Magdalene laundries

[hogsback]

UNCAT (UN Committee Against Torture) has released a damning statement on the Irish government's investigation (or complete lack thereof) the laundries.

More information here.

Quote:

"Mary Norris ended up in a Magdalene laundry for disobeying an order. A teenage servant in Kerry, she took a forbidden night off, and was taken away to a convent where the nuns had her examined to see was she still a virgin (which she was). From there she was dispatched to the Magdalene laundry in Cork. Immediately on arrival, the nuns changed her name ? standard practice in all the Magdalene laundries. "When I went in there," recalls Mary, "my dignity, who I was, my name, everything was taken. I was a nonentity, nothing, nobody."

Sybil,

That is a very good summary of the concept of faith.

It wasn't only in the time of the laundries that children were mistreated. My parents were violent alcoholics. They were very friendly (used to drink with) the local priest and many attempts to help us children and get us away were blocked by the priest.

I can remember the priest standing at our door giving a verbal character reference to a woman from social services. He praised my parents and told them my brother and I had a history of lying and she shouldn't take us too seriously.

Thankfully an aunt moved back from England and took us to live with her. But my first 12 or 13 years were horrendous and I'll never forgive that priest.

redcarnations the launderies existed until 1996 so it still would have been in teh time of teh launderies.

how awful for you to know that priest was lying and not be able to do anything. i feel so lucky to have been raised as i was and so angry for all those chidlren and women who had no control at all over what happened to them.

redcarnations the bit about children 'having a history of lying' all sounds very familiar.
Those nuns and priests could talk their way out of anything.

Sorry booyhoo, I'm wrong in that then.

Oh yes marjoriew, we were the worst liars ever. It just got so that we knew from quite a young age that there was no point in trying to tell anyone what was happening.

For a long time I was very bitter about all the adults that could have helped but didn't, now I've realised that the only person bitterness hurts is me.

God, this thread just makes me want to cry. Booy - interesting your mother is the same. Ironically, DH's parents (who live in the rural west of Ireland) are way more questioning of Catholocism and the Pope than DH will ever be. I've even heard DH defend the Pope to his own father!?

I still want a Catholic believer to come along and explain it all in some way that would make me feel less fretful.

We've recently moved to NZ (where I'm from), and I know it's taken the heat off me in terms of our DC not going to a Catholic school. If we were still in the UK I just know that DHwouldd try to bring the issue up on the basis that the religiously affiliated schools are supposedly better.

Here in NZ where we are predominantly a bunch of heathens - walking around the place without God in our hearts, it won't be as much of an issue, since there are plenty of good state schools, and so few religious ones.

Oh, and Sybil - your description is pretty bang on, IMO.

One of the Guardian comments on the article raises the question of class. I would also be very surprised if middle class girls were sent to the laundries.

Instead, they were incarcerated behind locked doors and gates in boarding schools. Safe from the notorious Christian brothers and the Magdalene laundries, but subject to harsh treatment all the same.

While I don't wish to defend or excuse the abusers, it seems to have been endemic, and using abuse of all kinds to control those in their charge may have been all they knew, all they had experience of. The girls who worked in the laundries were their slaves.

Making it possible for those girls and women to be freed only if a family member would vouch for them was very clever. It meant that there was no outrage about the treatment of family members because any relatives were complicit and had abandoned their own.

Mass emigration also played a role - the driven people, who did not like the parochialism got out as soon as they possibly could. The best and brightest left.

BooyHoo I don't doubt that your mother is a true believer, but I don't believe for a second that those in the heirarchy of the Catholic church, who condoned such torture, were truly Christian. I think that they entered the church because there was nowhere else for them to go, and they paid lip service to morality and decency.

Having been brought up in care in the Catholic Church, I have always believed that the cruelty perpetrated by the nuns and priests who had charge of us, was most certainly a combination of several things.
That the young men and women who entered the Church came from poor families in the majority from rural Ireland. Basic education, if any, and pushed by their families to enter the Church. This meant that the family gained a certain respect from their local community and Church.
That their cruelty towards children was partly to do with physical punishment which was endemic at the time. Cruel and unnatural punishments were devised in an attempt to control vast numbers of children who were already traumatised by either removing them from their families or having already been abandoned by their families.
No supervision by the children's departments at the time [now social services] . [I saw a welfare officer once in the 15 years in care].
Secure in the belief that they were called by God and whatever they meted out to us was for our benefit and they were doing God's work.
An example of this was the case of Sister Marie Docherty, who was tried and found guilty of 'cruel and unnatural treatment' towards the children in her care.
I knew this person when she was a young nun, fresh from the novitiate,
and I have a photograph of her holding my daughter, now 40 and playing with her and cuddling her.
Over the years, she turned into a monster. She learned the behaviour as others had done before her.

The regimes the nuns and brothers lived under were more severe than that in any modern prison, and they had no hope of release. But they are still accountable for venting their frustrations and their bitterness on those in their care.

I remember the nuns who were from working class families, who worked in the kitchens, seeming happier with their lot in life than those in authority, one of whom had entered the convent having been jilted.

I wonder if the endemic abuse and brutality started when Ireland was a colony? If so, there may be lessons for other post-colonial states.

whollyghost i agree with you there. many of them did not join out of a vocation.

'It's like some sort of science fiction story, where the whole society was to blame.'

Agreed.

@Suncottage and Majoriejew, I am so sorry that you and your families went through this. And Ninah. I was brought up Catholic and I couldn't understand (until relatively recently) why some people hate nuns so much. It is getting easier and easier to understand.

I have a lonely thread in aibu about the troubled teen industry in America (and elsewhere, but overwhelmingly in America) and can't avoid seeing the similarities between the mls and what happens there. The survivors of the TTI have made a film, which I hope will highlight what happened to those adolescents. The similarities are chilling. The lying to the families, the withholding of post to and from families. The sadists who ran the places. The common assumption that the teens in both cases are liars, and therefore have no voice.

I think, I hope that the Catholic Church has lost its power in Ireland. Is there any evidence that any thing of this nature is still going on there, in any form, boys and girls? Given that it didn't end until 1996, and afai can see, they didn't even close because of the abuse, they closed because washing machines in private homes rendered them unprofitable.

Do any of you live in Ireland, could you comment on that?

I haven't read all of the comments in the Guardian yet. How can I get in touch with the campaigners who are doing a good job of exposing this racket?

My thread in aibu contains lots of clips from the forthcoming film. Harrowing.

(Are the ml girls and the Nazareth House girls getting compensation? Are the perpetrators of abuse going to prison?)

(Is there a thread for ex-Catholics?)

Here in NZ where we are predominantly a bunch of heathens - walking around the place without God in our hearts, it won't be as much of an issue, since there are plenty of good state schools, and so few religious ones.

That sounds so fucking sane. Great to hear that even in deepest Ireland the pope is being questioned.