The Old Ireland Was Bad train trundles on, and was given a great boost this week by none other than Oprah Winfrey. Her latest pick for her monumental book club is Small Things Like These by Ireland’s own Claire Keegan, and the promotional machine is in full swing, bringing the horrors of twentieth Century Irish theocracy to a brand new American audience.
“I had never heard of the Magdalene Laundries. The fact that this is a fictional story, written by Claire Keegan, but based on non-fictional situations. From 1922 to 1996 in Ireland, there was something called the Magdalene Laundries where so-called wayward girls would be taken and put into this convent of laundries and actually treated as slaves,” Oprah said, to the delight of Ireland’s literati.
I came across the clip on RTÉ Radio One, where Brendan Courtney was waxing lyrical about how wonderful it is that what “we’ve lived with for so long” is being brought to light on a global stage.
“Looking at this positioning continues, I think, to tell the world about the atrocities dealt with in the story,” Courtney said, adding later after playing the clip quoted above in which Oprah described the laundries, “Wow. It’s amazing. There’s something surreal, isn’t there, and sort of clarifying hearing Oprah describe that – something we’ve lived with for so long here. She uses the word ‘slavery’ as well…I think it’s kind of validating and cathartic”.
Lest you be in denial about the fact that there’s a religious element to the new Irish worldview that everything before the year 2000 was godawful on this godforsaken island, I think Courtney did a good job of lifting the lid on that illusion. It was “validating and cathartic” to hear the big American personality join in the great Irish Catholic roast.
Courtney – and no end of others who think like him – have an appetite for punishment and mortification that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Ireland of their imaginings.
In fact, you might say that the main difference between Ireland today and that of the modern mortifier’s imaginings is that whereas, according to the Church, Ireland was redeemably bad, it has now been declared irredeemably bad, and uniquely so. The release of the Small Things Like These movie, headlined by the man of the moment Cillian Murphy, has done much to export Ireland’s specific brand of badness, historically illiterate as it may be.
Americans, for example, have always thought fondly of Ireland. Our rolling green hills, thatched roofs and, indeed, even our quaint religiosity were things to be admired until recently. Now, the tolling of the church bell over idyllic rural towns and villages speaks only of the unspeakable:
“Small Things Like These starts and ends with the sound of church bells ringing. The first time you hear the bells, it establishes the atmosphere of the chilly, humble Irish town, its inhabitants busy preparing for Christmas. But when you hear those bells at the end, they sound very different, a reminder in the air of the Catholic Church’s dominance, which we have seen at work in this powerful, quiet film about Ireland’s shameful ‘tradition’ of the ‘Magdalene Laundries’.”
That, from Sheila O’Malley of one of America’s premier film review sites, RogerEbert.com.
In an effort to offer some guidance to those, both Irish and American, who’d be inclined to share Oprah and Ms O’Malley’s newfound view that Ireland alone – with the Church’s significant help – generated and maintained these centres of darkness, I offer the opening words of the 2013 McAleese report: “There is no single or simple story of the Magdalene Laundries.”
Take, for example, the fact – which would be news to Oprah and Ms O’Malley, as well as many of our own I’m guessing – that America had plenty of its own Magdalene laundries.
The Magdalene Society of Philadelphia, for example, was founded in 1800 by, among others, Quakers and Presbyterians, with the stated intention of “restoring to the paths of virtue those unhappy females who in unguarded hours have been robbed of their innocence”. This institution was followed by others in places such as New York and Kentucky.
One set of researchers argues that there were 38 such institutions in the US by the year 1900. They set this fact out in an article responding to the extensive coverage Irish Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes had received in American media, while their own heritage when untouched by comparison.
“Magdalene Laundries existed in the US nearly as long as they did in Ireland. They were at least as numerous in this country and just as brutal,” the authors wrote.
None of this is to dispute that abuses happened in these institutions – there’s clear evidence that they did. Rather, it is to beat a drum that Irish Independent columnist David Quinn and former editor of The Irish Catholic Michael Kelly have been at the forefront of beating – to much abuse – for over a decade now: that these institutions were neither uniquely Irish nor uniquely Catholic.
If Oprah were to read a little more widely, or O’Malley to watch a little more broadly, they might find that their own country is not without its laundry-shaped sins, nor are the UK, Canada or Sweden, to give a few more examples.
But we Irish were always exceptionally religious, and religion needs a creed. Our current profession holds that we were exceptionally bad, and that we can’t be any more because that was then and this is now. Nowhere to be found is that paralysing German fear that we could do it again, demonise some other group of people who happen to be out of social favour.
Slowly, the Americans are coming to think so too. Ireland’s green is coming to be replaced by grey, unless everybody wakes up from their misguided religious stupor and realises, as the McAleese report did, that “there is no single or simple story of the Magdalene Laundries”.