walked off back into the kitchen. She'd already said what she needed to say, but that really frightened me. Because it was, first of all, where did they go? But also just the idea that no one spoke about them again. And so, you know, some of the Magdalene laundry survivors have likened the laundries to the gulags or to, you know, Auschwitz. And, you know, you don't want to overdraw those comparisons because you, these things, every atrocity is distinct in its own way. But I think there's something about the element of just disappearance and eradication there. So even in Magdalene laundry, you know, what's one of the ten commandments? They shall not kill. So that they, they're not going to eradicate them physically, but they can make it to be, and create a silence that was if these women never existed at

• 12:57Speaker 00

  all, while they're actually behind closed walls and their family aren't speaking about them and they have no way to communicate to anyone.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  One of the things, as an Irish person, reading your book, and so I, I don't thank you for this, but I do as well, because I think we need to face up to this and we need to be more mature in our understanding of our own histories. We're very good at giving out about the 800 years, as we always go on about, of, you know, British colonial rule. And of course, there were some atrocious things that happened throughout that span of time. I, your book made me realise we should be so flippant angry at ourselves for what occurred afterwards, that we are in many ways, the, the product of complicity around this. But just so people outside of Ireland might have a little bit of context

• 13:43Speaker 01

  about this time in Ireland, Louise, give us the, the time span that we're talking about, where the, the laundries are, are most prevalent. And how religious is this society?

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Okay, so the, the laundries span from the 18th century up until 1996. That's interesting about the 800 years, because we do love, we do love to talk about that. And I think in some ways the way we talk about Magdalene laundries has a similar kind of definitive air of blame about it. So then the Brits left, that was great. Then 1921, Ireland's independent, and then bang, church and state. That like hand in glove oppressive atmosphere. But actually, what I found, was I kept thinking, well, what does that actually mean? So how did they actually take over? So in the archives, what I found was the 1920s was a much more fraught time in Ireland. It was the Jazz Age. There was cinema, there was new music,

• 14:37Speaker 00

  there was new fashions. So and so, and also independence, and also the majority of the country were under 30. Like some part of me just thinks, God, that might have been a bit of crack.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  You know, a society that's sort of putting itself together. But across Western Europe, people, all countries, conservatives, governing classes, were concerned about the sort of influx of this new modernist culture. And Ireland was no different, but what was happening in Ireland as well was also extreme poverty, like really extreme poverty. And you have people in the middle of the 1920s saying, we are, we are on the cusp of a famine. We are about to go into 1847 again, which you know is like Blackfoot 7, the worst year of the famine. So that was the fear people were living with. Their children were emigrating en masse. There were no jobs. There was no social welfare. And the people in power

• 15:27Speaker 00

  were centrist, right, conservative, uninspiring. And so people are looking for answers in that time. And the church had always existed and always exerted power. It's not to say that they grew in power in that time. But when Ireland was so weak, in the middle of the 1920s, the bishops started issuing statements like purity is strength. So it's not economics, it's not the global order, it's not that maybe Britain should have paid some sort of reparation to Ireland or whatever. And so in that time, the religious ideas take on a kind of, almost, I would say, like a fanatical, you know, they're at the edge of society. And a friend of mine who's a historian said, well, you're being too judgmental, calling them fanatical. But no, I took that word from the archives. There are government

• 16:12Speaker 00

  letters saying, God, these are fanatical right wingers. These are, you know, they're so overzealous. They'll have us all marked with the scarlet letter and such like. So they, they thought they were mad. And then suddenly, by the 1930s, that kind of view, those kinds of views, that kind of feeling really takes over in popular culture. And then a new political party is voted in. And you have then a sort of raft of legislation in 1935, one, a piece of legislation that says, any sort of act that causes moral injury to the community is prosecutable. That's like dangerously vague. And you have the rewriting of the constitution at, at the end of that period, that women's place is in the home.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  So slowly you get these Catholic ideas getting inputted into the legislation. But what happened in Ireland became so effective and went on for so long, because that system had been bought into by, and was supported by a general public who had been seeking some sort of answer, some sort of stability, some sort of sense of national renewal. And purity became that idea, Catholic purity. But the problem with purity is, you, you know, you can't say, oh, we're very pure and we're very good, if you have pregnant girls outside of marriage, sort of going around and you have girls in flapper skirts, you know, and they wrote, one bishop said, Ireland's become overrun. I have to get this because it's such a great line. Jazz dancing, lip sticking, fag smoking flappers.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Fantastic. Oh, my gosh. Louise, within that context, then, tell me a little bit about the cult of Mary, because it's no coincidence that these are called the Magdalene laundries, right? And that idea of purity and the Virgin Mary. How important is that idea of, of womanhood and idealism within this context?

