“Are you the man who wrote the Magdalen book?” A voice, hesitant and frail, asked from the other end of my office phone. “I just finished it. I read about ten pages a day.” She called to share her story. She wanted someone to listen. She needed someone to understand.
Her mother died when she was seven. Initially, she and a younger sister were cared for within the extended family. The farm required her father’s attention. At fourteen, he deposited her with the Good Shepherd nuns in New Ross. Her sister was sent to the congregation’s Limerick convent.
The Good Shepherd Sisters managed industrial schools at both these locations. They also operated a reformatory school for girls in Limerick. But the two teenage sisters would live and work with the adult women in the Magdalen laundry. They remained enslaved, unpaid for their labor, for almost five years.
The Ryan Report evades this woman’s experience of childhood abuse. She was disappeared directly into the Magdalen laundry. There was no judge. No “cruelty man.” No committal order. She never was a ward of state. She was just dumped. Consequently, she exists in a legal limbo.
The Residential Institutions Redress Board ignores her experience of childhood abuse. The Dublin-based lawyers responded to her queries. She insisted she was a Magdalen and was never in the industrial school. They told her there was little they could do. The advocacy group “Justice for Magdalenes” helped petition the Redress Board on her behalf. Again, her case was not taken up. Her childhood abuse didn’t fit the legal parameters.
The recently published Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse tells a horrendous story. Irish society responds with anger, a sense of betrayal, and oft-stated disbelief. It seems intent on holding the religious congregations accountable. The government now accepts the report’s major recommendations. The Dáil passed an all-party motion pledging to cherish all the children of the state equally.
But what about those victims and survivors of institutional abuse not addressed by the report? What about Ireland’s Magdalen women and their families? Now is precisely the juncture that Irish society—state, Church, religious congregations, families, and local communities—should confront head-on the abuse of thousands of women in Ireland’s Magdalen laundries.
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