In the new Superman film, villain Lex Luthor is now a tech bro-cum-military contractor with a secret invention he calls the “pocket universe”.
Every time Luthor fires up a powerful portal he can generate a mini “Big Bang” that creates a small rip in the time-space continuum. Those imprisoned inside this netherworld, we are told, no longer enjoy their Geneva Convention human rights.
Some critics see a nod by Superman writer-director James Gunn to the legal no man’s land of Guantánamo Bay, the ex-territorial US prison camp on Cuba. Someone should tell Gunn that Ireland got there before him, though we called our pocket universe Magdalene Laundries.
Over more than a century, about 10,000 Irish girls and women passed through their portals and vanished into liminal, ex-territorial spaces where they were stripped of their hair, clothes, name and human rights.
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The laundries were where Ireland hid the “fallen” women it needed to disappear: unmarried mothers, those considered promiscuous, the sexually abused, or females considered a (potential) risk or a burden to their families or the community.
Most Irish people never stepped inside a Magdalene laundry; those who did rarely saw beyond the delivery and collection hatch, and few noticed when they vanished.
A decade after the closure of the last laundry, on Dublin’s Sean McDermott Street in 1996, photographer Ethna Rose O’Regan lobbied for access. When she got inside, she photographed everything she could.
Almost 20 years later, her After Magdalene series is on display in The Lab, Dublin City Council’s arts space on Foley Street.
O’Regan’s important images are of documentary and artistic value, a portal back to the shabby holiness of Catholic Ireland: flowery wallpaper, electric fires and chipped statues.
For anyone over 40, her images are insinuatingly, insultingly familiar. They exude a violently familiar colour and psychological palette of muted emotion and lingering shame. Squint your eyes and you could be in the set of Father Ted, or the stage set of a Tom Murphy play about holy Irish hypocrisy.
Alongside O’Regan’s unsettling images, the Lab exhibition, entitled What Does It Mean to Know?, presents visitors with a mournful reflection by poet Paula Meehan, who lugged laundry to Sean McDermott Street laundry as a child: “I thought they were nearly nuns.”
In an essay, sociologist Louise Brangan asks how far Ireland has come on the laundries and whether “the direct descendant of collective silence is sometimes collective forgetting”.
A final exhibition element, a provocative audiovisual installation by artist Sineád McCann, takes a lump hammer to modern Ireland’s dominant post-laundry narrative.
If the laundries operated in a DC Comics-style pocket universe, how Ireland remembers them reflects the rival Marvel franchise and its love of the “multiverse”, where parallel realities and competing narratives coexist.
In one layer of our Magdalene multiverse, Irish people knew. In another, Irish people didn’t know. In a third reality, Irish people knew not to know. In a fourth universe, those who did know insist no ordinary people in Ireland had any agency to take on the faceless, alien institutional villains of the piece – the Church and the State – without reflecting on the Irish people inside those institutions.
In another multiverse layer, Irish politicians, religious and officials apologise to women incarcerated in laundries and other institutions (without waiting to see if they are forgiven). In a final parallel universe, Irish officials write reports or tell international organisations, in our name, that there is “no factual evidence to support allegations of systematic torture or ill-treatment of a criminal nature”.
Step outside Ireland’s inventive and evasive Magdalene multiverse and a few things become clear. The laundry system survived because enough people knew, enough people wanted them to exist and because they had competitive prices that only slave labour could provide. That the campaign for justice continues, 30 years on, is because enough people today would rather forget.
For 20 years, O’Regan tried and failed to have her images of the Sean McDermott laundry shown in Ireland. One curator told her the “lost places” trend had passed. Another insisted Ireland was suffering from “laundry fatigue”. There’s some truth in all that.
Many Irish wish these places – and these women – could be returned to a LutherCorp-style pocket universe. Others sympathise with women, then go back to their lives. A third camp debate who is to blame for the past and diffuse responsibility for remembering that past in the present.
A common thread through these three camps is a lack of empathy for these women. Not as victims, survivors or “brave” individuals, just real people stripped of their real human rights.
[ Magdalene laundries survivor recalls a childhood of relentless abuse and neglectOpens in new window ]
This exhibition is for you if you are part of the silent middle in Irish society; the people who didn’t really understand the scale of the horror back then and are uneasy and unsure about how to remember today.
Spend enough time in The Lab – a bright modern gallery that represents the new Ireland – and you can feel the old Ireland creep in. With luck, the work will nudge you towards a blindingly obvious revelation about the laundries: one group of Irish people did this terrible thing to another group while the largest group (hint: us) either looked on, averted its gaze or knew not to know.
Not everyone is to blame for what happened, that is obvious. But if Ireland indulges in collective pride when the national side win a rugby championship, it can accept collective shame at what was done to these women – and a responsibility to remember.
Refusing to acknowledge the shame paralyses us as a people, unable to mourn the lives lost or not lived.
We can acknowledge, regularly and with sadness, our terrible, Luthor-like pocket universe ingenuity. Or we can keep 21st-century Ireland trapped a 20th-century Magdalene multiverse. Like Marvel Studios, though, this approach will see the country tie itself in ever-more elaborate, evasive and unresolvable narrative knots.
And eventually, Ireland will run out of lies to tell itself.
What does it mean to know? runs at The Lab Gallery, 1 Foley Street, Dublin 1, until August 6th
