Except that when the land had been sold to the developers, it emerged that it also held the graves of 133 women. They were 'fallen women' who had been incarcerated in the Magdalene Laundry that was attached to the convent. In effect buried alive, their graves had now been sold. Even in death, they were not safe from further insult.
Though the nuns did not believe that they had done anything wrong, their sale of the Magdalene graves turned out to be the beginning of a painful process of remembrance. The brutality of what had happened drew attention to a story that most Irish people had either deliberately forgotten or never known, a story that is told vividly and emotionally in The Magdalene Sisters, directed by the Scottish actor Peter Mullan, best known for his roles in My Name is Joe, Riff-Raff, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.
Mullan's film, which played to packed houses in Ireland last autumn and which opens in Britain this week, begins with the four main characters being introduced to life as Magdalene inmates by the superior, Sister Bridget (played by Geraldine McEwan), who explains how they will atone for their sins and be saved from eternal damnation by a regimented life of work and prayer. She explains that the institution is named after Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who repented before Christ and washed his feet in a gesture of self-abasement.
For Irish audiences, The Magdalene Sisters was the culmination of a long awakening to a reality that many of us would like to forget. After the scandal of the High Park graves, the public began to feel the immediate relevance of a word which seemed to have no real meaning in recent Irish history: slavery. Extraordinary as it may seem, the inmates of the Magdalene Laundries were, in effect, slaves, forced to work without pay at menial tasks even though they had committed no crime.
The remains of the High Park women were reinterred in Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery, their names listed on a stark limestone monument notable for the absence of religious symbolism. The dates of their deaths are given and they point to the amazing longevity of these institutions. The earliest is April 1858, the latest December 1994.
The institutions had an even longer history in Ireland. The first was established in Dublin in 1766. It was only in October 1996 that the last of the laundries closed. It was in Sean McDermott Street, 10 minutes' walk from Temple Bar, where boisterous, hedonistic young Dubliners live it up in trendy bars and restaurants. Within these institutions, around 30,000 women were imprisoned during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Initially, most were prostitutes and they stayed more or less voluntarily for no more than a year or two.
Gradually, however, the Magdalene homes came under the control of the Catholic Church. The conversion of the asylums into laundries that serviced both the clergy and commercial clients created an incentive to increase the workforce and to keep the women locked up for life. Unmarried mothers, having been separated from their babies, were bundled off to the laundries, usually with the collusion of families anxious to avoid the shame of having a 'loose' daughter or sister.
Mullan's film accurately describes the way that, in a climate of sexual hysteria, virtually any young woman could become a Magdalene. Not just conceiving a child out of wedlock but the suspicion that a girl might be in danger of having sex outside marriage was good enough reason to have her locked away. Often, the mere fact of being a defenceless orphan was sufficient proof that a girl was in moral danger and in need of rescue.
This kind of power was inevitably further abused by men in positions of authority. The laundries were a convenient dumping ground for servants raped by their masters and girls abused by priests or family members. Once inside, the women were silenced and, for the most part, institutionalised. Fed on a relentless diet of religious guilt and made to feel grateful for their rescue, many came to accept their lot.
It probably does no harm for British viewers to be reminded that the Magdalene institutions were not entirely a product of Irish Catholicism. There were similar establishments in England and Scotland. They evolved, moreover, from a peculiarly English Victorian cocktail of do-gooder moral activism and sexual hypocrisy.
The urge to rescue fallen women was a favourite pastime of self-satisfied Victorian grandees. So was the unquestioned assumption that women were to blame for their own fall. If they were sexual active, their worldly wiles ensnared helpless men. If they knew nothing about sex, their alluring innocence was a temptation that few red-blooded males could be expected to withstand. Whether they were participants in consensual sex or victims of abuse, they were a danger to themselves and others.
The misfortune of Irish women was that this Victorian virus inflected an institution whose power was on the rise through most of the twentieth century. The church had long been the focus of a suppressed Irish national identity so, in the new independent state that emerged in the 1920s, it held a position of almost unassailable power. Successive governments accepted almost without question that everything to do with morality, sex and the family was essentially the church's business.
Mullan's film arrived in a context where Irish people have been coming to terms with the implications of the Magdalene story. Mary Robinson, then President, unveiled a plaque in their honour in the middle of Dublin in 1996. A number of TV documentaries, Irish and British, featured the testimony of former inmates and exposed the cruelty and hypocrisy of the system.
