A Question Of Sex, Gender And Class

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Frances Finnegan, above, historian and author of Do Penance Or Perish: A Story Of Magdalene Asylums In Ireland, top, was on Tonight With Vincent Browne last night.

She appeared with laundry survivor Gabrielle O’Gorman, Labour minister of state Kathleen Lynch, and Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald.

Vincent Browne: “I’ve been reading your book, Frances. Do Penance Or Perish: Magdalene Asylums in Ireland. The story is horrific. It’s far, far worse than what was presented in the McAleese report.”

France Finnegan: “Or in the..the report that’s just come out?”

Browne: “Yeah. You wrote this…how long ago?”

Finnegan:“It took me 21 years to write. I came to Ireland in 1979 (from UK) and started work on it. I was given access to the Good Shepherd magdalene order, to all their records. Then, unfortunately, the college in which I worked bought the Good Shepherd, so I was actually working in the place that I had been writing about. I too thought it was a very generous apology. What I would like to say is, I’m glad that it was made and it should have been made more strongly I think, on behalf of the Irish people, who gave the religious orders free reign to do exactly what they wanted to. They were not accountable, for all the period I studied, they were an enclosed order. People weren’t going in and inspecting these places. And everyone, even the taxi drivers I came in with (to the show) were saying ‘You’ve got to say: Everyone knew about what was going on’. They did. It was an uncaring nation. And I have to say this, writing that book, I found just how oppressive it could be – as an Englishwoman coming here, a historian, making this exposure, which was the first exposure of it, I couldn’t get it published, there was a lot of opposition to it being published. I had to bring it out myself and then three years later, Oxford University Press took it over. Right up until yesterday there was, it seems to me there’s been a whitewash and there is still. You know, they’re using nonsense language like residents for these people. That is ridiculous. They weren’t residents; they were prisoners. They were penitents. These houses weren’t homes and refuges in the sense, that is almost being made in that report. They were places where women were punished. They were penitentiaries and if you look at any newspapers accounts, up until the 1950s, there was no question about what they were, everyone knew. Irish society knew where to send their errant daughters, they knew where to get their washing done, they knew where to get cheap workers after they, if they managed to get out of those places. They knew about them, there was no doubt at all. And they did not care. And when they brought out the book…that book has been around now for what? How many years? If it came out in 2001?”

Kathleen Lynch: “12 years.”

Finnegan: “12 years. We did Sex In A Cold Climate. The Channel 4 documentary. It’s never been shown on Irish TV. Everybody was shocked and amazed by that. I’m sick of the Irish public being shocked and amazed. Every week they’re shocked and amazed. When that rather, well, fictitious film, The Magdalene Sisters, came out, I was in Cork at the premiere, because I was to do the documentary. The middle class audience stood up and gave it a standing ovation, I was amazed – two of the biggest magdalene asylums in the country were in Cork. This was a class issue as much as a gender issue. The women of the poor, the children of the poor were put into these places. It was middle class people who benefited from it. And now, I’ve got a nasty suspicion the religious orders are somehow going to get out of this, almost untarnished. And the State is responsible. That’s not the case.”

Gabrielle O’Gorman: “The nuns should pay.”

Finnegan: “Of course, and they’re pleading poverty. But in the period I looked at, which was up to the 1900 and then beyond if women were still alive, I was only allowed to go up 1900 on their sources, the State wasn’t involved at all. It couldn’t be. You really think that enclosed magdalene laundries allowed men in there as inspectors. They resisted, absolutely resisted factory and workshop legislation and were proud of it, I’ve read their annuls. I think there’s a bit of a whitewash still. And all this business about girls being in there for not paying tickets…

O’Gorman: “Or someone voluntary, which is not true.

Finnegan: “But I mean a lot of them were in there for being unmarried mothers. I met dozens of women. So what? You know? They were stripped of their sexuality by people who wanted to be celibate. I think some of them were bit deranged in fact, you know? They were obsessed with other people’s sexuality. Surveillance, watch them, watch them all the time, don’t let them do this…I’ve got all the books on it, that the founders of that order wrote, or you know, the rules for the direction of the classes. They treated those women, certainly up to the 1950s, well they were called children even if they 70 or 80 years of age, they were made to work…

O’Gorman: “That was a controlling…”

Finnegan: “Of course it was a surveillance and controlling. I think it was quite sick and warped – to want to strip…”

O’Gorman: “It was a crime: women against women, wasn’t it?”

