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Compensation, yet still no justice for Magdalenes

Compensation, yet still no justice for Magdalenes

Last week, the compensation programme for survivors of the brutal Magdalene laundries kicked off. Yet something’s not right: in order to qualify for compensation, victims waive all rights against the state. And still the Church wants nothing to do with it. Think it couldn’t happen again? Think again. By MARELISE VAN DER MERWE.

These bloodless brides of Jesus
If they had just once glimpsed their groom
Then they’d know and they’d drop the stones
Concealed behind their rosaries
They wilt the grass they walk upon
They leech the light out of a room
They’d like to drive us down the drain
At the Magdalene laundries

Joni Mitchell, ‘The Magdalene Laundries

The films Philomena and The Magdalene Sisters don’t really do the story justice. Both films have won awards, although Magdalene laundry survivors have said that The Magdalene Sisters did not portray the horror of their experience vividly enough.

The appalling saga of the Magdalene laundries is finally coming to a head. Yet the survivor compensation programme – the fruit of a lengthy investigation and a much-anticipated report that somehow fails to really blame anybody – is too little, too late, says advocacy group Justice for Magdalenes (JFM).

Does any of this sound familiar? Marikana, anyone?

On Monday, just days after the compensation programme kicked off, JFM asked the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Geneva to call on the Irish State to establish a “thorough investigation into the Magdalene laundries abuse”. It claims the previous investigation was a wash, and the compensation strips survivors of their rights.

The Magdalene laundries were so-called ‘care’ facilities run by four orders of Catholic nuns. Some 30,000 women passed through them from 1765 – 1996, although the period under scrutiny is 70-odd years from 1922 onwards, during which around 10,000 ‘fallen’ women were taken in for ‘rehabilitation’. Although the laundries’ official mission was to rehabilitate the inmates and reintegrate them into society, many women were kept for years on end and, survivors recount, against the wishes or advice of their families. Some women stayed for life.

The laundries, according to survivor testimonies, were little more than a hybrid between prisons and workhouses, where the women were essentially unpaid labour in a lucrative state-supported enterprise. Although the laundries initially aimed to reduce prostitution, the definition of ‘fallen’ seemed to broaden as the demand for labour increased. Some residents were sent by their schools; others by state bodies; still more by their families. Some were disabled, some were orphans. Others were sent as a way of dealing with land or inheritance disputes. Many survivors say they have no idea why they were incarcerated.

As The Journal puts it, “[The] State repeatedly sought to funnel ‘diverse populations’ of females to the institutions and, in return, religious orders obtained an ‘entirely unpaid and literally captive workforce for their commercial laundry enterprises’.”

Fast forward to 2015, and after a lengthy fight for justice, the compensation programme for surviving Magdalenes finally began last week. The Martin McAleese Report, the result of an investigation by an inter-departmental committee set up by the Irish government to investigate the laundries, was some time earlier released to widespread controversy. Advocacy groups representing Magdalene survivors were critical of the report, saying it contained serious errors; Simon McGarr for the Irish Examiner wrote that, of the two “conflicting narratives” it represented – that of the victims and that of the state and Church – it allowed the more powerful voices to dominate. It may be relevant to note here that McAleese, a former member of the Senate, is a devout Catholic.

Among other discrepancies, the Report claimed 879 women died in the laundries, while the records of JFM report double that; the McAleese report had focused only on a specific time period. Additionally, it had left out certain burial sites. Furthermore, the McAleese report reported testimony of just one survivor of sexual abuse in a Magdalene laundry; just in researching this feature, Daily Maverick found first-person testimonies by several sexual abuse victims.

Survivors were appalled to read in the Report that “ill treatment, physical punishment and abuse… was not something experienced in the Magdalene laundries”. It adds that that the median stay for women in the laundries was seven months. According to JFM’s records, the average was at least five years. Researchers from the Magdalene Names Project claim that in the period 1954 to 1964 at the High Park Laundry, most women were there for minimum eight years. One woman in the Good Shepherd Limerick grave at Mount St Oliver Cemetery was recorded in the 1911 census as being incarcerated in the Limerick Magdalene Laundry at 18 years. She died in 1985, aged 92, after 74 years in the laundry.

