Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries: Commemoration, gender, and the postcolonial carceral state

By Miriam Haughton, Mary McAuliffe and Emilie Pine

This collection raises incisive questions about the links between the postcolonial carceral system, which thrived in Ireland after 1922, and larger questions of gender, sexuality, identity, class, race and religion. This kind of intersectional history is vital not only in looking back but, in looking forward, to identify the ways in which structural callousness still marks Irish society. Essays include historical analysis of the ways in which women and children were incarcerated in residential institutions, Ireland’s Direct Provision system, the policing of female bodily autonomy though legislation on prostitution and abortion, in addition to the legacies of the Magdalen laundries. This collection also considers how artistic practice and commemoration have acted as vital interventions in social attitudes and public knowledge, helping to create knowledge and re-shape social attitudes towards this history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526150790

Book preview

Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries

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Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries

Commemoration, gender, and the postcolonial carceral state

Edited by Miriam Haughton, Mary McAuliffe, and Emilie Pine

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2021

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5080 6 hardback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover credit:

Photograph of Stone Angel by Evelyn Glynn

Cover design:

Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

Contents

List of figures

List of contributors

Foreword: Memory, violence, and the body– Marianne Hirsch

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction: Commemoration, gender, and the postcolonial carceral state – Miriam Haughton, Mary McAuliffe, and Emilie Pine

Part IWitnessing and remembering: Magdalen Laundries

1 Public performance and reclaiming space: Waterford's Magdalen Laundry – Jennifer O’Mahoney, Kate McCarthy, and Jonathan Culleton

2 ‘A document of truth?’ Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the McAleese Report – Lucy Simpson-Kilbane

3 Unremembered in life and death: funeral and burial practices in Ireland's Magdalen Laundries – Nathalie Sebbane

4 Witnessing: testimonial knowledge as ongoing memory transmission – Audrey Rousseau

5 Patricia Burke Brogan's Eclipsed in Brazil: resonances and reflections – Alinne Fernandes

Part IIParallel histories: then and now

6 From Tuam to Birmingham: a case study of children's homes in Ireland and the UK – Sarah-Anne Buckley and Lorraine Grimes

7 Reflections on Ireland's ‘home(s)’: shame, stigma, and grievability – Clara Fischer

8 ‘He'd never have gotten a job like that if he'd stayed with me’ – the uneasy comedy of Philomena – Mary McGill

9 ‘That stuff is FOI-able … and it could be used against us if someone takes a case’: unlawful adoption in the past and the present – how much has changed? – Conall Ó Fátharta

10 Contract, the state, and the Magdalene Laundries – Máiréad Enright

11 Who is protecting who and what? The Irish state and the death of women who sell sex: a historical and contemporary analysis – Eilís Ward

12 Homing in on the states we are in – Speaking of IMELDA

13 Ireland's Direct Provision Centres: our past and our present – Vukasín Nedeljković

Index

Figures

1.1 Aimee Roche: ‘A woman scorned’. Credit: JL Creative

1.2 Emma Bray: ‘Pray for us sinners’. Credit: JL Creative

1.3 Laura Broderick: ‘Magdalenesque’. Credit: JL Creative

1.4 Jenni O’Neill: ‘Greetings from Ireland’. Credit: JL Creative

4.1 Photo taken (22 October 2016) during the premiere of the preliminary version of In loving memories. The film was part of the programming of ‘When silence falls’, organised by the Waterford Memories Project. Interestingly, the projection took place in the chapel of the Waterford Institute of Technology, which was formerly the St Mary's Good Shepherd Laundry. Photo credit: the author.

Contributors

Sarah-Anne Buckley is lecturer in history at the National University of Ireland Galway and senior research fellow at the Institute for Lifecourse and Society (ILAS). Her research centres on the history of childhood and youth, gender, and women in modern Ireland. Author of The Cruelty Man: child welfare, the NSPCC and the state in Ireland, 1889–1956 (MUP, 2013) and co-author of the award-winning Old Ireland in colour (Merrion Press, 2020) she has edited four volumes and written more than twenty peer-reviewed articles/chapters. She is the current co-PI of the Tuam Oral History Project and an IRC Coalesce Project, as well as chair of the Irish History Students’ Association.

