Rite and Reason: Society has yet to admit its complicity in the Magdalen laundries scandal which affected 30,000 women, argues James Smith.
Peter Mullan's movie The Magdalen Sisters, which went on general release in the US two weeks ago, provokes a truly disturbing, but frequently evaded, question for Irish society - has it yielded an appropriate response to this scandal? If, as recent publicity assured us, one in every four Irish people saw this film,what has been the moral and cultural pay-off in Ireland?
Has the recent culture of exposure - a seeming litany of social and political scandals - desensitized Ireland? Will this horror, unlike the industrial/reformatory schools or clerical paedophilia scandals, fail to initiate real action - apologies, inquiries, appropriate monuments or memorials, calls for reparations?
In his US interviews, Mullan challenged the religious orders to provide survivors and interested family members with information - the inmate's name at the time of entry; her appointed name while incarcerated; information about where inmates were placed after dismissal; any health background to help children fill in their medical pasts; and, finally, details about the burial sites of those who died while incarcerated - information until recently shrouded in a deliberate anonymity.
As with similar demands from victims of child sex abuse, such requests have been met by church secrecy, denial and obfuscation. The vacuum created by the collective resistance of the Good Shepherd Sisters, The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, and the Mercy Sisters, has again humiliated, diminished and dismissed survivors and families.
In light of this it is perhaps understandable that American commentators see The Magdalen Sisters as another indictment of the Catholic Church, implying that responsibility lies with the nuns alone. The movie arrived on the American big screen in the wake of an almost two-year media frenzy that has pursued revelations of clerical child sex abuse across virtually every Catholic diocese in the US. This backdrop will, no doubt, ensure a ready and receptive audience. But it may also detract from the film's specific cultural challenge.
Mullan's camera knowingly challenges the Irish public, implicating them as also responsible in the betrayal and mistreatment of the women. The convent's green delivery van feeds dirty laundry from the nation's well-to-do families and public institutions to bolster laundry coffers. Margaret's and Rose's families - each aided by a Catholic priest - arrange the disappearance of a daughter lest she tarnish their respectability.
Moreover, Mullan underscores that this Irish punishment was arbitrary and selective. Margaret's incestuous rapist escapes with a manly scolding. The father of Rose's "illegitimate" baby does not share her cruel fate. The message confronts each and every viewer - no one entered a Magdalen laundry without a relative, an employer, a neighbour or friend, knowing it. Only Irish society can decide to make public its collusion in these oppressive oubliettes that rendered generations of Magdalen women the nation's disappeared. So far it has refused to do so.
The American response to the movie has also ignored the Irish State's culpability in the scandal. The film's Corpus Christi procession depicts this clearly as gardaí escort the women from the convent, through the town, to concluding religious ceremonies.
The film replicated a photograph depicting real-life Magdalens from Gloucester Street Asylum parading down Sean McDermott Street in 1950s' Dublin. There, for all the world to see, gardaí marshal the women on both sides.
Surely this requires an explanation? If, as the religious orders maintain, women voluntarily entered these institutions, why a Garda escort? If, as the Irish Government has maintained, the Magdalen asylums were private religious institutions outside State control, why deploy gardaí to enforce a form of imprisonment inconsistent with the judicial and constitutional rights afforded all Irish citizens? Can the Minister for Justice or the Garda Commissioner point to the legislative authority by which gardaí performed these duties?
There is a long and as yet unacknowledged history of State collusion in Ireland's Magdalen laundries. Throughout the 20th century they absolved the State of its obligation to provide for women convicted of infanticide, for young victims of sexual crime refused entry to State industrial/ reformatory schools, for women under the age of 21 on remand, and, as the 1970 Kennedy Report pointed out, for wards of the State transferred illegally from industrial school to Magdalen laundry. In some cases the State funded the orders.
Can the Irish Government now demonstrate that women entering the Magdalen asylums under the auspices of the State ever left these institutions - especially in light of the orders' competing financial interest in maintaining its population of free labour? As historians Maria Luddy and Frances Finnegan intimate, the historical record for this aspect of Ireland's past will never be complete until the orders make records available.
Ironically, because Ireland's Magdalen laundries exist in the public mind at the level of story (survivor testimony and cultural representation) rather than history (archival records and documentation) the religious orders, not the State or the Irish public, remain at the centre of national and international opprobrium.
Consequently the demands for a Government admission of culpability or a communal admission of collusion are diluted. No one in Ireland - not church, not state, not community - will admit responsibility for the scandal.
• James M. Smith is an assistant professor in the English department and Irish studies programme at Boston College