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(Five years ago, I reviewed 2 films based on this Catholic Church
virtual enslavement of orphaned women: Philomena and The Magdalene
Sisters:
https://louisproyect.org/2013/12/24/philomena-the-magdelene-sisters/.
Both films can now been seen on Amazon streaming.)
NY Times, June 8, 2018
These Women Survived Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. They’re Ready to Talk.
By Ed O’Loughlin
DUBLIN — They are a haunting sight in the aftermath of wars and natural
disasters: the notice boards that spring up outside Red Cross tents and
hospitals, covered in notes from desperate people searching for loved
ones lost in the chaos.
As 220 survivors of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene Laundries convened for
a state-sponsored meeting in Dublin on Tuesday, strikingly similar pleas
for the lost went up at their hotel.
Orders of Roman Catholic nuns ran the laundries for profit, and women
and girls were put to work there, supposedly as a form of penance. The
laundries were filled not only with “fallen women” — prostitutes, women
who became pregnant out of marriage or as a result of sexual abuse and
those who simply failed to conform — but also orphans and deserted or
abused children.
“Their names were changed in the laundries, and it was often hard to
talk, and they didn’t get the chance to really know each other there,”
said Maeve O’Rourke, legal adviser for the Justice for Magdalenes
Research project. “So they’ve put up a notice board in the hotel, for
people to put messages on, to try and trace people they knew in the
laundries.”
The Magdalene Laundries were part of an interlocking system of
orphanages, industrial schools, “mother and baby homes” for unwed
mothers and church-run institutions in which Ireland once confined tens
of thousands of its own.
At least 10,000 women and girls are believed to have passed through the
laundries between independence from Britain in 1922 and the closing of
the last one in 1996.
Upon their release — or in some cases, escape — many survivors of the
institutions left Ireland to shrug off the stigma of having been in
them, and then spent their lives wondering about the other women whose
paths they had crossed.
“I heard about one woman who is here somewhere today who I think I knew
in Kerry,” said Elizabeth Coppin. “I’ll be looking for her later. And
I’ll be going for a look at the board back in the hotel.”
Ms. Coppin, 69, was made a ward of the court in County Kerry after being
battered by her stepfather at age 2. She was removed from her home and
confined in the industrial school and laundry system until age 19 —
three years after the expiration of the judge’s order making her a ward
of the court.
Abused by a nun at school, she tried to commit suicide by setting
herself on fire. Later, she escaped for three months from a Cork
laundry, but was recaptured and returned to the nuns by child protection
officials.
This week, she flew to Dublin from her home in England, and was already
beginning to fill in blanks and find old connections.
The two-day conference in Dublin was funded by the Irish government as
part of an agreement to redress the mistreatment of the women. The event
broke new ground by attracting so many women who had been confined in
the laundries — once a source of shame in a deeply conservative Catholic
country.
On Tuesday afternoon, Ireland’s president, Michael D. Higgins, hosted a
reception and gala dinner for survivors. But what moved Ms. Coppin most
was the reception she met when her bus pulled up outside the site of the
event.
“The crowd on the street was cheering us,” Ms. Coppin said. “We couldn’t
believe it. Not just women, but men and children, too. It was wonderful
— very emotional.”
Ms. Coppin left Ireland the first chance she got after leaving the
laundry and made a new life for herself in England. There, overcoming
the poor education she received in the industrial school, she eventually
went to college and became an elementary schoolteacher. She met an
English man and had two children.
“England was my savior, like many women who went there, or to different
countries like America,” she said. “My choice was to get as far away as
possible from Ireland.”
But the Ireland that Ms. Coppin left is a far cry from the one she
encountered this week. Ms. Coppin was struck, she said, by the many
young women who successfully came together — “so articulate and so
educated” — to campaign for the repeal of Ireland’s constitutional ban
on abortion.
She also noted the new willingness to confront the systemic practice of
forced and illegal adoptions, often without records, which preserved an
illusion of Catholic chastity while depriving unwed mothers of their
children and children of their birth identities.
Despite the new mood of openness and acceptance, many of the Magdalene
laundry survivors in Dublin this week were either too frail or too shy
to talk about their experiences.
Norah Casey, a businesswoman and journalist who was one of the driving
forces behind the event, said that more than half of those in attendance
had come from abroad. Most were from Britain, and a few were from the
United States and other countries.
“A lot of them didn’t even have passports to come here — they got the
hell out of Ireland as soon as they could and never came back,” Ms.
Casey said. “It is great to have them here, talking, but it is also very
sad. I haven’t heard one of them say that life was good after they left
the laundries. It got better, that’s all.”
Most of them have spent their lives trying to find parents and siblings
or children who were taken from them, Ms. Casey said. Many don’t know
who they really are.
“Magdalene asylums” were originally conceived by Christian churches in
Western countries, including Britain and the United States, as
charitable institutes to support “fallen women.”
In Ireland, the Magdalene institutions became associated primarily with
the Catholic Church, and by the mid-20th century there were at least a
dozen industrial laundries in the Republic of Ireland.
Some women were confined to the laundries for life and were forced to
work long hours in poor conditions with bad food, no pay and little or
no medical or educational support. The women and girls — even those who
had come into the laundries directly from orphanages or “industrial
schools” for juvenile detention — were told they should toil as penance
for their sins.
In recent decades, the power of the church in Ireland has dwindled, in
part because of a number of abuse scandals, not least among them the
revelations of the suffering in the Magdalene laundries.
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