Jonathan Culleton is a lecturer in sociology and criminal justice studies at Waterford Institute of Technology. His research publications and teaching cover several areas within sociology and criminal justice studies including Ireland's Magdalene Asylums, prisons and post-prison experience, immigration, and race and Irish identities. Jonathan serves as academic advisor to several community-based post-prison projects in the south-east of Ireland, and regularly contributes to local and national print media and radio.

Máiréad Enright is reader in feminist legal studies at the University of Birmingham, where she teaches in gender and the law and private law. She publishes widely and across disciplines in the areas of reproductive justice and historical institutional abuse. Most recently, she has written on the family planning and abortion rights movements, obstetric violence, and the Magdalene Laundries. She is currently working on a Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Law's inheritances’, which examines the resonances and repetitions of past human rights abuses in contemporary Irish law.

Alinne Fernandes is associate professor at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), theatre translator and dramaturge. She is also vice-director of postgraduate studies in English, and coordinator of both the Irish studies and women's writing research clusters at UFSC. She teaches drama, literature, and translation. She obtained her PhD from Queen's University Belfast in 2012, and ever since has conducted practice-based research on the dramaturgical study, translation, and staging of plays by contemporary Irish and Northern Irish women playwrights in Brazil. Amongst her translations are Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats… (Rafael Copetti, 2017), Mary Raftery's No Escape, Patricia Burke Brogan's Eclipsed, and Christina Reid's My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name? Fernandes has also published both in Brazilian and international journals, and edited A Virada Cultural (UFSC, in press) and Artistic collaborations (a themed edition of Ilha do Desterro, with Miriam Haughton and Maria Rita Viana).

Clara Fischer works in the areas of social and political theory, feminist theory, and gender politics. She is a Vice-Chancellor Illuminate Fellow at the school of history, anthropology, philosophy, and politics at Queen's University Belfast. She is the author of Gendered Readings of Change: a feminist–pragmatist approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and co-editor of Irish Feminisms: past, present and future (Arlen House/Syracuse University Press, 2015), New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland (Routledge, 2020). She has published widely in the leading journals in her area, including in Signs: Journal of women in culture and society, Hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy, and Feminist Review, and is involved in civil society research and advocacy. She has research interests in reproduction and sexuality in Ireland, gender and nationalism, Irish feminisms, emotion and affect, and embodiment and shame.

Lorraine Grimes has a PhD from the National University of Ireland Galway. Her thesis, titled ‘Migration and assistance: Irish unmarried mothers in Britain 1926–1973’, examines the institutionalisation of Irish unmarried mothers in Britain, and explores issues of maternity care, adoption, socio-economic class, unmarried fathers, and the push for unmarried mothers’ allowance in the 1970s. Lorraine is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at Maynooth University on the project ‘Archiving Reproductive Health’ and has previously worked for the World Health Organization on the project ‘Reproductive health: the implementation of abortion policy in Ireland’. Lorraine has a number of publications forthcoming, focusing on unmarried motherhood, maternity care, and stillbirth in Britain and Ireland.

Miriam Haughton is director of postgraduate studies in drama, theatre, and performance at NUI Galway, and vice-president of the Irish Society for Theatre Research. Miriam is author of Staging Trauma (Palgrave, 2018), and has co-edited Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland (Carysfort, 2015) and special issues of Ilha do Desterro (2018) and Irish Theatre International (2014). She has authored multiple journal articles and book chapters, and is associate producer for Mad, Bad and Dangerous: a celebration of ‘difficult’ women (Up Up Up/Copper Alley). Miriam is director/producer of Nochtaithe (Unveiled), a multidisciplinary performance devised by NUI Galway students in response to survivor testimony as part of the Tuam Oral History Project.

Mary McAuliffe is a historian and assistant professor of gender studies at University College Dublin and holds a PhD in history from Trinity College Dublin. Her latest publication is Margaret Skinnider (UCD Press, 2020, Life and Times Series). Other publications include We were there: 77 women of the Easter Rising (with Liz Gillis), and Kerry 1916: histories and legacies of the Easter Rising on which she was a co-editor. She is currently working on a major research project on gendered and sexual violence during the Irish revolutionary period, 1919–1923. She is co-editor of Saothar: the journal of the Irish Labour History Society.

