The Magdalene asylums, or Magdalene Laundries, were institutions in Ireland and elsewhere, where women were committed and forced to work unpaid, on the theory that it would reform their foul sexy ways. They were often run by nuns. Originally for prostitutes, they were used against unmarried mothers, rebellious school-skipping teenagers, and others in trouble with authorities. The Laundries ran from 1765 to 1996 in Ireland, and became infamous in the 1990s after several documentaries came out.
In Ireland.
The Irish government commissioned an inquiry, which took 18 months, and came out on February 5. Ireland’s Taoiseach (prime minister, pronounced TEE shock, approximately) Enda Kenny made a ghastly preliminary apology.
“To those residents who went into the Magdalene laundries from a variety of ways, 26 per cent from State involvement, I’m sorry for those people that they lived in that kind of environment.”
Sorry for? Sorry for?
Pity is not an apology. With great restraint, SorryWatch did not kick the stuffing out of this, because Kenny was due to address the Dáil on the subject in two weeks. We said nothing, only drumming our fingers on the tabletop in a significant way.
Kenny also feebly deplored the fact that there was stigma in being defined as “fallen women,” locked up, and put to forced labor. That stigma “should have been removed long before this and I’m really sorry that that never happened, and I regret that never happened,” he dodged.
This one’s in England.
“That is not a proper apology,” said Maureen Sullivan of Magdalene Survivors Together. Sullivan was 12 when her mother remarried, providing her with a predatory stepfather. Nuns convinced her mother to send her to a “lovely school” – a Magdalene Laundry where she never saw a school book again, and worked from 6 am to 9pm.
On February 19 Kenny had another shot at it in a long speech to the Dáil. In the intervening two weeks, he had spoken with many of the survivors.
“Today we acknowledge the role of the State in your ordeal,” said Kenny, citing the participation of social services reformatories, psychiatric institutions, county homes, the prison and probation service, and industrial schools in sending women to the Magdalene Laundries.
He saw “a cruel, pitiless Ireland distinctly lacking in a quality of mercy…. [W]hile every woman’s story was different, each of them shared a particular experience of a particular Ireland judgmental, intolerant, petty and prim.”
Kenny read some tragic quotes from women who were in the laundries, and said, “I believe I speak for millions of Irish people all over the world when I say we put away these women because for too many years we put away our conscience.
“We swapped our personal scruples for a solid public apparatus that kept us in tune and in step with a sense of what was ‘proper behaviour’ or the ‘appropriate view’ according to a sort of moral code that was fostered at the time particularly in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.”
Mary Magdalene, envisioned and painted by Hans Memling.
Today, he said, it’s a very different Ireland, with more compassion, empathy, insight, and heart. “[I]n naming and addressing the wrong, as is happening here today, we are trying to make sure we quarantine such abject behaviour in our past and eradicate it from Ireland’s present and Ireland’s future.”
The women in the Laundries, “are and always were wholly blameless.
“Therefore, I, as Taoiseach, on behalf of the State, the government and our citizens deeply regret and apologise unreservedly to all those women for the hurt that was done to them, and for any stigma they suffered, as a result of the time they spent in a Magdalene Laundry.”
More than the apology is required, he said, and described a review process to provide various kinds of assistance to survivors. A memorial is also to be built.
Well said.
Then he apologized again. “As a society, for many years we failed you. We forgot you or, if we thought of you at all, we did so in untrue and offensive stereotypes. This is a national shame, for which I again say, I am deeply sorry and offer my full and heartfelt apologies.”
It was a fine, fierce apology.“I thought it was wonderful. God bless him. Now I’m a proud woman today. God bless the Taoiseach,” said Marina Gambold, who was a 16-year-old orphan when a priest delivered her to a Magdalene Laundry in County Wexford.
Miriam Lord, writing in the Irish Times, describes the emotional reaction in the Dáil’s gallery, filled with former Magdalene women. “The women started to applaud. Louder and louder, some with their hands in the air. They stood and clapped the Taoiseach and they embraced and then they applauded themselves. It was such a happy, heartbreaking scene. And then the deputies began to applaud, rising too to their feet.
“Even the Ceann Comhairle [Speaker] knew there are times when rules just have to be broken. He stood and applauded too. Ushers were in tears. Civil servants in tears. Journalists in tears.”
Never tell me apologies are a superficial ritual of etiquette.
No, no indeed, pity is not an apology. This reminds me of the orphanages run in Australia where aboriginal kids were separated from their families to be put to work and made somehow less… aboriginal, for the sake of the state. When the state finally apologized, I could only have wished it could have been received in a manner as heartfelt and fierce as this. Instead, it seemed to be too little, too late.
Situations like these, when an apology comes after legislative error and people in power have essentially closed their eyes against it, these situations make me wonder if there’s ever a time an apology is simply too late.
Apologies are important symbols, and useful to the victims (when sincere) even when late, but they are just symbols, fundamentally cheap and facile. *Reparations* are deserved, expensive, difficult, and rare, and unlikely to be forthcoming in this, as in many similar situations. Thus may one judge the true remorse of the perpetrators.
I don’t agree that apologies are fundamentally cheap and facile. If that were true, we’d see a lot more of them. And we’d see a lot fewer people tying themselves in knots trying not to apologize, by resorting to cheats like sorry-if-anyone-was-offended, sorry-my-efforts-aren’t-appreciated, and sorry-you-feel-that-way. (Those are facile, if you like.)
Real apologies require that the person who is apologizing reflect, dig down, and understand what they did.
Reparations do seem to be forthcoming for the Magdalene survivors. Part of the Taoiseach’s speech was description of a reparation (compensation) scheme.
http://www.itv.com/news/update/2013-02-19/irish-government-confirms-magdalene-laundry-compensation/
It is clear from their response, that the women involved do NOT feel that apologies are “fundamentally cheap and facile.” If they were so facile it would not have taken the Teoiseach three times to finally get it right.
Important, and moved me to tears, especially after his initial hamhanded remarks. And look at that picture – I didn’t know Victor Garber was even Irish!