A good friend of ours, a colleague, just retired. She's Irish. We've known her for about 15 years, but only learned last week that the reason she is deaf in one ear is that when she was quite young she was condemned, and that is precisely the right word, to one of the Magdalen Laundries, where she was severely beaten. Quite understandably this is not something she much likes talking about.
Imagine thus our joy at discovering that, against all odds, the thoroughly disgusting William Donohue of the Catholic League has discovered an entirely new way for us to hold him in utter contempt.
We are releasing a booklet today that I wrote, Myths of the Magdalene Laundries,
that debunks the conventional wisdom about these Catholic-run
facilities in Ireland. Based on the McAleese Report, the Irish
government study that was released in February, the booklet examines the
origins of the many myths that have surfaced about the laundries.
Virtually all the horror stories that
have been told—nuns cruelly torturing and sexually abusing “fallen”
women—are lies. Worse, Irish officials, such as the current prime
minister, Enda Kenny, continue to misinform the public, even in the face
of indisputable evidence.
I have of course not read this pamphlet, and will certainly not pay the five dollars Donohue is asking for it. Likewise I have not read the entire McAleese Report, which is something I had intended to do this summer, because that is the sort of beach reading that interests me. But I have read the report's Executive Summary. Here is a key passage:
Part IV of the Report also records the memories of the living and working conditions in the Magdalen Laundries as shared with the Committee by a number of women. Although identifying common patterns in these stories, the Committee did not make specific findings on this issue, in light of the small sample of women available.
From a historian's perspective (or that of a serious literary scholar, which is what I sporadically am when I am not saying bad words on the Internet), we just don't know very much about what went on inside the Magdalen Laundries. With only a few exceptions, it is but fairly recently that any woman who went through one of them ever spoke publicly -- or privately -- about them at all. For some obvious and interrelated reasons: trauma; shame (the prevailing assumption was that only whores were sent to them); and the overarching mid-century Irish Catholic culture of censorship (for evidence of the existence of which I refer you to the total corpus of 20th century Irish literature).
And adding to the relative paucity of eyewitness accounts, we have the general crap quality of official Irish recordkeeping in that period -- skim through the statistical breakdowns in the Executive Summary, if you don't know what I mean. Lots of records that should have been kept, weren't.
And frankly, brutally, speaking as someone who has done time in Bishop Street, if this was a universe where you just can't locate key memoranda from the Department of Justice from the 1920s that by any rational standard ought to be there, nobody much gave a damn about keeping records about you if you were a poor unwanted little girl from the countryside (the rural/city snobbery in Ireland is even now intense, and back then, it was even worse). This was a system designed to forget you. You were forgotten.
But what we do know about the Magdalen Laundries is that they were cruel.
Because the relatively few women who have spoken about what happened to them there are brave, have no reason to dissemble, and are heartbreakingly eloquent.
Here is something from the Introduction to the McAleese Report:
But the large majority of women who engaged with the Committee and especially
those who had previously been in Industrial Schools spoke of the deep hurt they felt due to their loss of freedom, the fact that they were not informed why they were there, lack of information of when they would be allowed to leave, and denial of contact with the outside world, particularly family and friends.
And about these women,
most found themselves quite alone in what was, by today’s standards, a harsh and physically demanding work environment. The psychological impact on these girls was undoubtedly traumatic and lasting. In meeting some of them, and listening to their stories, the Committee was impressed by their quiet determination to find answers to the many questions concerning their lives both before and after entering a Magdalen Laundry.
No kidding.
Which brings us by commodious vicus of regurgitation back to Bill Donohue. Like I said, I haven't read his pamphlet, and won't, unless I get it for free. For him to be blathering about "indisputable evidence" is silly.
For him to be claiming that Taoiseach Enda Kenny should not be apologizing about the Magdalen Laundries is repulsive. As institutions they were at best authoritarian, rigid, and inhumane.
And, to take a step back -- is there an Irish person of a certain generation who doesn't have a story about physical abuse, or sexual abuse, at the hands of a Catholic authority figure? Seriously?
Perhaps there are worse monsters in the world than William Donohue.
Perhaps.
At any rate, if any of these monsters are sporting a cassock, William Donohue will defend them.