More Irish history

I’ve also learned about the Magdalene laundries, nine of which operated around Ireland for 100 years, not closing until mid 1990s. If you were unmarried and pregnant, unwanted, “wayward” or in some way not conforming to the Catholic church’s expectations of women and girls, you’d be sent to the laundries. Your hair would be cut off. You would be given a new name. And then, in this Catholic institution, you would provide free slave labour, washing and ironing linens for hospitals and hotels. An estimated 10,000 girls and women went through this system. On the grounds of the laundries, mass graves have been found. In one, 155 bodies were buried; death certificates existed for only 75.

And that, boys and girls, is what happens when the state and the church collude and the church’s merciless, hateful view of women is indulged. This scandal is in addition to the scandals at 14 mother and baby homes, including one in Tuam, where a mass grave has been found. The bodies of foetuses between 35 weeks and three years were unearthed after Galway-based historian, Catherine Corless, published research showing death certificates for 796 children at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home with no indication of their burial places. Mother and baby homes operated across the State at different times between 1922 to 1998.

As the film Philomena showed, women who took religious orders were able to humiliate and exploit unmarried mothers because of the church’s views on sin and the damning consequences (for women only) of extramarital sex. The nuns were no different from Nazis or Isis or the KKK--any group that thrives on punishing those it has rated as less than human.
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