The Fallen Review: Ireland's Magdalene Laundries Exposed in Harrowing Account
Louise Brangan's The Fallen delivers a detailed, thoroughgoing, and appalling account of Ireland's Magdalene laundries, the most infamous among the country's extensive network of penal institutions that operated for most of the 20th century. Many readers, particularly Irish readers, will finish this book in a state of white-knuckled rage, mingled with profound sorrow and at least a pang of guilt.
A Landscape of Institutional Oppression
As academic Louise Brangan points out in The Fallen, it is easy to become confused by the number and variety of prisons, mental asylums, orphanages, workhouses, and homes for unmarried mothers that proliferated in Ireland between the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the late 1990s. However, the Magdalene laundries were unique in their systematic cruelty.
Dr Brangan writes: "In a regime distinguished by its excessive inhumanity, the Magdalene laundries were its deep end. In 1951, when the laundries were at their height, for every 100,000 males, 27 were in prison ... [while] for every 100,000 females, 70 were in a laundry. These were not peripheral: they were Ireland's main carceral institution."
The Brutal Reality of Laundry Life
The laundries were established by the state but operated by nuns. Inmates, ranging from girls as young as nine to women in their eighties, worked without pay six days a week. They laundered everything from priests' vestments and prisoners' uniforms to the family linen of middle-class homes using mostly hand-operated, unwieldy machinery.
Discipline was rigorous, with the smallest transgressions severely punished. These women and girls were labeled "irretrievable women and girls, the fallen, who were believed to have engaged in sexual misconduct so egregious that they had strayed dangerously, irrevocably, beyond the lines of what was acceptable."
How Women Became Enmeshed in the System
Brangan reveals how women became trapped in this ghastly spider's web. Some were simply lifted off the streets. In her prologue, she tells of 15-year-old Eileen, "who disappeared on a quiet Sunday evening in February 1954." Eileen had run away from an abusive family and was working as a maid in a bed-and-breakfast establishment in Dublin.
That Sunday evening, she was approached at the front desk by two women she had never seen before, who she later learned were members of the Legion of Mary. This lay organization had the self-appointed mission, Brangan writes, "to guard Ireland's moral boundaries."
The two women drove Eileen to a large, gated house in the suburbs topped by a metal sign: "Saint Mary Magdalen's Asylum." "This was not tucked away, it sat among the row of ordinary local businesses: butcher, dairy, post office, pub, Magdalene laundry." Here, Eileen was received by a nun who took away her clothes, gave her an institutional smock, cut off her hair, and changed her name. From that moment, she would not be "Eileen," but "60."
The Moral Climate of 20th-Century Ireland
It is difficult now to comprehend the moral climate of 20th-century Ireland and the level of repression it imposed. Irish travelers to eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 were struck by the sense of familiarity they felt in cities such as Warsaw, Prague, or Budapest.
The people there, unless they were part of the state apparatus, had the Communist party controlling their lives from cradle to grave, while in Ireland, the Catholic church performed the same function. As historian Hugh Trevor-Roper remarked, communism and Catholicism are but two sides of the same coin.
The laundries, standing in plain sight, were largely ignored by a public content to pass those tall, locked iron gates whistling loudly and with eyes averted, in order not to see the mighty fortresses they guarded or hear the pleas of those held within the granite walls.
Broader Context of Institutional Abuse
Although the laundries were an outrage, they were not the worst of the penal institutions established by the state and administered by religious orders. There were, for instance, the mother and baby homes, through which an estimated 56,000 women and girls passed, and where about 57,000 babies were born, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s.
The most notorious of these institutions was the Bon Secours home in Tuam, County Galway. From 2010 to 2014, local historian Catherine Corless published newspaper reports of her research, revealing that nearly 800 babies were buried in the grounds of the home in an unmarked mass grave that had once been used as a septic tank.
Legacy and Redress
To date, more than €33 million in redress payments have been made to survivors of the laundries. The money was provided by the Irish government, while the religious orders have for the most part declined to contribute.
At the close of her book, a superb if horrifying testament, Brangan quotes one of the survivors, Carmel, speaking of the legacy left by her time in the laundries: "There's always something in my life that will remind me of my past life and that's where I will never get closure, never will. I've moved on, yes, I've moved on a bit. But I'll never heal."
The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland's Legacy of Silence by Louise Brangan stands as a powerful indictment of a system that destroyed countless lives while operating in plain sight of a complicit society.