Women artists, in Ireland and abroad, have been exploring the story. Patricia Burke-Brogan, a former nun, wrote Eclipsed, a powerful play set, like Mullan's film, in a Magdalene Laundry in the 1960s. Joni Mitchell included her own song, 'The Magdalene Laundries', on her album Turbulent Indigo in 1997 and rerecorded it in 1999 with the Chieftains. The American photographer and artist Diane Fenster created an installation on the subject in New York.
Maighread Medbh's poem 'The Price That Love Denied' was widely published:
I'm staring at a grave that I narrowly escaped Fifty years ago it might be me In a Magdalen asylum with my penitent's dress and my baby bouncing on nobody's knee
Nor is Mullan's film the first fictionalised treatment of the Magdalenes on screen. Last year, the BBC screened Lizzie Mickery's drama, Sinners, which told broadly the same story but also featured Anne Marie Duff, who plays Margaret in The Magdalene Sisters.
Why, then, did Mullan's movie have such an immediate impact in Ireland?
One reason is that it had the inestimable virtue of having been condemned by the Vatican after it won the Golden Lion award at last year's Venice Film Festival. Cardinal Tonini of Turin, who admitted he had not seen it, nevertheless said it was 'a film that does not tell the truth about the Catholic church'. The film critic of the Italian Catholic daily L'Avennire ostentatiously walked out of a screening in protest. The Vatican's daily paper, L'Osservatore Romano, called it 'an angry and rancorous provocatio'.
Far from discouraging Irish audiences, these denunciations added to the film's attractions. The Magdalene Sisters was released at the time when Irish people were enraged at the Catholic Church over revelations of a pattern of collusion by bishops in the sexual abuse of children by priests. The moral authority of the church hierarchy, which has been crumbling for the past decade, finally collapsed.
Another reason why The Magdalene Sisters worked so well in Ireland is that it is, in some respects, an old-fashioned Hollywood movie. This is not to say it glamorises the brutality of the institutions or dissolves into sentimentality. But it does belong in a familiar genre: the Hollywood prison drama. If you have seen The Shawshank Redemption, you know the broad shape of The Magdalene Sisters: unjust incarceration, sadistic cruelty, heroic endurance and eventual escape.
In cinematic terms, this limits its originality. But it also makes it watchable. Particularly in a small and relatively intimate society, revelations of this kind are extremely painful. The conventions of a familiar genre dull the pain a little. At least for an Irish audience, Mullan got the balance between truth and entertainment about right.
It matters, too, that Mullan moved beyond a crude sense of good inmates and evil nuns. The nuns, played principally by McEwan, Frances Healy and Eithne McGuinness, are a reasonably complex bunch. There is, moreover, a strong sense that they themselves are victims of a repressive system. The ultimate truthfulness of the film, indeed, has a lot to do with its exploration of the way one set of repressed people ends up repressing another.
Whether it will have the same impact beyond Ireland is another matter. As both the awards and the abuse garnered by The Magdalene Sisters in Venice have shown, it will generate strong feelings in Catholic countries. From an Irish point of view, there is a degree of discomfort in the prospect of British audiences viewing the film simply as an excuse for a sense of superiority.
Irish Catholicism is by no means the only culture in which female sexuality carries an automatic presumption of guilt. The sexual double standards of Britain in the Swinging Sixties may have been expressed far less brutally than in Ireland, but that does not mean that they did not exist. And the abuse of vulnerable people in institutions that claim to be protecting them is hardly an Irish phenomenon.
In many ways, the Magdalene Laundries followed the logic of a set of assumptions about gender and sexuality that had their roots, not in Ireland, but in English notions of respectability. In spite of the media culture that celebrates rampant, hedonistic sex, those notions have not disappeared entirely.
Mullan's film is useful, too, as a reminder that the repression of women by religious fundamentalists is not just an Islamic phenomenon. The difference between the kind of white, Christian, European culture that produced the Magdalene Laundries and the nastier forms of Islamic extremism is a matter of a few decades. Without acknowledging our own sins, as Mullan's film tries to do, we do not have the right to condemn others. Even devout Catholics surely cannot argue with that...
Fintan O'Toole
The Observer, Sunday 16 February 2003
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