In God's Name

Fiachra Gibbons, The Guardian, 7 February 2003

Peter Mullan's dramatisation of the horrific Magdalene laundries scandal outraged the Vatican. But women who were abused by the system say it does not go far enough. By Fiachra Gibbons

One question keeps cropping up when you talk to the women who were incarcerated by their families and their priests in Ireland's notorious Magdalene laundries: "What God did we offend?" It's a question with no answer. Impressive as it is, Peter Mullan's film The Magdalene Sisters, on which the Vatican called down damnation after it won best film at the Venice film festival, can't answer it either.

Critics are understandably resistant to strong, mind-altering doses of moral outrage. Amid their acknowledgement of the film's obvious merits, it's easy to divine a suspicion that this is a typical piece of rabble-rousing polemic from a Glasgow hot-head with scores to settle with his own childhood Catholicism.

Mary-Jo McDonagh takes a different view, as do the other women who served time in the institutions run by orders like the Good Shepherd Sisters or the Sisters of Charity. "It was worse in the Magdalenes, much worse than what you see. I don't like to say it, but the film is soft on the nuns," says McDonagh, who spent five years in one in Galway after being molested by a neighbour. She was spirited away early one morning by a priest and told she had "brought shame on her family". McDonagh eventually escaped to England after she was farmed out as a servant to a cousin of one of the "holy nuns", an expression she still uses without a hint of irony. Every other "Magdalene" I've talked to says the same: the reality was more brutal.

Yet when you see the film, you wonder how this was possible - how could a system so patently twisted and oppressive have survived until 1996, when the last Magdalene covent in Waterford finally closed? But it did. And no one, not until pretty near the end, said anything. Not even the women themselves, who were too broken, ashamed or afraid to speak out.

Thirty thousand in all were locked away in these penal establishments, some for decades, to scrub away the sin of being poor, pregnant, unwanted or for simply being an embarrassment to their families and communities. A few, who had spent their childhoods in orphanages run by the nuns, were put away for being too beautiful, and therefore in the twisted logic of the sisters, too "in danger of sin".

There were no trials, no inquiries, no nothing. The presumption that you were a sexual being was enough to condemn you. So the victims of abuse were guilty too, and, by bizarre extension, those in danger of corruption by their fathers, brothers, cousins, or just men in general also had to be saved from sin.

Once you were placed on the Register of Penitents your identity was taken away, your name was changed, and you were not allowed to talk to any of the other Magdalene women. "You were broken down and utterly at their mercy," says Dr Frances Finnegan, author of the definitive account of the Magdalene asylums in Ireland, Do Penance or Perish. "They decided how long you would spend in the convent - a year or your life."

She tells a story of this process of dehumanisation: "I met a woman who had been brought up in an orphanage and then later stuck into the laundry. One day she was taken into the parlour of the convent and told by a nun that her mother was dead. It turned out that she had worked alongside her mother for more than 20 years in the laundry and the nuns had kept it from them, knowing that her mother had been pining all that time for her child. Generation after generation was condemned in this way. You just cannot imagine how miserable and inhuman these places were. And the really terrible thing was that it was women doing it to other women."

Much of Dr Finnegan's research, gleaned at a time when the orders thought themselves so invulnerable that one opened its records to her, formed the basis of Steve Humphries' acclaimed Channel 4 documentary, Sex in a Cold Climate, which first brought the lives of the Magdalene women into the open. Dr Finnegan now works from the mother superior's bedroom of the former Waterford Magdalene convent, which her college bought after it closed. The nuns and the women who slaved under them now share their dotage in old folks' bungalows over the wall.

When Humphries went looking for survivors in Ireland in 1996, no one would talk. Then he found two women who had "escaped", like many thousands of others, to England. Both Brigid Young and Christina Mulcahy were dying of cancer. Strangely, their closeness to death gave them the strength to talk. Until then, like most survivors, they were intent on taking their stories to their graves.

It is the crippling shame the church inculcated in the women that angers Mullan most: "In any oppressive regime, you take away people's ability to think once you take away their ability to express themselves. The church is a pretty sophisticated organisation. It simply didn't serve their purposes to educate these women. They held them with fear, guilt and shame - its oldest and vilest weapons. The methodology they applied is shared by torturers all round the world. The prisoner's self-esteem is taken away, you deny them education, you deny them access to the outside world, you deny them communication to one another, you don't allow friendships to form and you take away their identities and give them new names. It is about breaking people down.

