Magdalene Laundries: Ireland's Dark Secret

After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal

This episode of 'After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal' explores the dark history of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries—institutional facilities run by Catholic nuns where

Key takeaways

• Magdalene Laundries were not mother and baby homes; they housed women and girls who were perceived as morally deviant, regardless of pregnancy status.
• Many inmates were sent without being told why, often due to minor social behaviors like going out late or having a boyfriend.

Main topics

• History of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland
• Misconceptions about their purpose (vs. mother and baby homes)

Notable quotes

I was guilty of nothing but loving life.

Conclusion

The episode underscores that the Magdalene Laundries represent a profound historical injustice, where women

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) Hello, After Dark listeners. It is I, Anthony Delaney, one of your co-hosts from, of course, After Dark. Now, listen, we have some good news. We have been shortlisted for the top 20 in the Listener's Choice Award category for this year's British Podcast Awards. Now, we made the top, I think it was five last year. So we are greedy historians and we want to make that top five again. This year, things are slightly different, though. You can only vote for us in this long list in the Spotify app. and you'll find a link in this week's episode that'll take you to vote for us. As a matter of fact, you can vote for us three times. So if you feel so inclined, please do that. We want to make that top five. We're going to smash it this year. I think we're going to take it, he said with absolutely no confidence. But lend us your vote and we'll see how well we get on. Heading for the top five. I know we can do it. Speaker 2 (1:01) The Magdalene 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. Bridget 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. Bridget 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 Magdalene laundries? Speaker 3 (2:07) Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddy. And I'm Anthony. And in this episode, we're going to be discussing the dark history of the Magdalene laundries that existed through our island 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. Speaker 2 (2:35) To guide us through this history, we have the one and only doctor, in fact, Louise Brangham. I read this book a few months ago now and 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 Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence. Louise, welcome to After Dark. Speaker 4 (3:07) Hi, thanks for having me. Speaker 2 (3:08) 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 Magdalene Laundry is. Don't worry, we'll get into that. But even in Ireland. Speaker 2 (3:28) I, as a historian, went into thinking that a Magdalene 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 Magdalene laundry not? Speaker 4 (3:53) 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 categorized 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 will 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 Magdalene laundry was something to do with this sort of clandestine scheme, the subterfuge system of illegitimate pregnancy. But what I came to realise very quickly was the Magdalene laundries were something else entirely. And when I was starting to write the book, I was dealing with this huge, several thousand pages of Magdalene laundry survivor testimony. And every time I was reading, I kept writing my notes. Was not pregnant. Speaker 3 (4:56) Was Speaker 4 (4:57) 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 Magdalene 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 Magdalene laundries. And he said to me, oh, you don't need to go all about the houses, about what they're just say what they are. You can't. 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. Speaker 3 (5:38) So Speaker 4 (5:39) Louise, in Speaker 3 (5:39) broad terms then, and we will get into the nuance of this, and as you say, it's a really kind of woolly and slightly blurred subject really, in terms of the requirements for entry or the sort of circumstances in which women would be coming into the Magdalene laundries. What were those reasons? Are they Speaker 4 (5:59) myriad and complex? 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? Yeah, because the ideal Catholic image of a woman. was herself, the Virgin Mary, who, you know, and when you think about the Virgin Mary in the Bible, she has no classic lines. She does nothing. She tends to her. She has Speaker 2 (6:28) no classic lines. Can we just sum Mary's involvement in the Bible up by that? 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. Speaker 4 (6:40) The next one will probably be where you take, commit yourself to that. Speaker 2 (6:43) But that's amazing. Speaker 4 (6:45) And so it was for girls who were considered. too lively. You know, in the survivor testimony, one woman who was sent to a Magdalene 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 were being arraigned for something, but this whole air of mystery hung over it. So it would be that their father would bring them and say, hop on 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 on 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 in some of these. but they arrive at this real sense of bewilderment. And so they spend days and weeks trying to figure out what they've done, sometimes lifetimes. And this one woman, when she was recalling being sent to the Magdalene 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. Speaker 3 (7:44) They Speaker 4 (7:44) liked going out. Sometimes she stayed out a bit late. Who knows what could have been happening? You know, so that's it. There's kind of very things that we think are very average now. One woman in the book, well, woman now, or was a woman, a girl, when she was 12, she'd been born outside of marriage. And that's important. We keep thinking of the Magdalene laundries as mother and baby homes. But in fact, it's often a place where the illegitimate Speaker 3 (8:07) daughters Speaker 4 (8:08) 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. Her... grandmother was raising her. She gets to the age of 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 Magdalene Laundry that was in Limerick City. Another girl in the book, she'd been raised in an industrial school. And really, rather than the relationship between being between Magdalene Laundries and with her baby homes, it's really between industrial schools. And Magdalene 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 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 you're 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. 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 Magdalene Laundry. But again, she was never told where she's going. And when she arrived, one of the things about the Magdalene 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. 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 had 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, basically she thought it was an old folks home. And she initially thought she'd been Speaker 3 (10:24) there to help these women. 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 what is remarkable is that these women of all different ages and contexts are just being removed from their life. 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. 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. 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, so 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, but actually that it's just for the convenience of a sort of patriarchal society outside that. And these women themselves. I just don't really understand what the issue is. It's remarkable, really. I've said before, I think Speaker 4 (11:29) a way to think about them is to think about them as Ireland's disappeared. Speaker 2 (11:34) They've Speaker 4 (11:34) been disavowed. And, you know, one of the ways I came into this topic, there are 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, we 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. Speaker 1 (12:02) Wow. Speaker 3 (12:03) And Speaker 4 (12:03) I just remember thinking. And Speaker 2 (12:05) that was Speaker 4 (12:05) accepted and normal. Yeah, and then she just, I can see her. She turned her back and walked off back into the kitchen. I was Speaker 2 (12:09) like, Speaker 4 (12:09) 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 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 a Magdalene Laundry, you know, what's one of the Ten Commandments is they shall not kill. So 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 all. Well, they're actually behind closed walls and their family aren't speaking about them and they have no way to communicate to anyone. Speaker 2 (12:55) One of the things as an Irish person reading your book. And so 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 history is 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 product of complicity around this. But just so people outside of Ireland might have a little bit of context about this time in Ireland, Louise, give us the time span that we're talking about where the laundries are most prevalent and how religious is this society? Speaker 4 (13:48) OK, so the laundries span from the 18th century up until 1996. Speaker 4 (13:56) 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 1931, Ireland's independent. And then bang, church and state. Speaker 1 (14:14) That Speaker 4 (14:14) like hand in glove oppressive atmosphere. But actually what I found was I kept thinking, well, what does that actually mean? So how do 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. There was new fashions. 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. Speaker 2 (14:40) You Speaker 4 (14:40) 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 on the cusp of a famine. We're about to go into 1847 again, which, you know, is like Black 47, 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 were centrist, right, conservative, uninspiring. And so people are looking for answers in that time. And the church had always existed and always exerted