Finnegan: “It was and they had these auxillaries. They never put men in these penitentiaries. For every woman that was in there for a sexual reason, there must have been a man somewhere around. This was a useful way of getting rid of unwanted women because there was still a fear of female sexuality I believe, well I know. Even the language used and now they’re trying to sort of lessen it again. I think it’s quite sad. And I must say, some of things in the inquiry, I’d have to take issue with. I’ve looked at it, but I want to…the numbers are wrong. I’m not happy about the graves. You know, when the book came out, and Sex In A Cold Climate came out, those graves were penitent plots. The next thing you know, they’ve suddenly got a few names on marble slabs. When I used to look at those graves, those plots, it was just a penitents’ plot with…they didn’t have names. Now it’s all the names they’ve put up. This has been a real, quick whitewash. And I’m afraid…Can I just say one little thing as an example of this? I worked in the regional technical college in Waterford, as I told you, just became WIT, and bought the Good Shepherd convent. Within a year of getting into that place, they set up a prize for students to, because it became the department…humanities department, sorry…music students to write a piece of music, arts students to write a picture, social care people to do an essay on 150 years, or 100 years, of caring in that institution. I tried to have that stopped. I thought it was such an insult to the women who’d suffered there, and the children on the other side in the industrial school. And yet they would not stop doing it. Even invited to go to the Good Shepherd nuns for a briefing. I think that was an enticement to the students, like a pied piper. Talk about propaganda and hiding history. What sort of nation is that? It was only the year before I retired that that was stopped. It went on for ten years. I think it was an outrage.

O’Gorman: “Don’t you think it was all part of this Hidden Ireland?”

Finnegan: “Well it was part of the cover-up because the nuns were in nextdoor. They’ve still got women in their care. These are women who gave evidence, a lot of them. How are they going to give evidence about the conditions when they’re still being looked after by those people. I’ve met some of them.”

Later

Finnegan: “The report says there was no evidence of any sort of abuse.”

Mary Lou McDonald: “Which is the most astonishing thing.”

Finnegan: “I find that rather strange because I’ve met so many women, in the course of doing this work and that is what I find the most frightening. Because there’s still seems to be…”

O’Gorman: “In denial.”

Finnegan: “Yeah. So when is this going to come out really? I can’t believe that all these women who’ve been talking to me have been telling lies. Of course not. The whole regime was intolerable. What normal woman would want to be in there, especially, after you’ve had a baby. You know, some of us might be mothers (in the studio), to have your baby taken away? How many women perhaps committed suicide. I think I would have done.”

O’Gorman: “Oh, many, many, many.”
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Finnegan: “Yeah. Well there was no evidence of that in this report. Suicides. People have said to me ‘how many women committed suicide?’ People who went in there, I’m talking about. I’ve wondered that myself.”
Later

Finnegan: (Directed at Kathleen Lynch) “But can I ask you one thing? When I was doing this (her book) what were the trade union movement doing? I gave a lecture to the national trade union movements, saying this is the most exploited labour force in the country. Where was the trade union movement? Where was the women’s lib movement? Where was the medical profession? I mean, in that report, they talked to doctors, sort of from 1990-2000. I would like to talk about doctors in the Fifties. I suspect, I’ve a horrible feeling, that if we still needed women to do our washing, they’d still be incarcerated. The domestic, I was only asked this on Women’s Hour, ‘why did it stop?’, the domestic washing machine stopped it I think.”

O’Gorman: “Exactly right. Yeah.”

Finnegan: “I coined that phrase. If we still needed them, they’d still be there. They’d still be incarcerated. Stripped of their sexuality, treated like whatever, virtual slaves. And we’d still be doing it. Isn’t that an awful thought.”

Browne: “The two issues that I just want to raise finally, with regard to this, and one is the McAleese Report itself. You have to admire Martin McAleese for the work that he did, given the resources that he had, but the committee that he chaired was a committee of insiders. And the remit was not to examine what had gone on in the laundries over the years, it was a very narrow remit. And no adequate at all, I would have thought, to do justice to the horrors that were inflicted on these women for so long.”

Finnegan: “Well I gave evidence to that. And I got the feeling they didn’t really want to know about it. They’ve seized anything out of there that kind of fits in with what…But I did feel that a lot of my evidence was almost, you know…well, they didn’t, you know, well it wasn’t used, was it?”

Previously: Omission To PreyMagdalene: A Conclusion

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