Nonetheless, following the report, the decision was made to compensate those of the 600-odd survivors who are still living in Ireland. The compensation fund, worth €58 million, comprises a medical card and other supports including home help, counselling and physiotherapy services free of charge, backdated to 1 July, when the rather vaguely-named Redress for Women Who Were Resident in Certain Institutions Act came into force. The women are entitled to GP services; prescribed drugs and surgical appliances; nursing and home help services; dental, ophthalmic and aural services; counselling; chiropody and physiotherapy.

A payment scheme provides for between €11,500 and €100,000, depending on the length of stay, the Irish Times reports. Additionally, pension-type top up payments of up to €100 weekly, if under pension age, and up to €230.30 weekly if aged over 66, are also being made.

JFM, however, has released a statement criticising the Irish government for reneging on some of its earlier promises to Magdalene survivors. The organisation has also raised concerns regarding the terms of compensation.

In order to receive financial compensation, the women are required to waive all their legal rights against the State,” JFM said in a statement. “Therefore, they are disempowered to insist that the rest of the scheme is implemented properly.”

The financial aspects of the scheme were rolled out first. Not all healthcare elements have been included, JFM says.

The government prioritised the administration of money payments, meanwhile delaying the healthcare and other elements of the scheme,” JFM pointed out.

The Irish government now refuses to provide some of the healthcare services it promised in 2013, including counselling for immediate family members.

There is still no healthcare for women outside Ireland who have entered the scheme.

Further un-implemented aspects of the scheme include support and advocacy services, and assistance in obtaining education and housing.”

Steven O’Riordan of Magdalene Survivors Together further criticised the package.

The judge (John Quirke) said the women should get the equivalent of the HAA (Health Amendment Act) card that gives you direct access to social care workers in the community and direct access to medical treatment without having to wait,” he said.

But the Irish government has argued that it is simply impossible to provide medical support and compensation to Magdalene survivors living abroad, as it is too challenging to work across international administrative systems.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny apologised to Magdalene victims in 2013 and the State has admitted its role in supporting the laundries, not only by providing funding but also by making use of the services. According to JFM, after 1922 some girls and women were also sent to the laundries by the courts. One survivor reports being locked up for stealing an apple.

While JFM and other organisations are heavily critical of the state, the Church should not be forgotten. The Magdalene laundries were run by four Catholic orders, and evidence points to the laundries ultimately becoming an extremely profitable business. Not just the laundries, but also the similarly Church-run Mother and Baby Homes – which are the subject of a new inquiry. (Evidence suggests that death records of babies were falsified to cover a lucrative human trafficking business between Church and State. Earlier this year, it was discovered that nearly 800 young children were buried in unmarked graves between 1925 and 1961 at a convent in west Ireland. Some remains were found in a concrete tank.)

The Church has to date refused to make any contribution to the compensation fund, although a somewhat lukewarm statement has been issued in which members of the orders involved stated that they regretted that the “care” given was not always up to scratch and by way of consolation prize referred to the friendships forged in the laundries – even though victims speak of being forbidden to communicate.

The Guardian reminds us just how the Magdalene scandal was unearthed in modern Ireland. “The nuns had been dabbling on the stock exchange. The results were unfortunate. When a company they had invested in went bust, they decided to sell off a portion of their Dublin land holdings to cover the losses. The snag was that the land contained a mass grave. It was full of ‘penitents’, the label attached to the thousands of women locked up in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries. This particular order, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, ran High Park, the largest such laundry in the country.

The good sisters did a deal with the developer who bought their land. They split the costs of clearing the mass grave, exhumed and cremated the bodies, and re-buried the ashes in another mass grave, in Glasnevin cemetery. However, it emerged that there were 22 more bodies in the grave than the nuns had listed… Over one-third of the deaths had never been certified. The nuns did not even appear to know the names of several of the women… The final number so callously disturbed from their resting place was 155. All had died in the service of the nuns, working long hours in their large commercial laundry for no pay.”

As it happens, the nuns did not have anything to worry about financially – child and woman abuse is apparently a money spinner. The land surrounding the mass grave at the largest Magdalene Laundry was sold by the order of nuns who ran it for €61.8 million during the boom. According to the Irish Examiner, the site at High Park was the second most lucrative deal involving 18 religious orders responsible for abusing children in residential homes. In total, the orders made €667 million in property deals between 1999 and 2009. And the four orders involved in running the laundries have combined assets of more than €1.5 billion.