Kate McCarthy is lecturer in drama at Waterford Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on participatory performance, educational drama and theatre, and regional theatre. Research projects include Letters from the Past, an intergenerational archival project, and The Waterford Memories Project. Kate is a member of the Irish Society for Theatre Research and the Arts Education Research Group at Trinity College Dublin. As a practitioner she has facilitated and devised numerous theatre projects in diverse settings.

Mary McGill is a journalist and researcher. She is a former Hardiman scholar in the department of languages, literatures, and culture at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her doctoral project explored digital and visual culture (post)feminisms, and gender identity. Her first book, The Visibility Trap: Sexism, Surveillance and Social Media, was published in July 2021 by New Island Books.

Vukasin Nedeljkovic is a PhD candidate at Dublin Institute of Technology. He initiated the multidisciplinary project Asylum Archive. Asylum Archive is a platform open for dialogue and discussion inclusive to individuals who have experienced a sense of sociological/geographical ‘displacement’, social trauma, and violence. It is an act of solidarity to bring a different perspective on the life of people who came to Ireland to seek protection. Asylum Archive's objective is to collaborate with asylum seekers, artists, academics, civil society activists, and immigration lawyers, amongst others, with a view to creating an interactive, documentary, cross-platform, online resource, critically foregrounding accounts of exile, displacement, trauma, and memory: www.asylumarchive.com (accessed 16 June 2021).

Conall Ó Fátharta is an award-winning former journalist who worked as a senior news reporter with the Irish Examiner newspaper for more than a decade. He currently lectures in journalism at National University of Ireland, Galway. His work is primarily investigative in nature and focuses on Ireland's treatment of unmarried women and related practices – including forced and illegal adoption, infant trafficking, falsification of identities and records, medical and vaccine trials, infant mortality, and the use of infant remains for anatomical research. He has also written extensively about Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and reported on recent advocacy campaigns, government inquiries, and redress schemes. In 2011, he received the Justice Media Award for Daily National Newspapers from the Law Society of Ireland for a series of articles on illegal adoption and state failures to legislate for adoption-tracing rights. In 2018 the Law Society of Ireland recognised his contribution to the pursuit of human rights and social justice for vulnerable citizens, citing his work on the Magdalene Redress scheme as ‘of enormous national significance’. He was shortlisted for Campaigning Journalist of the Year in the NewsBrands Ireland Journalism Awards in 2018 and 2019.

Jennifer O’Mahoney is a lecturer in social, abnormal, and forensic psychology at the Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT). Her research focuses on how victimology and trauma are remembered and narrated by survivors; the relationship between memory and cultural heritage in digital humanities; and activism and social change. Jennifer’s work emphasises public scholarship and the collaboration and co-production of knowledge. Jennifer is the primary investigator (PI) of the Waterford Memories Project (www.waterfordmemories.com), a digital humanities project which aims to contribute towards a better understanding of the system of Magdalene institutions that existed in Ireland through the gathering and study of testimonies and archival data.

Emilie Pine is professor of modern drama in the school of English, drama, and film in University College Dublin and editor of the Irish University Review (2017–2021). Emilie is director of the Irish Memory Studies Network, and PI of the major IRC New Horizons project on legacies of institutional abuse Industrial Memories (2015–19, see https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie, accessed 16 June 2021). She is the author of The Politics of Irish Memory: performing remembrance in contemporary Irish culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), The Memory Marketplace: witnessing pain in contemporary theatre (Indiana University Press, 2020), and the multi-award-winning Notes to Self: personal essays, which has been translated into fifteen languages.

Audrey Rousseau is an associate professor at Université du Québec en Outaouai specialising in the politics of memory. Her doctoral thesis analysed the contemporary struggles led by survivors of the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland. Interested in the production, circulation, and interpretation of social discourses on redress, reconciliation, and social justice, she reflects on the role of ‘memory entrepreneurs’ and different aspects of witnessing the past. She authored the chapter ‘Representations of forced labor in the Irish Magdalen Laundries: exploring contemporary visual art as potential sites of memory’ in Excavating Memory: sites of remembering and forgetting, Maria Theresia Starzmann and John R. Roby (eds), (University Press of Florida, 2016), where she ascribes art practices as sites of collective remembering.