• 17:55Speaker 00

  I came across stuff during the time where apparently in Rome, they were concerned that Ireland liked and was more adoring of the Virgin Mary, that Jesus had been reduced to this like second tier god, second tier Messiah in his own religion. We seemed to, I think she's a kind of the quintessential Irish mammy, like we just love her. And that's what in 19, then the book opens in 1954 with the disappearance of one young girl called Eileen, who had been, she had also been born outside of marriage. She had ran away to Dublin, you know, and in every, the odds are against this girl in every conceivable way. She's 14, she has no family, she runs away to Dublin and then finds her feet in the big city. She gets a job in a B and B. And while she's there, these two women approach her.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  I hate this one so much. This one infuriates me.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Well, I'll tell it then, we'll discuss it because, yeah, so she is working at B and B and two women approach her, come in off the street and they weren't customers, but she does the usual, can I help you? And they say to her, we can take you somewhere nicer. We can take you somewhere better to work. And she says, I have been raised in a strict Catholic way. We don't say no to people, particularly if they have an air of authority. These were just two bland, middle class women. They say, come with us now. She says, yes. And she walks out into the car with them and they drive her across Dublin and they bring her to a Magdalene laundry. And she's still, is still standing there in obedient silence. And then they turn to leave when she's in the convent with the nun, still saying nothing. And then they look at her just as before they leave

• 19:24Speaker 00

  the door and say, we're putting you in here for your own safety. I have all sorts of- Theories about how they came to identify, but they were part of a group, it turns out, called the Legion of Mary. And that is known because the nuns wrote a letter saying the Legion of Mary sent you here. And I've seen that. So that's, we know that. And they had started in 1921, the Legion of Mary by a guy called Frank Duff. And this was a group who were committed to the veneration of Mary and everything that she did. And what that meant was they would say things like from their meetings, we can get beyond the priests. The priest is on the pulpit, but we're in the community. We can be in the, in the sports club, the pub, convincing people to behave with more religious decorum. But also that would mean they would just sort

• 20:08Speaker 00

  of sit up alongside people on the street and say, you know, you know, they were looking for people who also would be predelinquent.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  And so that's, so, but in the 1920s, they were considered fringe fanatics. By 1954, they were literally legion in name and in number. There are tens of thousands of members of the Legion of Mary. And then in 1954, when this girl Eileen was taken by them, that was also had been declared a Marian year by the Pope. And I, I mean, my feeling is that no other country probably threw themselves into the veneration. Mary was almost like opened the sort of gates for them. They'd already been doing it. I've seen photos in the archives of people who painted the whole front of their house in a shade known as Marian blue, which I realise maybe people outside Ireland don't realise, but it's

• 20:53Speaker 01

  I know what it is straight away.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's the shade of her robes. They built dozens, must be more, more, more statues around Ireland. You will go down the most abandoned, rocky, rural, windswept, middle of nowhere and find a raised looming statue of the Virgin Mary. And these are people go on missions across Ireland to other parts of Ireland and build these, and erect these statues. So Virgin Mary is incredibly important and in Ireland, and Marian culture is incredibly important. And a really common thing for the Irish family to do, right up until, I think in the eighties, it had probably been abandoned and began to wane a little in the

• 21:35Speaker 00

  sixties, but was to say the rosary on bended knee, led by your father every day at six o'clock. And still, when I went to secondary school, right up until the early 2000s, we were made say the rosary every day at 12. And it'd be a great honour to be invited up to read it out over the tannoy. And I've like, yes, this is, yeah. You know, but that, that's, that part is, so, you know, Catholicism really part, was part of the ordinary culture of Ireland. And so that's why as much we must be annoyed at ourselves. If you have nothing, like nothing, really nothing, and you have Catholicism, which gives you order, it gives you a certain kind of pageantry. You know, you've got Christmas, Easter, you know, it puts, you've got penance, you've got fasting on Fridays. It gives a whole, a

• 22:20Speaker 00

  whole daily, weekly, monthly, annual rhythm to your life, a life that previously had probably been spiralling.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Hmm. We're gonna take a step inside the laundries when we come back after this break. Terry Cottle died by suicide, but his heart lived on, transplanted into Sonny Graham. Years later, Sonny died the exact same way, same heart, same fate. But that wasn't the strangest connection between them. Sonny also married Terry's widow. Hosted by Karen Kilgariff, this is Heart, an Apple original podcast produced by Plan B and Blanchard House. New episodes are available Mondays and Apple TV subscribers get special early access to the entire season. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

• 23:13Speaker 04

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• 24:13Speaker 01

  Louise, you've given us an indication of what it was like when those girls, in some cases, came through those doors with their suitcase and are suddenly surrounded by these faces of older women, nuns, but also, you know, inmates, what, what do you call them? Residents. But give us an idea of what daily life was like in there for these people.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  The daily regime was absolutely unrelenting. And I think in, you know, the Magdalene laundries is a largely politicised topic now about who is to blame and how wrong was it really? You know, the church are only doing what people thought was normal. And one of the government reports, the Macalise report, and which is often used to say, look, this really wasn't a punishing place, will say, well, they weren't beaten. These weren't like industrial schools. It wasn't regimented sexual and physical violence. So they weren't, that's not

• 25:10Speaker 03

  That's a very low bar.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, yes. But actually, speaking to women, reading the archives, yes, there wasn't regimented beatings and other kinds of abuse. But what was absolutely psychologically puncturing was that once they entered, their name was taken, not to be spoken again. They would be replaced with either a pseudonym, often drawn from Bible, often male names, Lorcan, perpetua, scholastica. And then their clothes would be taken. They would never get those back again. And that's interesting when, if and when some of the women did get to leave, they were given other people's clothes. They were never given their own items back. So their clothes would be taken and then they'd be given this uniform that

• 25:52Speaker 00

  would be cut from rough calico. And then their hair would be cut. And then, you know, one of, and usually this is the point at which women would begin to speak and say, like, what are you doing? And so you just have to have your hair short, short here. You have to have your hair short here. So their hair would be cut up. And then they would be brought to a dorm room. And that would be where they would sleep. And often the way that, so that some of the dorm rooms were organised such that they sat like head to foot. So even if you turn around to whisper to someone, you actually weren't as close to the person, you were looking at their feet. So it was very hard to communicate. And then they were just put to work, immediately put to work. And we called them Magdalene laundries. They weren't called Magdalene laundries at the time. They were called asylums or penitentiaries or homes or refuges. And certainly homes and refuges are the terms

