Statement of Good Shepherd Sisters, 5
th
February 2013
             
We welcome the publication of this comprehensive Report on State Involvement and
other related matters in regard to the Magdalen Laundries.
We were part of the system and the culture of the time.  We acted in good faith
providing a refuge and we sincerely regret that women could have experienced hurt
and hardship during their time with us. It saddens us deeply to hear that time spent
with us, often as part of a wider difficult experience, has had such a traumatic impact
on the lives of these women.
We have noted in the Report that “the lack of information  given to some women,
as to why they were sent and the length of time they would remain”  was hugely
upsetting for these women. In truth most of us were  often  not privy to this
information, however, this should not have happened and we fully understand how
wrong and upsetting this must have been.
We have been meeting and will continue to meet these women personally, to listen  
to them compassionately and to discuss, if they so wish, their on-going concerns.
We are aware of the response from Minister Shatter today and agree that it will take
time to absorb and reflect  on this lengthy and significant Report. Hopefully its
publication, will provide much greater clarity and understanding of this entire issue,
and lead to reconciliation and healing.    
After the Homes closed some women remained with us and they are now part of our
Good Shepherd Family. A prime concern for these women at this time is that their
privacy will be respected and maintained.
We are grateful to Minister Shatter and all those who initiated the Inquiry. We thank
Dr. Martin Mc Aleese and his team for their painstaking research and commitment
which has given all of us a much clearer picture of the reality surrounding the entire
Magdalen issue.

Statement regarding The McAleese Report

The Religious Sisters of Charity welcome the publication of the McAleese Report commissioned by the Government to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen laundries.

We apologise unreservedly to any woman who experienced hurt while in our care. In good faith we provided refuge for women at our Magdalen Homes in Donnybrook and Peacock Lane.  Some of the women spent a short time with us; some left, returned and left again and some still live with us.

We co-operated fully with Senator McAleese and his Committee in the preparation of this report and made available all of our archival material.  Each individual woman, if she so requests, will be welcomed and provided with any information we have on file regarding her stay with us.  
ENDS

The Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge said: "It is with sorrow and sadness that we recognise that for many of those who spoke to the inquiry that their time in a refuge is associated with anxiety, distress, loneliness, isolation, pain and confusion and much more."

We have to thank David Quinn, head of the Iona Institute, for pointing out three significant facts that have been missing from the discussions on the Magdalene laundries.

First, the Magdalene homes were not an invention of the Catholic Church.

Second, the Magdalene homes did not exist only in Catholic Ireland. For example, the Magdalene Society of Philadelphia was established in 1800 by, among others, the Quakers. In the north of Ireland, the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterians ran Magdalene homes.

Third, the laundries – or if you want to use the name I prefer because it is more accurate, the industrial workhouses -- were not established in Ireland to punish unmarried mothers. The first Magdalene asylum was established in Ireland in 1767 by a Protestant benefactor as a home for ‘penitent prostitutes.’ In fact, we still don’t have figures as to just what percentage of the inmates at the workhouses were unmarried mothers.
...

If you think being locked up in something called a Magdalene Laundry was bad, imagine being confined to something called the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded. Such state institutions were sterilising those who had the misfortune to be listed as ‘mentally deficient.’

Two-thirds of the 7,325 sterilised in solid-Baptist Virginia were female.

Small footnote: almost the only opposition to this policy came from the Catholic Church, alas a weak force against the Protestant ‘science’ of eugenics.

The point I am making is that modern State brutality to stop females breeding at will was in no way unique to Ireland and certainly not unique to the Catholic Church.
...

Are factual inaccuracies in movies justified by role in highlighting issues?
Saturday, February 9, 2013

JOE HUMPHREYS
McAleese report raises questions about accuracy of how Magdalene laundries have been portrayed
A feature of the campaign for justice for the women of the Magdalene laundries has been the role of historical dramatisations on stage and screen.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a series of plays and movies about what went on behind the institutions’ walls. These played a major part in shaping public opinion as well as bringing the issue to international attention.
None has had greater reach than The Magdalene Sisters, the 2002 film directed by Peter Mullan which won the coveted Golden Lion award on its release at the Venice Film Festival.

It tells the harrowing story of four teenage girls admitted to a laundry where they experience or witness routine physical and sɛҳuąƖ abuse by nuns and a priest. Like many dramatisations, it depicts the laundries as profitable, money-making rackets, and shows the women subjected to various indignities including head-shaving.

But the question arises from this week’s report: how accurate were such narratives?
A striking feature of the McAleese report is the number of women who spoke positively about the nuns, and strongly rejected allegations of physical abuse. Against this, the vast majority reported psychological abuse. One woman said she was sɛҳuąƖly abused during her time in a laundry by a fellow “Magdalene” who had been in the institution for some time.