While the perpetrators continue to profit, the survivors are still scrambling for compensation from the State alone. The UN has demanded that the Church investigate. It waits.

The abuse suffered within the convent walls beggars belief. The inmates were denied education, nutrition and basic human rights. They were stripped of their identities.

One survivor says she was kidnapped by the Legion of Mary and delivered to the Sisters of Charity Laundry in Donnybrook. The Gardaí returned her to the institution when she tried to escape. According to JFM, this was not uncommon. Another survivor tells of leaving the laundry and going to a priest for help. The priest raped her and took her back to the laundry. When she told sisters she had been raped, her head was shaved as punishment and she was placed in solitary confinement. She became pregnant as a result of the rape. When her baby was born, the baby was removed. She was recently reunited with her daughter.

Almost 1,000 women are buried in Laundry plots across Ireland. One survivor says: “They weren’t even marked, the graveyards… The women were buried in some sort of cloth or something, with no priest, no ceremony. They were just buried there.”

Elizabeth Coppin (66), the survivor who originally took her story to the UN, tells of being thrown into a padded cell, having her hair shaved off, and told she was a boy named Enda. She was given a bucket for a toilet and told “It will be a very long time before you get out.” She was given water from the toilet to drink. Contrary to the McAleese report, she says “abuse was a daily ritual” and “the fear of punishment was very real”. She and the other inmates slept in cells. They weren’t allowed to have friends. “These experiences have left terrible lasting effects on our lives and this dull ache and pain is something I will have to live with and carry with me to the grave,” she says. She was locked up for four years.

Mary Josephine O’Neill told the Sydney Herald of the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of older girls in a convent run by the same order. She was transferred to a laundry, where she stayed for several years and suffered more abuse. When she finally left the laundry and got married, the trauma remained. Mary and her husband, Norman, have been married for 36 years. “But I’m afraid I was a failure in the bedroom department…I tried to be a good wife, but every time it felt like rape.”

Marina Gambold was 16 when she was taken. She was orphaned at eight and sent to live with her grandmother. By 16, she had nowhere to go, so her priest sent her to a laundry. Her name was changed to Fidelma. One day she accidentally broke a cup and for three days, a thick string was tied around her neck and she was made to stay on her knees and repeat, “I beg almighty God’s pardon, Our Lady’s pardon, my companion’s pardon for the bad example I have shown”. She was made to eat off the floor. Another punishment was to be left out in the cold overnight. She and two other friends developed nearly fatal hypothermia.

Kathleen Legg entered when she was 14. Since birthdays were never celebrated she lost track of how old she was. On entry, she was stripped naked and told her name was no longer Kathleen. She was known as number 27. The nuns sent her mother falsified school reports saying how well she was doing in lessons, but she says she didn’t attend a single class and never saw a clock, book or newspaper.

We bathed once a week and I remember the lice from our hair used to float around the top of the water so if you were one of the last to get washed it was horrific,” she says.

Maureen Sullivan was abused by her stepfather. Her ‘salvation’ was to be sent to a ‘lovely school’ which turned out to be a Magdalene laundry. She never saw a schoolbook again. Instead, she worked from 6am until 9pm, seven days a week. In five years, she saw her mother four times. On her mother’s last visit, her mother suggested she should be paid for the work she did. So the laundry gave her five pounds and threw her out.

One would like to think it could not happen again. Yet the last laundry closed in 1996 – not so long ago. The perpetrators remain defiant. And in South Africa, our president comments casually that we should send our pregnant teenagers to Robben Island – the infamous former leper colony, the former hell of political prisoners. Local teenagers continue to be shamed, punished and verbally abused in schools, in South Africa (Shefer et al, 2013), if they fall pregnant or are found to be sexually active. We’ve just got through several years of debating the stupidity of criminalising teen sex. Is it so far-fetched that another generation could be deprived, exiled, abused on the basis of punitive moral bullying? And is our country, liberal Constitution and all, exempt? Is the Magdalene story so far-fetched?

Today, the Magdalene survivors and their children – when they know them – try to repair their lives. But they are still on the losing end. Those who profited from their suffering continue to profit. And the survivors have to sign over their rights to the state just to get some of what is owed to them. DM

Photo: Inside a Magdalene Laundry. (Wikimedia/Magnus Manske)

Read more:

  • A life unlived: 35 years of slavery in a Magdalene Laundry on The Journal.

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