Our capacity for self-delusion has had awful results for those who were locked up, but has also contributed to our economic ruin, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
THE FIRST time I wrote about the issue of the women who were incarcerated in Magdalene homes was in September 1993. The grounds of the largest such home in the UK or Ireland, High Park in Drumcondra, Dublin, had been sold off to a property developer by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity. The graveyard was included in the deal – the bodies of the Magdalenes were dug up and re-interred in Glasnevin Cemetery. I noticed that at the same time, the sisters had lost a lot of money speculating on the shares of what was Ireland’s first great bubble company, Guinness Peat Aviation.
What was not so obvious at the time was the deeper connection between these two events. Part of the reason things went so badly wrong in the way the Irish economy unfolded over the next 15 years was the extraordinary capacity for denial in Irish culture. Most societies have a talent for self-delusion but ours operated on a heroic scale. We were able to deny not just things we suspected to be the case but things we knew to be the case, whether it was the widespread corruption in politics or the fact that property simply could not be worth anything like what we were paying for it.
That capacity didn’t come from nowhere. It was formed by many, many decades of practice. With its hatred of the poor (but not of poverty), of the deviant, of the dissenting, of the disturbing, Irish society developed extraordinarily powerful mechanisms for filtering out unwanted people. One of them was emigration. The other was institutionalisation. We locked up vast numbers of people in industrial schools, Magdalene homes and mental hospitals.
The existence of these institutions was not, of course, a secret but knowledge was neutered – in large part by the sense that, since the church was running so many of these institutions, they must be good. When I wrote about High Park in 1993, for example, a no-doubt well-intentioned lady wrote to The Irish Times to share her memories of visiting the home to see her aunt who was a nun there: “My memory is of a group of tough, middle-aged Dublin women having lots of fun at the expense of my aunt, who also enjoyed the ‘craic’. These women were there from choice – they asked to be admitted, it was a ‘women’s refuge’ and protecting them was part of the nuns’ work. Sure, laundry work was hard and still is – but the women were well cared for . . .”
This habit of denial had terrible consequences for those who were locked up, but it also fed into the economic catastrophe that ultimately overtook us. The conviction that what we want to be true must be true and that anyone who doubts it must be deluded, malicious or both, undermined our collective ability to recognise what was happening to us. And if we are to change the culture that has proved to be so toxic, we have to develop a new habit of mind in which we take our own realities seriously.
It is for this reason that the continuing official denial of the State’s responsibility to the survivors of the Magdalene homes is not just a marginal question. If, after all, our Government can’t face up to the obvious injustice of locking up women for life and using them as forced labourers simply because they were judged to present a moral danger to society, how will it ever face up to bigger and more complex issues of responsibility and accountability?
Dealing decently with the relatively small number of Magdalene survivors ought not to be particularly hard. The systems in place for the survivors of industrial schools provide the obvious model, with the added opportunity to avoid the outrageous aspects of the deal that saw the State taking almost the full rap for that scandal. The problem is that the Government is still in almost complete denial.
First we had Batt O’Keeffe, as minister for education last year, claiming that the State “did not refer individuals nor was it complicit in referring individuals to Ireland’s Magdalene laundries” (it did and it was) and referring to the women who were forced to work in the laundries as “employees”. Both of these claims were subsequently withdrawn.
In April, however, Brian Cowen, answering questions from Fianna Fáil TD Michael Kennedy, engaged in further obfuscation. He claimed that “the position of women in such laundries was not analogous with that of children in the residential institutions that were the subject of the Ryan report” and that “the Magdalene laundries were run by a small number of religious congregations”, implying that the State had nothing to do with them.
From the 1930s onwards, the State transferred women from mother-and-baby homes and country homes into Magdalene laundries.
As late as 1970, children as young as 13 were being confined in Magdalene laundries – some of them transferred there from industrial schools. The laundries were unquestionably a part of a system in which the State was enmeshed. Taking responsibility for those realities would be a small step towards decency.