Thus began a report in the Guardian on June 15th, 2025, describing an event organised by Confer, an umbrella organisation for about 400 Spanish Catholic congregations, many of which had run centres for the incarceration of girls and young women, guilty of no crimes, from 1941 to 1985. At their height, under the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, they held 41,000 people. Their patron was Franco\u2019s wife, Carmen Polo.<\/p>\n
It was always obvious that Franco\u2019s fascist, profoundly Catholic regime would produce serious abuses of women and children. As elsewhere, it has taken time for the facts to emerge, for brave affected people to recount what happened to them, and for the state to begin to acknowledge the atrocities and crimes visited upon its citizens. <\/p>\n
In Ireland, we have carried out investigations into the archipelago of institutions used to contain women and children from the foundation of the State (and in the case of industrial schools and Magdalene asylums, before that). The most obvious correlatives to Spain\u2019s Women\u2019s Protection Board were the Magdalene Laundries<\/a>, to which girls and women could be sent without any criminal conviction \u2013 merely a suspicion that they might be in danger of \u201cfalling\u201d.<\/p>\n Louise Brangan, a senior lecturer in social policy at the University of Strathclyde, has written a book dealing with Ireland\u2019s Magdalene Laundries in the 20th century, clearly imbued with admirable empathy for the victims of this pernicious, degrading and illegal system of incarceration, punishment and slave labour. She is highly critical of the devil\u2019s compact between Christ and Caesar, Church<\/a> and State, collaborating to perpetuate these abuses into the 1990s.<\/p>\n In her introduction, she lays out her objectives: \u201cI wanted to write the history of the Magdalene Laundries from the perspective of the women and girls who had been subjected to it\u2026 I was equally curious about the nuns who oversaw the laundries and their journey into the religious life. I wanted to know what it was they thought they were doing with these women, and why this regime seemed not only justified, but necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n [\u00a0Commission of Investigations Act inhibits truth-telling about past and presentOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n She tells us that she wishes to \u201ccomprehend the laundries on their own terms, using archival material, photographs, video footage, blueprints, contemporaneous newspaper coverage, unpublished letters and government reports\u201d. She rightly laments the fact that the records of the religious orders which ran the laundries remain closed, and reveals that \u201ca tiny handful\u2026 of former nuns who abandoned their vocations\u201d have made their experiences and views known through \u201cinterviews, memoirs and reflective essays\u201d. <\/p>\n She then writes that her main source for this book will be \u201ceyewitness accounts, scores of them. The artist Evelyn Glynn, the Waterford Memories Project and the activist group Justice for Magdalenes<\/a> conducted their interviews with survivors between 2009 and 2015… Taken together, there is a tranche of roughly 3,000 pages of transcripts\u2026The words and memories and quotes that appear in this book are primarily drawn from those who committed their testimony to these archives. Their names are anonymised.\u201d I will come back to the issue of these sources.<\/p>\n She chooses six women on whom to focus; Carmel, Nora, Catherine, Brigid, Katie and Eileen. She begins with a short history of post-independence Ireland, where she explores the links between Church and State and the overwhelmingly Catholic miasma that permeated most of society, particularly as regards women and girls. She then moves into some of the individual stories of women and girls who find themselves in one or more of the 10 Magdalene Laundries in Dublin, New Ross, Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Galway. <\/p>\n She describes the now horribly familiar routine treatments \u2013 the hair-cutting, provision of ill-fitting uniforms, removal of names, awful and insufficient food, prohibition on friendships, ill-fated attempts to escape, verbal and physical abuse and bone-crushing daily unpaid labour on huge laundry machines. Brangan is very good on the sense of futility and dark resignation that overwhelms so many, as they realise this is how their life will be, likely until they die. An inmate at Sunday\u2019s Well in Cork says: \u201cWhat really traumatised me [was] to hear that door locking behind you and you were never, never, never to walk out that door again, never.\u201d She captures the unremitting drudgery and profound dullness of daily life, interspersed with many prayers.<\/p>\n And very few visits, also. The last great unexplored institution in Ireland is the family. Many of these women were abandoned by their families, and never sought by them again. Some had been placed in the laundries by family members. \u201cRespectability\u201d was clearly more important than family bonds to some. Other inmates came from industrial schools or orphanages and had no families to speak up for them or rescue them. <\/p>\n But why was it necessary for the nuns who ran these organisations to behave with such cruelty and contempt towards those in their power? Many of the inmates had been victims of familial sexual abuse. Instead of help in prosecuting the fathers or brothers responsible, they were treated like criminals. What a terrible perversion of any kind of basic humanity.<\/p>\n [\u00a0We need more than a plaque to mark Ireland\u2019s history of crueltyOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Brangan has a brilliant chapter, titled \u201cSilence\u201d, on the strategies employed by inmates who got out to prevent anyone knowing about their past. One survivor had never told her husband or children about her time in the laundry, such was the shame and stigma accompanying such revelations. It is enraging to contemplate the vile irony of innocent people, effectively kidnapped into highly oppressive environments and illegally kept there for years, feeling thereafter that they were somehow to blame. Alas, our craven culture encouraged such cruelty.<\/p>\n It is scholarship 101 that you must identify your sources accurately so that readers can read them for themselves and test the accuracy or otherwise of your assertions<\/p>\n This is a well-written, fluent book about a really important subject, based on eyewitness evidence from those who suffered. Brangan has some blind spots: she barely mentions the feminist revolution in Ireland in the 1970s, except for the change in the law on contraception and the removal of the marriage bar. The Report of the Commission on the Status of Women in 1973 is not mentioned, nor, amazingly, the Unmarried Mothers\u2019 Allowance, also introduced in 1973. Ireland didn\u2019t change by magic; the second wave of feminism was a huge catalyst for transformation. <\/p>\n There is a problem, however, with how Brangan treats her sources. Writing about a subject so fraught with difficulty, the reader has a right to expect a comprehensive note on sources and methodology, and a bibliography. What I have quoted above is all we get on sources. It is automatic for anyone reading a book based on primary sources, when they come to a quotation, to turn to the footnotes to see where it came from. There are no footnotes at all for the plethora of oral testimonies used in this book.<\/p>\n If you go to the Justice for Magdalenes Research (JFMR) website, as I recommend you do, you will find their testimonies carefully listed, with information about whether the person is anonymised or not, key organisations mentioned in the interview, and a request that if the interview is used in a publication or broadcast, a citation be given. Each interview has a reference number. <\/p>\n It is scholarship 101 that you must identify your sources accurately so that readers can read them for themselves and test the accuracy or otherwise of your assertions. <\/p>\n One of the \u201canonymised\u201d names used for a crucial witness in the book is \u201cCatherine\u201d. A quick look at the JFMR website reveals this to be Catherine Whelan, who emigrated to the US some time after her exit from New Ross Laundry in 1953; she is credited by JFMR as \u201cthe spark\u201d for their political campaign for a proper investigation into the laundries. Why did she need to be \u201canonymised\u201d like this? How many of the other women chosen by Brangan wished to be anonymised?<\/p>\n![\"Survivors](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/QQ2727G7KFGRZGPD423Q2QHRCU.JPG\")
Survivors of Magdalene Laundries and other State institutions touch a monument acknowledging victims that was unveiled in 2022 in Dublin. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw\/The Irish Times <\/p>\n