• 26:35Speaker 00

  that the Catholic Church have really liked to hold on to. But they were called laundries. And we call them that now because that's precisely what they were, big industrial scale laundries. And they were washing everyone's laundry. Local people, local businesses, you know, the president or Sanukdron would send their sheets and tablecloths there, wedding dresses, everyone, everyone's having their laundry washed there. And when we sort of see these institutions visualised in cinema, they almost look like little cottage industries. They're all sort of round and vast. These were huge, purpose-built, industrial factories built at the back of convents. And I've been to see a couple of them. They all follow the same pattern. So it's not they just like started up accidentally in the back.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  You know, they were purpose-built. You have an ironing room, this steamy sweaty room. You have the wet room where, you know, these huge, I mean, massive industrial laundry machines, five, six foot in height, huge gaping, you know, vats. And then you've got the packing room. But the point is, it works basically like a conveyor belt. But the reason that it's not like a factory is that the minute they, they would start their day, straight up wiggle into their, back into their calico dress, and then down on the knees for the first round of Hail Marys and rosary of the day. Then down to the chapel for a mass. And women will say at this stage, you still don't know where they were, but no one is

• 27:58Speaker 00

  speaking. And there's a nun leading them all the way. Then they would go have a breakfast in the large refectory at these, and at these long, large tables. They're not looking at each other. They're looking straight up at a nun who's sitting up on a raised rostrum. Still, no one is talking. And then one woman was saying on her first day, so she's still just following kind of lockstep in this kind of cavalcade of women, walks out of this room where they've just had breakfast and down this tiled, cold corridor. And on one of the arched signs, it says, Do penance or perish, painted in a cursive script. And then she entered the laundry. And they're doing all that laundry work. They're sat about in these different rooms, but they're not allowed to speak. That's the thing that's absolutely gruelling there. It's not just the labour. It's not just the slavery. Of

• 28:43Speaker 00

  course it was slavery. Of course it was imprisonment. But basically, they are working in silence unless they're being led in prayer. So they're praying all day, all the time, led by a nun. So like these incessant incantations, constantly praying, working, praying, working, never allowed to speak. So you could never speak to another person. You could never use your own name. And you're just going on like that. And you still don't know where you are.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  Two things that strike me again, Louise, is first of all, that it must have been so remarkable to have been removed from your own life and you're sort of vicariously living the lives of the people whose laundry you're doing. You mentioned like wedding dresses coming in and that sort of thing. And, and, you know, you've been stripped of all of your personhood, your womanhood, I think, you know, crucially, in, in terms of this idea of the cult of Mary and, you know, you're having your haircut and the sort of removal of anything that would mark you out in terms of that identity. But also that the spaces you're describing and those regimen, those routines, that there's, there's a sort of A very purposeful choreography to that. And I'm wondering, you know, you mentioned that the,

• 29:52Speaker 03

  these factories grow up at the back of convents. Is there a scheme to design these? You mentioned they're quite similar. You've been to a couple. You know, is there like one architect that's just doing this as a commission? And if so, how these, what's the sort of thought process behind those spaces? Is it simply, oh, we're going to build somewhere where we can do laundry? Or is it, you know, talking about the, you know, the sort of cursive script above the door and things? That there's such a sense of the design of these spaces and the oppressiveness as being sort of intrinsic to that. Is that actively what's going on in people's minds when they're setting these spaces up? Or do they just evolve organically? And, you know, suddenly they're at this pinnacle of sort of horror?

• 30:37Speaker 00

  There is a really good PhD done by a guy who's an architect called Chris Hamel at Queens, and he's looked at them as architecture and looked at all the blueprints. And I've also gone to Architect Office and looked at the blueprints. They are, I don't know if it's one architect that's built as a commission, but when the numbers of women being sent to the Magdalen Laundries in the 1920s and 30s began to rise as this kind of more intensely Catholic spirit really began to take off, there are letters in the archives from the nuns saying, we're going to build even bigger, bigger spaces, bigger laundries, we're going to a bigger dorm. So they're really aspirational. There's also a bit of context to put this in, is that Ireland did not have an industrial revolution. And in fact, poverty was idealised as kind of virtuous. You know, so it wasn't accidental. They bypassed that. They sort

• 31:22Speaker 00

  of bypassed, you know, capitalism, we're not going to do that. We're not going to do socialism. We've got Catholicism as a kind of full political economic ideology. And so there isn't the same kind of factory. Like everyone was meant to be making good in small subsistence farms and, you know, lend and make do. And it's all like really idealised rural 20th century living. But here at the back of convents, for women are these big industrial spaces. So I just think the contrast there is incredibly telling. The reason I think they did laundry work, you know, it's very, you could really wring out, which is a pun not intended, they're like the rich metaphorical thing about these women were considered fallen filth. They're also told they were filthy and dirty all