Nathalie Sebbane is a senior lecturer at the University of Sorbonne-Nouvelle, where she lectures in British politics and Irish studies. After completing her PhD on unmarried mothers in Ireland (1838–1937), she redirected her research more specifically to the Magdalene Laundries. She specialises in Irish women's history, church–state collusion, institutional abuse, memory and history, and issues of identities in Ireland's new national narrative. She has published widely on institutional abuse, including articles and chapters in Études Irlandaises, 40.1 (2015), Ireland: authority and crisis, Carine Berbéri and Martine Pelletier (eds) (Peter Lang, 2015) and Études Irlandaises, 42.1 (2017). Her monograph, entitled Memorialising the Magdalene Laundries: from story to history, was published by Peter Lang in April 2021.

Lucy Simpson-Kilbane holds a BA in history from the University of Leicester and an MA in Irish studies from the University of Liverpool. She received the 2013 Institute of Irish Studies MA Dissertation Award for her thesis on Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the 2013 McAleese Report. She returned to the University of Liverpool to continue her research into modern responses to historical institutional abuse and was awarded a PhD for her thesis, which offered a critical and comparative analysis of the McAleese Report and the 2009 Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Ryan Report).

Speaking of IMELDA was a direct-action feminist performance group based in London (established in 2013). We worked to end the restrictions on abortion in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. We campaigned to repeal the 1983 8th Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland, which legislated that the unborn foetus had equal rights to life as the mother. We also campaigned for the extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland where, unlike the rest of the UK, abortion remained illegal under the 1861 Offences against the Person Act. We deployed interventionist-style performance to upend the pretence that Ireland was ‘abortion-free’ by highlighting that people travelled daily to Britain to access abortion. Our actions outlined how anti-choice laws in Ireland disproportionately affected migrant and working-class women due to travel restrictions and financial expense. We were a non-hierarchical, intergenerational collective, which includes former members of Irish Women's Abortion Support Group (IWASG), who supported women travelling to England for abortions between 1980 and 2000. The name Imelda was originally used as a codename for abortion by IWASG, whose members often wore a red skirt so as to be identified by women travelling. In reclaiming the name IMELDA and wearing red in our actions, we pay homage to previous reproductive rights activists. Our activities are archived on the website www.speakingofimelda.org

Eilís Ward is a political scientist with an interest in gender, sexuality, and political processes. She researched the politics of the sex trade for more than fifteen years, as a staff member in the school of political science and sociology NUI Galway, where her other research and teaching interests were international relations and Buddhist social theory. She has published widely on the area of sex work policy and politics and co-edited (with Gillian Wylie) Feminism, Prostitution and the State: the politics of neo-abolitionism (Routledge, 2017).

Foreword

Memory, violence, and the body

Marianne Hirsch

As someone interested in memory, memorials, and commemorations, I was thrilled to be invited to Dublin in 2016. How would the Easter Rising and the foundation of the Irish Republic be remembered and commemorated 100 years later, I wondered? How much of these memories lingers still, determining present-day Irish identity and self-conception, and how is the memory of these distant events inflected by subsequent conflicts and historical turning points? For the memory scholars Jan and Aleida Assmann, embodied or ‘communicative’ memory, passed down through stories and behaviours from grandparents to children and grandchildren, lasts at most 100 years. Subsequently memory is institutionalised in archives, museums, memorials, and ritual commemorations. That is indeed what I found in Dublin that October – images of the monumental patriotic commemorations from the previous April as well as historical exhibitions interrogating aspects of a foundational, if complex and contested, past. The ability to reckon with the past is in itself fundamental to its perpetuation into the future and the memorials and memory institutions I visited institutionalised memory in complex ways that serve present-day national interests. But, I found that official reckoning failed to reach more troubling aspects of the Irish past.