The report says the 118 women it spoke to comprises a “small sample”, and is “biased towards more modern years” but it remains the largest single collection of such testimony to be published.
Criticism from the women may have been tempered by the fact that half were living in nursing homes under the care of religious orders. However, there is no escaping the fact that the report jars with some popular perceptions.
“We have always said the one-size-fits-all model of survivor does not apply,” says James M Smith, a leading researcher on the laundries and a member of the Justice for Magdalenes advisory committee.
Of Mullan’s film, he says: “I have said then and since, no survivor I have spoken to has alluded to women suffering sɛҳuąƖ abuse in the Magdalene laundries. They were predominantly female and run by female religious; sɛҳuąƖ abuse was endemic in male institutions.”

He notes survivors have also denied that women were stripped naked and examined by nuns, as depicted in The Magdalene Sisters. However, the use of hair cutting as a punishment is confirmed by a set of laundry “house rules” that Dr Smith discovered.

This docuмent is included in the McAleese report, along with testimony of three women who said they had either experienced or seen hair-cutting as a punishment. Head-shaving was reported only once, however, in a case of head lice.

Dr Smith, who is associate professor in the English department at Boston College, has previously critiqued The Magdalene Sisters in academic papers, saying it “reduces most of the nuns on the screen to mere stereotype”. He has also argued the film “replicates the critical shortcoming” of the work of a previous Channel 4 docuмentary, Witness: Sex in a Cold Climate, by deciding “neither to solicit nor to incorporate the religious orders’ version of the Magdalene story”.
Patricia Burke Brogan, the former novitiate whose groundbreaking play on the issue, Eclipsed, was first staged in 1992, says she too has harboured concerns about some of the dramatisations.

“I never saw any physical beating-up. I know in some places the women beat up one another because they were trapped and frustrated.” But, she says, the critical issue is that “the women had their freedom taken from them”.
Of Mullan’s film, she adds: “I could not stand it. Some of the parts were really over-the-top. The nuns were monsters.” To a lesser extent, she says, other films have contained “inaccuracies”, including those showing women having babies in laundries, something which, she says, would not have occurred.
Mullan’s agent said he was unavailable for comment this week but the director has previously denied claims that he exaggerated abuses, saying rather he “did the opposite”.

Campaigners believe the role such movies played in highlighting the issue justified any artistic embellishment, and this view is shared by Louise Lowe, director of the award-winning play Laundry, who says The Magdalene Sisters “served an important function at the time”.
Of her own work, which was staged at a former Magdalene asylum in Dublin, she says: “We make art; we are not historians or sociologists. We did not make up anything, which probably made our work a lot harder. We spoke to families and people who had stories or memories.”

She says an important element of Laundry was “acting as a witness” and exploring the responsibility of people outside of the church – an issue that resonates with this week’s report. “The more we researched the more we realised it was too simplistic to separate those things.”

Dr Smith describes Eclipsed as the event that “started off” the docuмenting of what happened in the laundries, and he notes the recently launched UCD Magdalene Oral History Project would be a natural conclusion. Whatever about artistic depictions of the laundries, he adds, “the survivor testimony has been consistent”.

Ed West12:01AM GMT 05 Mar 2008
As two 'mis lit' memoirs destined for the bestseller lists are revealed to be works of fiction, Ed West reports on the almighty backlash against a classic of the genre
It was a childhood tale of woe that touched the public's heart. Kathy O'Beirne's 2005 memoir, Kathy's Story: A Childhood Hell Inside the Magdalene Laundries, painted a relentlessly grim picture of growing up in 1960s Ireland. Entitled Don't Ever Tell in Britain, it shifted 400,000 copies, making O'Beirne the second best-selling Irish non-fiction writer of all time, after Frank McCourt, whose Angela's Ashes had been no laugh-a-minute either.

O'Beirne told of being tortured by her labourer father, experimented upon in a psychiatric hospital, and raped by no fewer than four priests and a policeman. Then there was her spell in a Magdalene laundry, one of Ireland's notorious Church-run homes for "fallen women", where, aged 14, she gave birth to a daughter. A reviewer at the time wrote: "Her story is so horrific, it is almost unbelievable."

Which, upon reading the book, was the reaction of Hermann Kelly, a Derry-born journalist. "Alarm bells started ringing," he says. "Even in the introductory chapter, every single thing is black and white. If you were a betting man, the statistical probability of someone having so many terrible events in their life stretched credibility."

According to Kathy's Real Story, Kelly's exposé of O'Beirne's book, published in the UK next week, Don't Ever Tell is not so much misery memoir as a great work of fiction.