• 32:06Speaker 00

  the time. They were insulted all the time. But here they were literally bleaching and staining and cleaning. But the nuns have sort of said, and maybe it's true, that it's just that it was cheap and it was easy to do. And one did not need a sort of a very high skill set to do it. So why was it laundry? Why these factory spaces? Was that so intentional? I think it began from a time when it was easier and cheaper to do it. But in the 1950s, they expanded them even like lots of them more and they bought new machines. So it was another phase of like really redevelopment of the laundries. But the regime in those spaces, if you think they're in these huge convent complexes where the nuns live, there might be an industrial school at one end, there's gardens, there's all sorts of spaces,

• 32:48Speaker 00

  there's places with a public cum, the parlor, the chapel. But actually, in that vast architecture of the convent, the women who are, and you asked what they were called inmates, or they were called penitents, and the nuns would refer them, or as our children, our children. So in the nuns, you know, the nuns have, I've read a literal handbook, how to deal with our penitent children. And the consular for them as our children. So again, that's the patrician idea of always infantilising these women. And they would walk one recurrent route through this, from the dorm, down the stairs, into the refectory, from the refectory to the laundry, back to the refectory, back to the dorm. That's it. That's the recurrent route. So as much as these are large spaces, they are contained very tightly.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  It's claustrophobic. Those are the sights of these women's lives for years. We have a photo here of one of the bags that presumably the laundry was sent back out in. And it just looks so innocuous. It looks so mundane. It's just a white, maybe is it paper bag? It looks paper. And it just says Magdalen Laundry and Dry Cleaning Service. There's a telephone number and it's.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  A four digit telephone.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  Oh, simpler times.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  One, two, three, four.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  You know, it just, I suppose it just gives nothing of what was going on inside these places. But I'm just wondering about the bags. Were they ever used to transmit messages? Did women ever write on them, you know, help, I'm stuck in here?

• 34:13Speaker 00

  Not that I'm aware of. No. But at the last point, would not, when you were giving the wrapped finished laundry, you're giving it to a delivery driver, who would often drive a van that says like Magdalen Home Laundry, whatever else on the side. But it's usually a nun who's doing that. Like a nun is at that last stage.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  So there's no opportunity to.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  You know, I, one woman was saying how basically she'd lost a sock or something. Or anyway, I'm just be up at night crying, being like, if I don't find this sock, I'm going to get absolutely hammered. So you can imagine if you're thinking, I've lost a pair of socks, I mean, very much happened to the best of us. The idea of trying to sneak a message in would like surely put you over the edge. That's how controlled these spaces were. But I'm so glad you chose this bag because I was, and I got this thanks to the Galway City Museum and an incredible woman there who had a photograph for me when I heard that they had it. Because when we talk and think about the laundries, we're thinking about what happened inside and the women and the nuns. And it's all easy then because we've got good guys and bad guys and victims and offenders. And, and we also, we speak

• 35:21Speaker 00

  about the laundries now so much in the terms of human rights abuse, I was illegal trafficking. All of that is right. But what I think that sort of allows us to sidestep is that the idea, we know that they're wrong now, we condemn it now. For a very long time, not only did people think they were right, they thought they were ordinary. And I just thought that bag for me really got at that.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, the mundanity of it is shocking now to look at.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's just, you can now envisage it landing on Mary's door down the road, who's just got her blouses done, or Tim, who's just got whatever.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  It allows you to map that complicity, doesn't it, across society, that these parcels are going out to whoever's had their laundry done. That it really is across, across the board and ordinary in terms of its place in that world.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  And it really does make me very suspect of the idea. No, I'm not suspect of the idea of charity. But when people like.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  I hate charity.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's too much of it, you know. But when people have this sense of mission and I'm doing good, and I'm doing good for these people, whoever they are. And you think, well, have you asked these people? What would they like? And in some ways, like such was the sense of people when they've got those in, if they did think about them, they thought about it as a kind of charity. The nuns are doing good by these women. It's salvation. They've fallen. And we don't really need to know what they've done. If they went there, then they deserve it. You know, there's no smoke without fire. And they've clearly sinned or have erred on the side of sinning. And the nuns are wonderful. You know, and people would have believed that, you know. And so there's something just about how you could

• 36:54Speaker 00

  think, yeah, that's fine. That's all normal. That's right. These are the good guys, you know?

• 37:00Speaker 01

  You talk about these, these women that we don't need to know anything about in the context of the time. And for me, one of the people that really sticks with me, and this is why, again, your book is so brilliant, is because you start to bring these women back to the forefront. They start to assemble themselves before you, like a cast of women that we should always have been paying attention to. And for me, Eileen is one of those people that really kind of pulls at the heartstrings, particularly that, just the Legion of, I actually saw an ad for a current day Legion of Mary shortly after I read your book. And I was like, take that down. Anyway, the other person though, that I want you to tell us a little bit more about is Bridget, because she lives a lot of her life over the course of the laundry. So can you tell us a little bit about her, how she gets in there and what her life is like?

• 37:45Speaker 00

  Well, Bridget was the person I was, the child I was alluding to earlier, who was 12 years old, whose priest come and convinced her grandmother to bring to the Magdalen Laundry. And there are incidents where family members would have sent their, you know, wild and giddy daughters. And giddiness is a problem that comes up, you know, a lot of the girls are a bit giddy and this will put manners on them. A short, sharp shock. Sometimes the parents or family members come and pick them up after a day, a couple of days or a week or whatever. But no one comes to pick up Bridget. And she's there for such a long time. And she said initially, when she arrived, she would go into the toilet

• 38:25Speaker 00

  and at night, and the sash window would be open and she could hear a dog barking. And it reminded her of the dog at home. So she would go to the toilet at night. Not all the dorms had an associated toilet. You would just use a pan or something. But, and she must have mentioned it to someone because then one night she went in and the window had been nailed shut.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that's just like, just this, just a touch of cruelty. Like that's how much they were really cut off from the outside world. Bridget ended up staying there until she's in her late 30s.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  From the age of 12?

