Unpaid Employees Sounds Better Than Slave Labor

The legacy of the industrial schools is forever an ugly stain on Ireland's history. The story's been told in The Leaven of the Pharisees, a novel that put a human face on an inhuman era.

For decades, children were taken from their homes and put in the dock, to stand trial for whatever crime would serve the purpose of the State and the Catholic Church. Largely the crime came down to being poor, or to having a widowed mother who was being courted. Church and State, working hand in hand, went about the business of stamping out immorality, and thousands of children were emotionally destroyed in the process.

The cost of lawsuits and financial settlements is astronomical.

Then there were the women, untold numbers of women who were guilty of being pretty. Guilty of being pregnant outside of marriage, even if that pregnancy was the result of rape. Guilty of being a risk to men, to inciting lustful thoughts in men's minds.

Thousands of women were put away in Magdalen laundries, to slave away for the Sisters of Mercy or the Good Shepherd Sisters. Hard, backbreaking labor, without hope of pay. Without a set term of incarceration, without a fixed date of release. Break one of the rules and a woman would have her head shaved as punishment, humiliation on top of cruelty. The nuns who ran the laundry would decide when a girl had sufficiently made amends for her crime.

Uncounted numbers of women died behind the high walls of the Magdalen laundries, their identities unknown because the nuns took away not only dignity, but names. The mass graves were discovered many years after the laundries had shut down.

Is the State not responsible for them as well? By what right could the Catholic Church incarcerate women without some regulation by secular law?

Minister for Education Batt O'Keefe has stated that the women who were locked away for failing to meet the high moral standards of their parish priest have no standing with the Residential Institutions Redress Board. They can't come to the government and demand financial compensation for their suffering.

The laundry-prison does not "come within the responsibility of the State," he said. "The State did not refer individuals to the Magdalen laundries."

Mr. O'Keefe looks on the former "employees" as a separate class, since some of the women were brought to the laundries by their family. The State had absolutely no control over that. Except for the part about regulations dealing with fair employment practices and workplace rules, but that's not the Department of Education's mandate.

However, there were plenty of women, guilty of being illegitimate and not fit to walk Ireland's streets, who went from the Magdalen laundry's nursery to an industrial school and then back to the laundry. They do fall under the aegis of the Redress Board, having been fortunate enough to spend a few years in a government-run institution.

The former Maggies could go to the nuns for their past-due wages, but the religious orders are hurting financially and have nothing to offer.

Except their prayers, of course. The nuns are doling out their prayers, but divine intervention won't do much good to a woman who was abused, incarcerated and institutionalized into a shell of a human being.