"When you get letters from Magdalene women you realise how few were given anything of what you could call an education. Every story is horrific, yet they struggle to put their thoughts on paper. And you think, 'You bastards, you even took away their means to express themselves, so they couldn't come back at you.'"

T echnically, every woman who entered one of the closed laundries did so voluntarily, following the example of Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who became the "13th apostle" of Christ, after whom the convents were named. But there was nothing voluntary about the grinding work, the beatings, the breast-binding, the head-shaving, the forced fasting or the humiliating weekly mortification sessions, when the women were stripped and laughed at for their vanity. Now this technicality, the notion that they collaborated in their own imprisonment, is denying the bulk of the survivors proper compensation for the years they spent in servitude.

Irish politicians - according to some surveys, the third most corrupt ruling class in Europe after the Belgians and the Italians - are not particularly good at giving a moral lead. Four years ago, though, the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern publicly apologised to the thousands of former inmates of the orphanages and industrial schools that the Catholic religious orders ran for the Irish state for decades with equal terror and violence. "We cannot truly advance unless we acknowledge and deal with the more uncomfortable elements of our past," Ahern said. "Only when we do this will we have matured as a self-confident and inclusive society."

For once, these were more than platitudes. He established a truth commission with a brief to examine child abuse and forced the religious orders to pledge more than €120m (£80m) to a compensation fund. Even so, the state may end up paying out five times that.

Very few of the Magdalene women, however, fell within the ambit of his redress act, which spares victims the trauma of having to pursue their persecutors through the courts. They were excluded by a canard that sees the convents as private institutions beyond the state's ken, an argument that cuts little ice with those who know most about how the laundries operated.

Dr Finnegan and Sally Mulready, a London Labour councillor who has campaigned for Magdalene survivors in Britain, insist the state worked hand in glove with the religious orders. If women escaped, they were brought back by the police, who were also on hand to transfer women between institutions, Mulready says. "The whole state apparatus colluded. These women were in penal servitude. The nuns made a lot of money out of them and it is not unreasonable that they should now pay some of that back. I am still hopeful that the orders will stand by their responsibilities to the Magdalene women and we will not have to shame them into it. But if we have to, we will."

So far the church has only offered to include them in a €12m educational fund for survivors and their families. Mulready is also withering about "the grubby resentment" she detects in some quarters of Dublin about including the Magdalene in the state compensation package: "Irish society abandoned these women and dumped them on the congregations. These are people they could barely speak about until a few years ago, except in the most patronising of terms. They more than owe them the money."

For Mullan it goes even deeper. He was surprised at how warmly the film was received in Ireland, where it has been seen by a third of the adult population. "Between the industrial schools and the Magdalenes, a big part of the economy was based on slave labour. This is a country where thousands of the disenfranchised, the unrespectable poor, had their kids locked up for no other reason than economics. And the reason there was no outcry is that they were in no position to complain.

"I wanted to show in the film how these places were very clean and efficient factories. The whole point was that from the outside they looked okay."

The laundries were not purely an Irish phenomenon, although a particularly sinister strain developed there in the 1930s when Eamon De Valera allowed the Catholic church to dictate the newly independent state's social policy. There were plenty of Magdalene laundries in Britain too, mostly Protestant ones, the last of which closed in the 1970s. The same orders who operated in Ireland ran laundries in north and south America, Australia, France and are now concentrating their efforts in Asia and Africa.

But Mullan wonders if the lessons have been learned. And there are some awkward questions that still have not been asked in Ireland. Mullan has been told many spine-chilling stories since he made the film, but one - about the spectacular cruelty of the industrial schools - haunts him. These schools, which are often like Victorian borstals, still exist.

"A group of boys were driven into countryside outside Dublin in a school bus," he recalls. "They stopped alongside another bus wherein stood several young dental students who proceeded to remove all their teeth without any anaesthetic. I'm sorry, but that is Dr Mengele stuff. Where are those young dentists now? Why didn't they say something 20 or 30 years ago about this? Why keep silent all this time? How did they rationalise that to themselves?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2003/feb/07/artsfeatures