• 39:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. When it was decided that maybe now is the time that she could probably leave. And she is given a job working for a priest. And, you know, she, her mother, her own mother then comes to pick her up. And this, her own mother, anyway, comes, picks her, drops her at the priest. Bridget said, you know, he was a bit too haughty for me. But I've spoken to people who knew Bridget and said, you know, he was just a bit of work, like he was not nice or pleasant. And then she was there for, with him for a couple of years. And then a woman in her early 40s, she decides, like, this is not the place for me. And she returns to the Magdalen Laundry that she'd been in. And then she leaves again.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  And she gets her own house. But then she said, when people found out that she'd been in St Mary's, which was the local Magdalen asylum, they would cross the road to avoid her, or they would make comments, you know, because she was a fallen woman. And that was the thing in the 1960s, you know, because they were, this is also another way how I came into this, was I was writing about the prisons. And they were saying, we don't even have a women's prison. And when people go on remand, we will send them to one of the Magdalen laundries. Aren't we great? You're right, they're basically like, you know, proto abolitionists, fantastic. And then one person who I think Nora Connolly O'Brien, and I think was James Connolly's daughter, stood up, she was a senator and said, I would advise any girl coming before me to go to the prison. Do not go to the Magdalen laundry.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  It was, if anyone finds out you've been there, it will be a stain on your reputation, from which you will never recover. And it's like the first time, sort of, in official realms of Ireland, in the chambers of parliament, in particular, someone says the thing that everyone knows, but no one will admit. And so that's what Bridget found when she left again. So she returned again. Another thing I should say about Bridget is she was not Bridget when she was there. Her name was Peter. She'd always been known as Peter. She returns again. After Vatican II, which is when the church liberalised in the 1960s, they decided, we might get rid of these pseudonyms, and that you can have your own name back. You can be Bridget again. But then she left,

• 41:09Speaker 00

  returned again, left, returned again. But she said, this was my family. This was the only place that I knew. Then that laundry was officially closed. And that is when the story of the Magdalen laundry ends. Oh, this has all went its way to a conclusion. But the laundry was bought by a local businessman. And he paid all his staff, but kept on some of these elderly people like Bridget, and paid them a wage. But it's like, where else are they going to go? This has been their whole life. And he and Bridget became very good friends. And she said, he was very good to us. But, you know, that lawn, it kept going on. And she then moved in with the nuns. And they would

• 41:50Speaker 00

  have built these kind of convalescent homes in around the 90s, early 2000s, like little rows of bungalows, like old folks' homes, like sheltered accommodation or whatever. And so she lived in there. And I have been trying to figure out, you know, well, what her transcript sort of just ends? Like, she's incredibly eloquent, and also seems to have a very funny sense of humour, you know, and there's one bit where she tells a story, just after Vatican II, the nuns were, it's a point, the nuns were also closed up in this. They are also fully cloistered in this convent world. And one is the nuns' causation to Limerick City, and on an errand, all by herself, you know,

• 42:31Speaker 00

  and she'd promised the children, women, women and girls, that she would read them a bedtime story. So just, I guess you can't tell how infantilised this space is. But when I get back this evening before bedtime, we will have a story. She gets in and says, I'm shook. I can't, I can't. I've seen something out in town, and I can't even believe it. I have to take to my bed. And Bridget said, well, what had you seen? And she said, I saw a woman wearing trousers. So that's just how absolutely closed in and divorced they were. So Bridget tells all, you know, and so in terms of Bridget is incredibly tragic, but she also, you know, I'm trying, as you say, I'm trying to restore something of someone's full humanity. And, and so I was trying to figure out what had happened with Bridget. And then, you know, I've been speaking to different people,

• 43:15Speaker 00

  and they said, oh, don't you, don't you realise, Bridget, Bridget died there. She, oh, I don't think they said it like that. Said like, she didn't, she didn't leave. And she had met the government, when the government were doing their commission in 2012, and they went to meet women, had the residents of the Magdalen laundries. They met Bridget. They met Bridget.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Still there.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  And they are still there. And they asked her, have you ever been beaten? No. Have you ever been abused? No. And afterwards, she said, I, I answered those questions wrong. I should have said, no, those things didn't happen to us. But they made us silent. They suffocated us. They psychologically tortured us. But that's not what they asked. And these women have lived in silent isolation for decades. And that's, and now they're assembled into a focus group beside Martin MacLeish, who was also the president's husband. And then they're asked, tell us the story of your life. And yet, when that commission wrote its report, they said, you know, Magdalen laundries ended in 1996. And yet they had met Bridget. They had met Bridget in 2012. And they could see

• 44:23Speaker 00

  that she was still there, and that she was going to die there, which she did. And I read her obituary notice. But somehow, that element of Bridget's life just made me so incredibly, like, I really, I, you know, this, these are always, as you two are such pros of looking at, these are dark histories, and you're sort of carrying that. But somehow, seeing that, we had not acknowledged the fact that these laundries did not properly end in 1996, that there were still women there. And so women who died there, and they were not pregnant outside of marriage, they were literally 12, they were children, and they were giddy, and naughty, and fun. And we just could not tolerate that if they were not from a respectable background. And as you said earlier, we just disappeared them. And now we just, how do you face that? I don't think we know how to face that

• 45:07Speaker 00

  yet. And that's why Bridget's story, for me, was the one that I wanted to hold up so much in the book as well. Because if we want to confront this history, then we will accept the sad, kind of ambivalent, ambiguous end of the laundries that Bridget's story tells us, and also the strange, inexplicable route in that these women and girls found into the laundries.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a, there's a mundane tragedy to it. And that's not to take from the gravity of the tragedy, but it's the mundanity that allows that to just seep into 2012 without people nearly noticing. We're going to take another break. But when we come back, we're going to look at the other set of women that Louise has been referring to in this history, and that is the nuns.

