A job half-done again

It is hard to know where to start.
The report on the Magdalene Laundries is 1,000 pages long. Put together by a committee of officials from five departments of the civil service, it was delivered last week by the Chairman, Dr. Martin McAleese – husband of former President Mary McAleese and himself a former Senator.

It is a budget job, which cost just over e11,000 to produce. The problem is that it feels like it. Seeming to take everyone’s evidence at face value, it has none of the forensic power of a determined judicial inquiry.
The report is useful in one respect at least. In the past, the State has attempted to convince us that it had no involvement in the incarceration of the women in the Magdalene Laundries. This preposterous claim was made by the then Minister for Education Batt O’Keefe of Fianna Fáil as late as 2009, when he insisted that the laundries were privately owned and operated establishments, which did not come within the responsibility of the State. The Minister also stated that the laundries were not subject to State regulation or supervision. He went on to refer insultingly to the women who had been held in the laundries as ‘former employees’. It was as if he was unaware that (a) the women were not, in general, there by choice; (b) that, therefore, they were not free to leave; and (c) that they were not paid for their labour.
Whatever his motives in making these claims, the report exposes the extent of State involvement in the laundries. One in twelve of the Magdalene inmates came from the so called Justice system on foot of convictions of one kind or another. These women were at least told how long they would be detained in the laundries. Those referred from non-State agencies and industrial schools were not afforded that courtesy. In total, over 25% of the inmates were referred by one arm or another of the State apparatus.
Over the years, politicians from all of the main parties failed in their duty of care to vulnerable Irish women. But the fact is that, far more than anyone on the Government benches today, Fianna Fáil were directly complicit in the cover-up of what went on in all of the appalling religious-run institutions that were sponsored or utilised by the State. They were the dominant political force in the Republic for as long as the State has been in existence. Their policies created the conditions in which the laundries were used as a dumping ground. They colluded with the authoritarian bullies of the hierarchy in suppressing anything that might have seemed like a gesture towards sexual freedom. In power, Fine Gael might not have behaved any differently. But as a party, from the formative years of the State until relatively recently, Fianna Fáil bowed and scraped and genuflected before the altar of Church dominance, in education, in hospitals, in planning, in public administration and in broadcasting – indeed in every area of influence or importance in Irish life.
They would be wise not to risk climbing up onto any moral high ground during the debate.

The publication of the report should have been a day of vindication for the victims of what in truth was an Irish gulag. Approximately 1,000 of these women are still alive. Having been excluded from the terms of reference of the Residential Institutions Redress Board, set up in 2002, to compensate the victims of abuse in Irish institutions, they have been forced to campaign for over 10 years to have the appalling treatment to which they were widely subjected ventilated properly.
As a result, expectation was high among the women and the support groups that have campaigned alongside them, Justice for Magdalenes and Magdalene Survivors Together. They knew that the Taoiseach Enda Kenny would be asked about the report in the Dáil on Tuesday. In the event, they were deeply upset by what he had to say.
A money-saving attitude seems to have underpinned the State’s approach to hte entire business. In which light, perhaps the Fine Gael leader had been advised not to make a formal apology because of the potential implications in terms of future compensation claims. But that doesn’t explain the extent to which he seemed to equivocate and get lost as he spoke. The clip has been replayed many times on TV and on radio since. It doesn’t get any better with repeated exposure. To date, the media has focussed primarily on the fact that – despite copious use of the word ‘sorry’ – Enda Kenny did not issue a meaningful apology on behalf of the State to the Magdalene women. But in truth that was not the worst of it.
What can have been going on in his mind when he started to make belittling comparisons between the Magdalene women and those women (and their children) whose lives were destroyed by medically-approved use of the drug thalidomide during pregnancy? And how could he have lapsed into the language of the religious institutions who had in many instances mistreated the women badly, by using the work ‘penitents’ to refer to them.
The stereotype of the “fallen woman” is still with us...

Unfortunately, it is also there in the report itself. Dr. McAleese makes the point in his introduction that: “The women who were admitted to and worked in the Magdalene laundries, whether for short or long periods of time since the foundation of the State have for too long felt the social stigma of what was sometimes cruelly called the ‘fallen woman’. This is a wholly inaccurate characterisation of them, hurtful to them and their families, that is not borne out by the facts.”
It is as if he believes that the real so called ‘fallen women’ weren’t entitled to expect anything else – but that the rest of the women who ended up in the laundries should not have been tarred with the same brush. The fact is that unmarried mothers and prostitutes are as entitled to an apology for mistreatment at the hands of the State, and the nuns who ran the laundries, as anyone else.

You have to ask is the report adequate at all? The committee spoke to only 118 women. It is a small sample out of 10,012 and probably not representative, as Dr. McAleese himself acknowledges, especially since 58 are still in the care of the nuns and would therefore be unlikely to be critical of their hosts. The terms of reference of the inquiry were limited by the Government to 10 institutions. Why? Listening to interviews with survivors of the Magdalene laundries, there is significant disagreement with the picture of their activities, painted by the nuns and largely accepted by the report. Most notably, the Religious Sisters of Charity, who ran the institution in Stanhope Street claim that it was not a laundry but a ‘training school’. Survivors disagree vehemently. As for the conclusion that the laundries did not make money, surely that misses the point that if the nuns were cleaning for other Church-run institutions, whether schools, hospitals or parish houses, and the girls were also sewing and embroidering the vestments for use by priests and not being paid, then that represents an economic value to those institutions, even if it didn’t go into any ledger kept by the nuns.
In short, far from bringing closure for the women, the McAleese Report feels like half the story.
This much I do know: the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland were the product of a horrible, patriarchal, religiously driven worldview that was utterly paranoid about sex. Internalising the shame and stigma that was attached to conceiving a child outside marriage, Irish people in general colluded in this worldview.
But this became the dominant ethos here primarily because of the pervasive, noxious influence that the Catholic Church exerted on Irish society in relation to sexuality. And it is one of the greatest achievements of the modern era that the vice-like stranglehold exerted by the Church and its proselytisers in this regard has been undone.
The survivors of the Magdalene Laundries may still be waiting for justice. But objectively, there is one thing in which we can find comfort. It cannot and will not happen, ever again.