One story of one woman who was sent to a Magdalene Laundry at age 16 and never got out, but died there after 35 years of slavery.
Samantha Long’s mother Margaret Bullen was placed in Gloucester Street (now Sean McDermott Street) Laundry c.1967 and died 35 years later, never having been released into society and her own home. Margaret died of an illness known as Goodpasture Syndrome, a disease of the kidneys and liver – one of the causes is exposure to industrial-strength chemicals such as those used in the Laundries.
So that would be 2002. Just twelve years ago, Ireland – the Celtic tiger – was holding a woman in slavery until she died of a disease probably caused by the slave labor she did for 35 years. Twelve years ago. Ireland.
Margaret Bullen was sent to the notorious High Park industrial school and Laundry in Drumcondra at age three, then to a special school at age thirteen after she was certified mentally unfit for education, but fit for work. Then at around sixteen she was sent to the Magdalene Laundry where she was enslaved for the rest of her life.
(In Ireland, from c. 1967 to 2002.)
She became pregnant – twice – with Samantha and her twin sister Etta, and later with another daughter, while officially under the care of the Gloucester Street nuns. The circumstances of these conceptions are again shrouded in mystery but Samantha says her conversations in later life with her mother when they were reunited led her to believe that Margaret had been the victim of sexual abuse and predators several times.
There was no education, no education and I, you know, I honestly believe for a long time she didn’t know how she got pregnant, she just knew that somebody hurt her once and then she had babies. I really believe that. She didn’t make that connection, I know that for sure. She was no, she didn’t have a boyfriend, let’s put it that way. And that’s the politest way that I can say that.Some of the more harrowing details of Samantha’s testimony recount how her mother was denied society, education, wages and other basic rights for most of her life. This extract recalls Samantha and Etta’s first meeting with Margaret in the Gresham Hotel when they were 23 and had traced her as their biological mother. (Samantha and Etta were adopted by a loving couple in Dublin and later moved to Sligo in childhood.)
Margaret was only 42 at the time but looked much older. She was carrying a handbag but it was completely empty, because she didn’t own anything nor did she have any money. Samantha recalls:
And, she was just lovely, and she was asking extremely innocent questions like, she, it was the first time she ever had coffee and it was very exciting for her to have coffee and she hadn’t seen brown sugar before either and obviously in the Gresham there was brown and white sugar cubes on the table and it was all very fancy to her. And she was just overjoyed to be there and absolutely wowed by everything.
She looked, she looked like a pensioner. I couldn’t believe she was forty-two, I kept looking, I kept looking into her face to find a forty-two year old and I couldn’t, because she had the face of hard work, that face that you see in so many women that have just had to work too hard and have never had a rest and have never had anyone to take care of them or tell them to put their feet up, and who have just, just worked too hard. Because, as I said on the radio a few years ago, this was slavery and I don’t use that term lightly and I’m not an emotive person but slavery is a form of work for which you get no pay and you can’t leave and these were the white slaves of Ireland and they were never emancipated. And nobody stood up for them until now, until you guys (Justice for Magdalenes) did.
Those laundries were run by the church. The church pocketed the profits. That’s how the church treats people.
Updating to add: Justice for Magdalenes is here.
This shocks me.
It’s profoundly shocking.
Not new, at least to me, but shocking none.the.less.
It does put a different aspect on certain 19th century novels and parliamentary debates. See for instance the arguments over the Factory and Workshop Acts Amendment Bill in 1901
Such as by Asquith:
Ye shall know them by their love.
The religious orders who ran the laundries are refusing to compensate the victims of their slavery.
The religious orders who ran the laundries are refusing to compensate the victims of their slavery.
That would ruin their entire business model.
If the church had any sense of decency they would shutter the religious orders out of shame and sell everything to compensate the victims.
Same should happen to the UK Tory party: make it pay compensation to the victims of their Elm Guest House pedophile brothel that they covered up for years.
This is fucking heartbreaking, and way too close to home for me. My family is from Ireland a few generations back. My Mother was taken by Nuns 60 years ago and adopted to a violent family, her Mother was taken by Nuns and raised in an orphanage. It feels like a stroke of luck that it wasn’t my Mum carrying around that empty handbag and being worked to death.
Thank you for constantly amplifying this, Ophelia. These stories need to be told.
I’m pretty sure that even having an official category of “mentally unfit for education but fit for work” is a human rights violation. Seriously, why not just tattoo “SLAVE” on her forehead?
That’s a very good point.