• 45:50Speaker 04

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• 46:29Speaker 05

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• 46:50Speaker 03

  So Louise, you talked about the nuns also being cloistered in this space, that this is a closed community. I think it's, it's tempting and possibly correct to read them as the villains in some way, at least in terms of that institutionalisation, and the punishments, maybe not physical, but certainly psychological, they're meeting out on the people, the women that are in their care. Do you see them as villains? How, how did you approach their side of things, their experiences, and their role in this when you're writing the book?

• 47:23Speaker 00

  So initially, I'd been super keen to get to speak to the nuns. And I felt like I had pretty much got a good record of convincing people to speak to me. I'm short, and I'm blonde, and I'm smiley. And so I said, I'll convince them. And also because, and it's in the conclusion of the book, my mother had grown up in the gardener's cottage of a closed Carmelite convent. So I spent my whole life around cloistered nuns. And I could see them tiny, small, I mean, shrunken women, living literally behind, like, we would go visit them, behind a grill. So I felt like I was, I mean, the word sympathetic is dangerous here, but I was, no, that's, that's my interest. I'm not, I don't believe, I, good and evil, no, no history is good and evil, black

• 48:07Speaker 00

  and white. There was a nun, to me, there was an untold story here, and surely that was the nuns. So I wrote these letters. I told them about my mother. I said, I'd grown up also at this Carmelite convent. I really wanted to hear it their way. And I, I mean, that genuinely.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  I really, and we had not heard from them. And, you know, if we're interested in women's history in Ireland, well, the nuns are an important part of that. And we never talk about them as women. We always talk about them as nuns. And I either got stonewalled, or had a nice car, a nice, I mean, I had a correspondence with one order, but they said, absolutely not, we're not going to speak to anyone. So then I thought, well, I'm going to go to the archives. So I went to the Catholic Archives, the Catholic Diocese in Archives in Dublin. And I spoke to the archivist there, said, listen, I'm writing about Magdalen laundries, but I'm going to look at the stuff to do with the laundries. But what I want first is just everything from those orders of nuns. I just want to understand what they were thinking about, what they were writing about when they wrote letters to the bishop, what were their concerns, what were they up to? And she said, we've had so

• 49:04Speaker 00

  many people in here do Magdalen laundry stuff now, it's very in vogue. But no one's ever asked to just read about the orders. So I knew then that I was definitely right, that there was a gap there. And I found letters where they were writing about, you know, the value of what their institutions were doing. Because the only women who don't re-offend or fall again are the ones who are in the Magdalen laundries, which is because they're literally not, like, I'd also be very good if you wrap me up in bubble wrap and put me in a box as well, you know. And, but I also found, I guess, in their letters and in their archives, you know, things where they really believed that they were saving, like, that's a fundamental here. Like, we write this off because we can't understand that their whole sense of personhood, of subjectivity, like,

• 49:49Speaker 00

  they believe in a life that goes on forever. This is the waiting room, this mortal coil, this is the waiting room for the real thing that's going to happen in the kingdom of heaven. But what you do here will secure that. And if you really believe people have souls that live forever, that permits all sorts of kind of dreadful behaviour. Like, lots of people, Irish people, I had members of my family who had been in the nuns and left, and I heard, heard, sort of whispers about that. And I I sort of, you know, I understood that entering the nuns was and entering the convent was really difficult. So, yeah, so I I went about trying to find memoirs, archival footage,

• 50:30Speaker 00

  trying to find out what happened to the nuns as well. And, you know, in one part of the book, I open with one of these recruitment drives. So of like a nun who arrived into a classroom. These girls are fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Some of them might be the kind of girl who think, oh, I don't want to be like my mom. I don't just be at home. I don't want to be a spinster. And what's the other type of Irish woman? Fallen. They have aspirations. But there's also nowhere in Ireland where a woman like that could really get a job. If you married, you if you worked in the civil service, but also lots of private industries, you had to leave your job. It was called the marriage bar. So suddenly you have a nun who's arriving in her incredible bright white robes. She's come from the missions, you know, some far off lands doing kind of impossibly

• 51:13Speaker 00

  exotic work, working in tropical medicine. They're not just teachers, they're setting up schools, they're not just nurses, they're setting up hospitals. And so so many, and they was all girls, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, were convinced, give up your studies, this is your destination. And then they would enter the convent, their hair would be cut, their name would be taken. They weren't allowed read for a long period of time, then they weren't allowed contact their family. So they've sort of been sold this idea that they're going to be the great and the good. And that is also why so many women would have left the convent. And if they did, they would have been another kind of fallen woman. They would have really been pilloried in their own community as well, like for the shame they would have brought on their family by leaving the convent. And there's some really interesting research going on around that at