The key to O'Beirne's success was the public's fascination with the Magdalene laundries, which are to misery memoir writers what the SAS is to Andy McNab. Established in the 19th century and finally closed in 1996, the laundries, as depicted in the 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters, were notorious for Dickensian harshness and cruelty. The nuns who ran them historically, according to Kelly, were "Catholic Frankensteins, or Daleks out to exterminate all signs of life and love".
O'Beirne wrote: "I was 12 years old and I had just been delivered to hell... the Devil himself could not have dreamed up a better hell than the Magdalene laundry."
Except that the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of High Park have no record of O'Beirne; and they were certainly meticulous record-keepers. As Kelly says, their archives are "complete and so comprehensive that one woman's two-day admittance was recorded".
O'Beirne simply didn't exist in the files; the laundries did not admit girls as young as 13, or pregnant women. Even former Magdalene residents have said O'Beirne's account rings false. One former friend suggested O'Beirne had seen The Magdalene Sisters, and now "seems to think it's her".
In response, O'Beirne's co-writer, Michael Sheridan, could only say he spoke to a woman who remembers being in a Magdalene home with Kathy. "She died in a psychiatric hospital some time after we spoke," he said. "She is another victim, just like Kathy."
Nor is there any record of "Annie", O'Beirne's child who apparently died from bowel disease at the age of 10. She claims it was because the birth was hushed up. Kelly recently offered €1,000 to anyone who can find proof of Annie having existed. He does not expect to be getting out the chequebook any time soon.
Kelly's exposé could be the start of a widespread backlash against misery literature, a genre kick-started by Angela's Ashes in 1996, and which took off globally four years later with A Child Called It, Dave Pelzer's account of growing up with an alcoholic mother who beat, starved, stabbed, burnt and force-fed ammonia to him. "Inspirational memoirs", the polite term for this type of book, now account for nine per cent of the British book market, shifting 1.9 million copies a year and generating £24 million of revenue for the publishing industry. HarperCollins recently admitted to a 31 per cent increase in annual profits thanks to "mis lit".
"Mis lit" is not an entirely new invention. The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, Or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life in a Convent Exposed, published in 1836, suggested that the Sisters of Charity in Montreal were forced to have sex with the priests next door, who then baptised and strangled any offspring. Unable to distinguish reality and fantasy as a result of a brain injury as a child, Monk had never been in a nunnery. She was, in fact, a prostitute who had spent her early years in a Magdalene laundry. "At least she'd been in one," says Kelly, drily.
Among the most disturbing recent examples of the genre was Damaged by Cathy Glass, which recounted the story of a foster mother and her ward, Jodie, a seven-year-old who had been horribly abused.
But even that was a picnic compared with Stuart Howarth's Please, Daddy, No, which recalled how his father repeatedly raped him and forced him to eat pigswill, among other things too hideous to mention. Stuart is then abused by paedophiles, becomes a homeless, cocaine-addicted arsonist, and ends up killing his father and going to prison. It sold 13,000 copies in its first week.
So why has other people's misery become such big business? One of the biggest factors is the impact of the rise of the supermarket: eight out of 10 misery memoirs are bought at the checkout, mostly by women (who make up 85 per cent of the market) who would not visit a bookshop but buy "true life" magazines such as Pick Me Up or Chat, which feature stories about abusive fathers, cheating husbands and distasteful diseases.
With this demand, it is not surprising that some have been tempted to stretch the truth. Hollywood scriptwriters would have pitched the Belgian writer Misha Defonseca's 2005 memoir, Surviving With Wolves, as "Schindler's List meets The Jungle Book". This yarn about a six-year-old Jєωιѕн girl searching for her missing parents on a 1,900-mile trek around occupied Europe - during which she kills a nαzι officer and is given shelter by packs of wolves - was a complete fabrication.
In a statement last week, Monique De Wael (Defonseca's real name) admitted she had made it all up. Her parents weren't resistance fighters. She didn't spend four years wandering alone across Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Yugoslavia, through Italy across the Alps to France and back to Belgium. She isn't even Jєωιѕн.
And yet the fabricated accounts keep on coming. Last week, Love and Consequences by Margaret B Jones was published in America, about growing up in gangland LA and selling drugs at the age of eight. But the book was withdrawn on Monday after Jones - real name Margaret Seltzer - admitted that while many of its details were based on friends' experiences, they were not her own.
True or not, supporters say these books inspire and help us to empathise; others say it is Schadenfreude. The psychologist Oliver James has even suggested there might be some hidden erotic motive.
"Misery literature is huge, especially in Ireland," agrees Kelly. "The public loves this description of a cold, miserable Ireland, where it always rains and priests are always around, abusing someone."

But what makes the O'Beirne saga so troubling, Kelly believes, is that it fuels Ireland's obsession with clerical sex abuse, and the abuse-claim industry. O'Beirne herself accused Fr Fergal O'Connor, founder of the homeless hostel Sherrard House, of raping her in the 1970s. The investigation took a year, during which the 77-year-old University College Dublin professor was prevented from visiting his own workplace. Yet Fr O'Connor was virtually crippled by arthritis when the alleged crimes took place, unable even to shake hands because of the pain, according to a friend. The priest was exonerated two days before his death.
Mainstream Publishing, which published Don't Ever Tell, is steadfast in its support of O'Beirne's book. "We have made our own investigations, and are convinced this is a legitimate account of the harrowing experiences endured by a young girl whose life has been embittered by the abuse she suffered at the institution in which she was incarcerated. We have no doubt about Kathy O'Beirne's account of these events. Mr Kelly's version is his own and, in our opinion, does not relate to any sort of reality."

O'Beirne's own feelings about Kelly's investigation became clear on Irish TV last November, when he pulled out her birth certificate and school records, showing she had lied about her age, education and alleged adoption. O'Beirne, furious, hit him. As he commented at the time: "She can beat my back, but she can't beat my book."