The inter-institutional conference organised by University College Dublin and NUI Galway to which I was invited, ‘1916: Home: 2016’, was dedicated to a different anniversary, one left out of the official list of commemorative occasions of that year. The year 2016 was also, it turned out, the twentieth anniversary of the closing of the last of the Magdalen Laundries. The widely attended feminist discussion was devoted to exposing a troubling and violent, though largely unacknowledged, Irish national past. Listening to and learning from these accounts of gender-based persecution, violent punishment, and incarceration, I wondered whether the sealed archives and official denials, the silences and secrets, the stigmatisation and shame associated with the Magdalen Laundries and the related Industrial Schools and Mother and Child Institutions, would not qualify the 100-year statute of limitations the Assmanns see in the transmission of communicative memory. Don't visceral memories of gendered violence communicated through a veil of secrecy and shame continue to linger in the very bodies of descendants, haunting their present? If past crimes are not acknowledged, how can they be institutionalised? And if they aren't, what do we, who hold that violence in the form of postmemories, owe the victims and their stories? How can gendered postmemory, viscerally circulating through women's bodies, be mobilised in the cause of restorative justice?

The essays in this collection respond to these questions and more. They reveal the complicities of the religious and state institutions that created the Laundries, mother and child institutions, and industrial schools and allowed them to persist as punitive carceral institutions. And they trace contemporary efforts to acknowledge the suffering of the women and children who lived and died there through legal investigations, literary and artistic works, films and television programmes, memorials, and oral history projects. What is more, they try to determine what might constitute forms of repair in our present.

Memory studies and memory practices have been slow to incorporate gender, and, especially, to recognise the particularities of how gender-based violence shapes personal and cultural memory. The case of the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland and elsewhere provokes an admission and examination of that failure, and this volume accomplishes just that. It is not just a question of adding forgotten or wilfully occluded stories to present-day understandings of the past, thereby enlarging known histories. It is a question of making space for the way women's bodies carry the legacies of violence and abuse and the vehicles through which women can begin to express those legacies, bring them out into the open without fear. It is a question of saying their names, of finding respectful ways of listening to their voices and stories without speaking for them. More than that, it is a question of finding ways of imagining the lives of the incarcerated women in their own present, with the hopes and dreams, the possibilities and futures that remained unlived.

Much work remains to be done, but this volume offers a beginning. In so doing, it adds a great deal not only to a missing chapter of Irish history, but also to an ongoing, transnational, feminist conversation about gender and memory.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their commitment to and engagement with the collection as it slowly emerged; thanks also to Manchester University Press for their enthusiasm and guidance, and to the anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive feedback. We would likewise like to thank our colleagues for their encouragement, and our universities, NUI Galway and University College Dublin, for the financial support that made the multidisciplinary academic and artistic project 1916: Home: 2016 possible. Most of all we are grateful to the survivors of institutions and violence who we have met during this process, and we pay tribute here to their inspiration, resilience, and expertise.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Commemoration, gender, and the postcolonial carceral state

Miriam Haughton, Mary McAuliffe, Emilie Pine

Over the past several decades, Ireland has begun the long process of facing up to its institutional history, and the legacy of abuse in Irish residential institutions during the twentieth century. This process has been marked by delay and denial, as state and church agencies prove, repeatedly, reluctant to acknowledge their roles in the abuse of children and women. Despite these delays, this process has led to widespread political and social remorse, expressed most publicly by the official state apologies to survivors of abuse in Industrial Schools, Magdalen Laundries, and Mother and Child Institutions.¹ Uncovering and acknowledging these histories has thus led to transformed social and cultural attitudes both to the Irish past and to the vulnerable groups who were contained for decades in Ireland's residential institutions.