• 51:55Speaker 00

  the moment with women who left, left the convent. So I wanted to show that their own journey into the nuns, it wasn't they started out going, I really hate that kind of woman. I'm going to go there and do all these villainous things, that they were sort of sold this idea of brilliance. And then one nun in her own sort of reflective essay who also left the convent, she said, you know, I could see what was happening, that the great ones were being sent off in the mission. They've got to be secondary school teachers, but the ones who were probably a little more lackluster, not so into, not so filled with the sort of Catholic decorum of mission, they were the ones who were sent to the industrial schools. They were the ones who were sent to the Magdalen laundries. The one woman, and there is some footage of her being interviewed,

• 52:38Speaker 00

  who had left the convent, said that she wanted to go to a Magdalen laundry because these are surely the most sort of fallen souls of all. And if you really wanted to show what a good committed nun you were, if you're really interested in salvation, you should go to the very bottom. And that meant the Magdalen laundry. And she said, when she arrived in, she just said, I can try to think of exactly her words, and she's incredible voice. And she said, what I began to see was that the nuns there, who had been there a long time, either hid away or did nothing. But after being there, they were changed. And she, not only she said, I have to get out of this convent, I have to get out of this Magdalen laundry, but she said, I can't even be a nun anymore.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  So I guess the point is that they also went, I think, on this journey. And I just think, I see, I've seen some reviews of the book, my book, saying, oh, she says how evil the nuns were. I was like, I'm sure if anything, I've shown that the language of evil is kind of a pro- a problem if we begin to really institutionalize it. These are also women in a difficult time, in a strict time for womanhood. And I think it's so interesting to seeing, you know, fallen woman, risen woman, both here, essentially cloistered outside of society in these institutions. It's a kind of perfect epitome of like Ar- Ireland's kind of moral value. The best kind of woman will be disappeared, and the worst kind of woman will be disappeared as well.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  And they're all kind of magnetized around this idea of the Virgin Mary and the ultimate kind of purity and the ultimate ideal of womanhood.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Oh, there's an incredible bit from the Rosary magazine, it's doing incredible circulation in Ireland.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Rosary magazine.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  And they, if anyone would like to fund me to just read all of these magazines, nonstop for several years, Sacred Heart, also a great one, Our Ecclesiastical Record, if anyone wants to know. And but in the Rosary, they sort of marvel at one of the Magdalen laundries, and they say, here you have Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, side by side, the, what's it, the vile weed and the pure rose, face to face. You know, it's like a real biblical thing of good and evil.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  It was also your book, though, that highlighted to me why, I've said this on the podcast before, why Mary is my favorite, one of the Holy Avengers, because we have this like seep through down

• 54:56Speaker 00

  No silent women, is that it?

• 54:58Speaker 01

  No, no, I love, I love a sassy bird. But she, she, like this, this, this iconic, powerful woman, although that's not what was trickling down to society, but certainly we had this idea. I mean, I have.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  With Mary Magdalene or the Virgin.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  No, with the Virgin Mary.

• 55:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  I was obsessed with her as a child. I was like, where the hell do they get that girl? Gay boy, growing up in Royal Ireland, that's where I got it. But it's just interesting to see what our generation inherited of this. And there is an inheritance, you know, like, we feel like we've moved away from this an awful lot now. But actually, there are still lingering things, which brings us to kind of the the close of our conversation, Louise. And and I want to talk about the end, or I want you to talk about the end, of these laundries, because there are ends, many different types of endings. Talk us through some of them and how we get to where we are now.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  I guess it's, it was, you know, when I was talking about the regime earlier, and one of the things I should have said about ends and how people left on an individual level, the thing that was most torturous about a Magdalen laundry is that you did not know when you were leaving. And for many women, they thought they were going to die there. And there was a real chance that they would die there and be buried in an unmarked or mass grave. That, so were you beaten? No. Were you held where you think you were going to die? Yes. And that is what happened to so many women. So on an individual end, that is what happened. On an institutional end, they began to sell the laundries or close them, really from the ends of the sixties, seventies. So it's not quite, and it ends in nineteen ninety six. And by nineteen ninety six, there's Shaw Mac Dermot Street left, you know, people in

• 56:33Speaker 00

  the centre of Dublin. And, you know, we say that that's when the last Magdalen laundry closed, and the anniversary of that is coming up. And I have given public talks, I've been on radio before, I have used that line, like you, you say, and you describe the Magdalen laundries, the hair cutting, the silence, the name changing, the death. And then you say, when do you think the system ended? Nineteen ninety six. And it's an incredible feeling to possess and hold an audience attention like that, because you've won the argument then. It all went on too long, it all went on too late, it was all too much. But I sort of say that, and I mention that in the book as well, almost to admit my own complicity of sort of forwarding this idea that they ended. You know, they didn't, you

• 57:16Speaker 00

  know, you know, and there was still, there was forty women still in that laundry, doing what the nuns called industrial therapy. So they were just folding pillowcases and folding for.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Industrial therapy.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. So they had an outside workforce, but they would get stuff coming from Mount Joy, the main prison down the road, they would just fold a few little bits. And then, so then the laundry closes. Where did those women go? There are still women all over the country in these institutions. I went to, because I wanted, there's something, and you'll know this yourselves, about physically being in the space you're riding about. And one of the opening stories is the book starts in industrial school with a girl called Carmel, who would walk from her industrial school, which also had a Magdalen laundry beside it, down to the church. So I thought, I'm going to go there, I'm going to do that walk. I felt that was really important. And when I got back to the car and it really started raining, I was like, there's a mass grave for the Magdalen laundry across the road

