Review of The Fallen by Louise Brangan – an exasperating novel about the Irish Magdalene laundries | History books

MAll readers, and certainly most Irish readers, will finish this book in a state of intense anger mixed with sadness and at least a pang of guilt. It is a detailed, comprehensive and harrowing account of the Magdalene Laundries, the best known and best known, of Ireland’s expansive and diverse landscape of penal or correctional institutions, which operated for most of the twentieth century (the last of the laundries closed in 1996).

As academic Louise Brangan points out in her book The Fallen, it is easy to become confused by the number and variety of prisons, mental institutions, orphanages, workhouses and maternity homes that proliferated in Ireland between the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the late 1990s. However, Magdalene sinks were unique. Dr Brangan writes: “In a system of extreme brutality, the Magdalene laundries were the deep end. In 1951, when the laundries were at their peak, there were 27 in prison for every 100,000 males… [while] Out of every 100,000 females, there are 70 laundry workers. These centers were not marginal: they were the main cancer treatment institution in Ireland.

Laundries were established by the state, but run by nuns. The prisoners, from girls as young as nine to women in their eighties, worked without pay, six days a week, washing clothes, with unwieldy machines that often operated everything from priests’ clothes and prisoners’ uniforms to bedsheets in middle-class homes. Discipline was strict, and the smallest transgressions were severely punished. Who are these slaves who wash clothes? “Irreversible, fallen women and girls who are believed to have engaged in such egregious sexual misconduct that they have strayed dangerously, and irreversibly, beyond the bounds of what is acceptable.”

How did they get trapped in this horrific spider’s web? Some were simply lifted from the streets. In her introduction, Brangan tells of 15-year-old Eileen, “who disappeared on a quiet Sunday evening in February 1954.” Eileen had run away from an abusive family and was working as a maid in a bed and breakfast establishment in Dublin. On Sunday evening, she was approached at the reception desk by two women she had never seen before, whom she later learned were members of the Legion of Mary, a secular organization with a self-appointed mission, as Brangan wrote, “to guard the moral frontiers of Ireland.”

The two women led Elaine to a large gated house on the outskirts, with a metal sign above it that said “Saint Mary Magdalene Sanctuary.” “This was not hidden, but existed among the row of ordinary local businesses: the butcher, the dairy, the post office, the pub and the Magdalene Laundromat.” Here she received a nun, Elaine, who took her clothes, gave her an institutional robe, cut her hair, and changed her name. From now on it will not be “Ellen”, but “60”.

We are not told how the two soldiers knew of Eileen’s presence; Someone at the residence may have “said something,” or a family member may have reported her. What was her sin? “Irish women and girls did not need to do anything so terrible as to become pregnant to be detained in the Magdalene Laundry” – the majority of female prisoners were “nothing more than strays and unwanted; homeless, needy, abused, or rejected. Their presence was treated as degrading.”

It is difficult now to understand the moral climate that prevailed in Ireland in the twentieth century, and the level of repression it imposed. Irish travelers to Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 were amazed by the sense of familiarity they felt in cities like Warsaw, Prague or Budapest. People there, unless they were part of the state apparatus, had the Communist Party control their lives from cradle to grave, while we in Ireland have the Catholic Church doing the same. As historian Hugh Trevor-Roper has noted, communism and Catholicism are merely two sides of the same coin.

The laundresses, which stood in plain sight, were largely ignored by the general public who passed those long, locked iron gates whistling loudly with averted eyes, so as not to see the mighty fortresses that guarded them, or hear the pleas of those confined within the granite walls.

Although the laundries were infuriating, they were not the worst of the penal institutions established by the state and run by the clergy. There were, for example, the Mother and Baby Homes, through which an estimated 56,000 women and girls passed, and about 57,000 babies were born, most of them in the 1960s and 1970s. The most famous of these establishments was Bon Secours House in Tuam, County Galway. From 2010 to 2014, local historian, quiet heroine Katherine Corliss, published newspaper accounts of her research, which revealed that nearly 800 children were buried in the grounds of the house in an unmarked mass grave that had once been used as a septic tank.

To date, more than €33 million in compensation payments have been paid to laundromat survivors; The funds were provided by the Irish government, while religious communities mostly refused to contribute. At the conclusion of her book, a remarkable if terrifying testimony, Brangan quotes one survivor, Carmel, as she speaks of the legacy of her time in the laundries: “There is always something in my life that will remind me of my past life, and this is the place I will never finish, and never will. I have moved forward, yes, I have moved on a little. But I will never recover.”