This volume brings together a range of perspectives on the experiences and legacies of institutionalisation in Ireland, with chapters that attend to many different manifestations of the lives and afterlives of institutional systems. Throughout, contributors seek to understand how these systems operated and how, after their closure, they have been remembered by varied stakeholders from survivors to artists to politicians. The Magdalen Laundries provide a particular focus for the volume as they potently illuminate the distinct social experience for vulnerable women in modern Ireland. Furthermore, Magdalen history specifically brings to the fore the contested nature of institutional history, the particular attitudes towards women that saw them incarcerated (many for life), and the equally gendered attitudes that underpin the ways this history was first repressed and, more recently, commemorated.² The Laundries, however, did not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they were part of a broad network of institutions, including Industrial Schools and Mother and Child Institutions. Given the proliferation of institutions, it is startling to note that investigations of Irish institutional history have suffered from a lack of intersectionality – and so alongside an examination of the history and remembrance of the Laundries, this volume includes chapters that consider the wider institutional context, to demonstrate the broader dimensions of Ireland's postcolonial carceral history. It is key to understanding this history that we see these institutions, and the women and children who were incarcerated within them, not as exceptional cases but as expressions of social attitudes that viewed vulnerable members of the population as morally suspect, a ‘problem’ which the state, church, and citizenry responded to through mass institutionalisation. Contributors address these attitudes, both in chapters that address individual institutional histories and through analysis of the structures and histories of bodily autonomy in Ireland, such as the criminalisation of abortion and prostitution. Though these attitudes led to the incarceration of children as well as women, gender is a particular focus throughout the volume because of the ways that women's bodies bear a disproportionate weight of both social scrutiny and shame. These chapters’ analyses produce key insights into the normalisation of these gendered ideologies, as well as into the callous structures of institutionalisation that have characterised Irish approaches to otherness. Through this volume's inclusive approach, it is hoped that we can gain an understanding of how the Magdalen Laundries and other institutions operated, and have been investigated and remembered. By placing analysis of these varied institutions and social attitudes together in a single collection, the volume gestures to the deep relationality of these institutions – a story that has yet to be fully told. Furthermore, the volume's inclusiveness is mirrored by contributors’ mobilisation of multiple methodological and theoretical approaches from psychology and history to close readings of political, artistic, and oral texts, to accounts of site-specific and activist performances and autobiographical narrative. The breadth of this work draws attention to how agile critics must be in approaches to such a complicated and occluded history. Finally, the volume concludes by demonstrating the continuation of many of these attitudes through the institutionalisation of refugees and asylum seekers in the Direct Provision system, demonstrating that though much has been done to remember and recover Ireland's institutional past, this is not an issue that has been resolved. In our title, ‘legacies’ is thus an elastic term, acknowledging the multiple ways that traces of the Laundries and other institutions continue to mark Irish society and culture, not least through the ongoing and unmet need for restorative justice.

Why we need this work

As Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell attest, in the twentieth century Ireland's population was the most institutionalised in the world.³ Given the scale of Ireland's institutional history it is surprising to note that relatively little historical, social, or cultural academic investigation of these institutions exists. And yet these lacunae are also not surprising, given the shame and stigma attached to these institutions, the social and cultural silence surrounding them both at the time and since, and, indeed, the difficulty for researchers in breaking these silences given the absence of documentary and historical material because of lack of access to religious and other records. As Linda Connolly and Tina O’Toole argue in Documenting Irish feminisms, ‘[d]ocumentary research raises important issues relating to the way in which material is preserved – what is preserved, by whom is it preserved, and for what reason. The absence of material in an archive relating to a particular group or groups can tell us a lot about how a group as well as the archive was set up and constituted.’ ⁴ State investigations such as the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (2000–2009) in Industrial Schools, the official Inquiry into State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries (2011–2013) and the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (2015–2021) had access to both state and religious records, and built up copious archives of testimony. However, as contributors argue, these archives and testimonies were not always used fully (see

Chapters 3 and

4), and subsequent to the conclusion of the commission concerned they remain out of the public sphere. Ongoing calls that the records of the Magdalen Laundries and Mother and Child Institutions be transferred to the safekeeping of a national agency such as the National Archives of Ireland remain unheard, thus preventing historians, researchers, and scholars from researching and writing fuller histories, and denying access to both survivors and researchers for an ‘unreasonable length of time’.⁵ A major flaw also exists in the methodologies of the inquiries, as they were engaged to report on institutions as stand-alone centres for incarcerating women and children, rather than engaging with the ideologies which unified all these centres of coercive confinement and the practices of interaction between these institutions. The lack of access to records, and the lack of transparency in the official reports, hamper not only academic researchers but also the transition of this history from social knowledge into education – for instance, Ireland's institutional history is not currently included in school curricula. Given these absences, it is worth, first of all, reminding ourselves of the development and role of the institution at the centre of this volume, the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland.

History and context of the Laundries

Magdalen Laundries, or Asylums, predate the foundation of the Irish state. The original ideologies which led to the foundation of the Magdalen Asylum system in Ireland are neither uniquely Irish nor uniquely Catholic. As Frances