• 58:11Speaker 00

  in the graveyard. And I knew they'd put a headstone up, a group of activists had put the headstone up with names and dates on it, which they'd really fought for. And that's another thing we'll maybe talk about, like how much survivors made to fight for acknowledgement. Anyway, I finally found the gravestone. Like, I remember wearing jeans, the jeans were stuck to me. Oh, my God, I was, I was, I'd absolutely lashed. And I was just looking at the names and the dates. And I had just really wanted to pay my respects. And then one of the survivors, one of the women whose name is on the headstone, had died something like thirty years after that laundry had closed. So she'd been inside there making little religious trinkets and doing knitting or whatever. So it didn't end for these women. It ended for us and our historical memory and how we like to tell this story. And so it's interesting, then

• 58:55Speaker 00

  they close in nineteen ninety six. There was an interview in the Irish Times with Sister Lucy, who was the head of the last Magdalene laundry in Sean McDermott Street, meant she was the head of the last Magdalene laundry in the world, as far as I'm aware. Nothing, nothing, nothing. 1998, Channel 4 airs a documentary called Sex and a Cold Climate. That was a huge response to that. And also, there's a bit of suspicion and twitchiness about the British saying something about the Irish, you know. Then that is made into a film by Peter Mullen called The Magdalene Sisters. That was huge as well. That was huge. It ran for months and months and months in the cinema.

• 59:35Speaker 03

  As a non-Irish person, that was my route into this history.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  And I think, you know, it's interesting, I don't think there's any confusion there about the mother and baby home in his film, you know, like he, because he'd spoken to women. And he got accused a lot, that that was a bit, it was a bit much, a bit of an exaggeration, wasn't that bad. Then they disappear again off the radar. So they've sort of, they've come into the consciousness once, then twice, then they disappear again. Then in around the mid 2000s, when Ireland began to deal with its industrial schools, women went and said, well, I was in industrial school, and then when I was 14, I was sent to this other kind of industrial place where I washed and I scrubbed and I spun. You know, I wasn't paid and I wasn't let to leave and I was my prey all day long and whatever. And the government commission said, no, that's nothing to do with us. It's a private enterprise,

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  Magdalene Laundry. So there apparently had been some great separation of church and state the rest of us hadn't been aware of. So they sort of wiped their hands of them and said, that's church problems, nothing to do with the government. Not government paid contracts, the government paid money to the laundries to keep certain kinds of women. Government was completely complicit in it. But they said, no, no, no, nothing for us. So then different groups of survivors began to come forward, form groups and began to campaign. And so that's when the Magdalene Laundries really began again to enter the collective consciousness. So from about 2009, and then in 2013, you have this Macalise report that says, a bit, they weren't, you know, they were hard, maybe they were insulted a bit, they were put down, is how they put it, they were put down harsh language. Maybe

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  the women weren't sure that they could leave, but you know, it was mostly fine. And that reported, the most, I cannot overstate how enormous the damages that that report did, because it downplayed everything that had happened in the institutions. And once you get through 900 and something pages of drudgery of legislation and contracts and whatever, you finally get to a section of that report that includes the women's voices. Like they have this walk on part in the report that includes, that is about the abuse that they suffered. And then that sort of goes quiet again. It's all like, you know, and now it's sort of dealt with. And it's funny, because when I started in the project, every time I went home to Ireland and was chatting to people, people kept saying to me, almost

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  like, oh, God love you, but like, you're a bit late, aren't you? Like, it's done. It's done. Like, and the word, the term I kept hearing again and again from people was, like, we have our laundry fatigue, laundry fatigue. Like, they got us. And I think essentially had moved on. And I just thought this was kind of amazing, because we don't even have like a history book of this, like, that puts, lays out the full nature of the institutions from beginning to dubious end. And so it's interesting that as much, like, there's a sense that it's all over historically and it's behind us. And so in some ways, part of the book was also thinking like, what, what does justice look like for these women?

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  Well, they were erased at the time. They were erased from themselves. They were erased from the social landscape. And they've sort of been erased now, in the way we keep saying that they're mother and baby homes. And I've, I've had real conflict in myself about like not being, you know, I'm not out on the picket lines of this. I'm not like, but I, I think writing, history writing is also a form of justice. It's about saying, look at, look at what we have ignored. Look at what we have sidelined. And trying to just say, remembering is also a form of justice. And that for the women who are there who are still alive, it will never end, it will always be with them. And one of the women says that, you know, at the very end, she wanted to go, gotta get emotional now. She wanted to go

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  into history books, that was her idea of justice. Yes, she got reparation money. Yes, there's going to be a museum. But that what happened to her will be understood and not forgotten. That, it means, and in some ways, it should never end, we should never forget.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Do you know what? It feels like there's not much more to say on that. I think that's a good place to end. And, and just to say, I think you have achieved that with your book. If you haven't read The Fallen, then you need to go out and get a copy. It honestly moved me so much. You will be angry, as you're probably picking up from me on certain points of this. But Louise approaches this with such nuance and intelligence and sympathy and empathy and all of the things that make incredible history, that you can't help but meet these women face to face. And it does feel like a tragedy that Irish society was denied them for as long as it was. And thank you for listening to Watching After Dark,

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  wherever you're, you're meeting us today on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. As I say, go and get Louise's book and thank you so much for listening.