Ireland the nation, the Irish Catholic Church, unspeakably evil and cruel, are unable to acknowledge their corruption and iniquities, unwilling to step down from their pedestal of sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy:
From 1765 to the late 1990, about 30,000 women were incarcerated and deprived of normal lives for a youth mischief that their own church was not able to forgive. Supported by the State and the Church, the goal of theses institutions was to rehabilitate "fallen" women into society, but in reality, their return to freedom was seldom a fact.
In 2001, the Irish Government admitted that the Magdalene Laundries were places of abuse. In 2011, the United Nations Committee Against Torture urged Ireland to investigate the facts and truth of the government involvement.
Christianity and women. Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, especially Irish Catholicism, these patriarchal institutions, seem to really have it in for women.
They were the forgotten women of Ireland, kept under lock and key, forced to clean and sew, and to wash away the sins of their previous life while never being paid a penny. Some stayed months, others years. Some never left. They were the inmates of Ireland’s notorious 20th century workhouses, the Magdalene Laundries. And this week, with the publication of a government report into the dark history of the laundries, the women came that much closer to obtaining justice.
Elizabeth Coppin, abused by her stepfather, was sent to an orphanage run by the Irish Catholic Church on behalf of the state of Ireland. From the orphanage Coppin, while still a child, was passed into the network of Magdalene laundries and forced to work from eight to six every day except Sundays and bank holidays.
Coppin and others who suffered a similar fate, finding no redress within Ireland, were obliged to go to the United Nations Committee Against Torture (UNCAT). UNCAT put pressure on the Irish government to investigate and a certain Senator Martin McAleese, former member of the Irish Senate and a devout Roman Catholic, was asked to head an inquiry into what exactly had happened behind the convent walls, something on the order of a fox guarding a henhouse. The results of McAleese' investigation were inevitable:
Survivors were astounded to read in his report that "ill treatment, physical punishment and abuse… was not something experienced in the Magdalene laundries".
The Magdalene Laundries grew out of the Magdalene Asylums, the first of which was set up in 1765 as a short-term reformatory for "fallen" women. In 1829 the Catholic Church appropriated them and they began turning into the longer-term laundries, run by the Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Refuge and the Good Shepard Sisters.
One can only gasp at the irony of the orders of nuns named: Sisters of
Charity ...., Sisters of
Mercy, Our Lady of
Refuge, the
Good Shepard Sisters.
What Charity? What Mercy? What Refuge? Where the hell was the Good Shepard?
The victims of Charity, Mercy, Refuge and the Good Shepard, would like reparation, at the very least, an apology:
"Apologize for what?" demanded Sister A, her voice choked with emotion. "Apologize for providing a service? We provided a free service for the country . . . All the orders involved saw a need in society and they tried to respond to it in the best way that they could and there was a terrible need for a lot of those women because they were on the street, with no social welfare and starving. We provided shelters for them. It was the 'no welfare state' [a term often used to describe the Ireland of that era] and we are looking with today eyes at a totally different era."
Needless to say, the orders of nuns named are very, very wealthy orders, something not quite in keeping with their so-called "vows of poverty", wealth gained from the enslavement of those unfortunate women and children:
The four religious congregations that have refused to contribute to the compensation fund for residents of their former Magdalene laundries had combined gross assets worth €1.5 billion when the last comprehensive assessment of their financial resources was made in 2009.
Injustices visited upon these innocents for petty misbehaviors, stealing an apple because one was hungry, that sort of thing.
One must ask:
Can there be justice for women in Ireland?
In a nation where they would rather a woman die than terminate a pregnancy that could cause her death:
The death of an Indian woman who was allegedly refused an abortion even though her life appeared to her and her husband to be in danger has prompted Irish abortion rights activists to protest in several cities around the predominantly Catholic country. The public announcement on Nov. 14 of the woman’s death, which occurred last month in a hospital in the city of Galway, coincides with the release of a report commissioned by the Irish government into whether Ireland’s strict abortion laws should be liberalized.