Laundry nun says manual work 'slavery'

A nun who managed a Magdalene laundry has said that “any manual work, particularly at that time, could be considered slavery”.

She was responding to a question about whether what took place at the 10 laundries in this State, the last one of which closed in 1996, was slave labour.

She continued: “Picking potatoes was slavery, cutting hedges was slavery, building walls was slavery, breaking stones was slavery. The women who work in our sex industry today in Ireland’s towns and villages, that’s slavery. Doing stuff you don’t want to do under duress.”

“Sister A” is one of two nuns who managed Magdalene laundries and who gave interviews which are being broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1’s The God Slot programme at 10 o’clock tonight. Neither is identified.

Sister A said she was glad the McAleese report was written, “because it kind of takes the lid off an era of Irish society that anybody under 60 years of age hasn’t a clue about.”

As to where money made in the launderies went, Sister B said, “Some of the Magdalene homes were housing up to 100 women – the money went into feeding them.”

Asked about compensation for the women, Sister A said: “I don’t know, they did get their keep. I think the emancipation I would search for, is for society to acknowledge that I was hard done by, that I shouldn’t have been locked up.” She felt talk of “€200,000 each is excessive. Do I need €200,000 at 70 or 80 years of age and what would it do for me? It is generally accepted that people who got redress, where the average reward was around €70,000, they wasted it. So what does redress and money do?”

“Sister B” said: “The popular perception is that we look as if we have wealth and that we made it on the back of the laundries and the media have whipped up an anti-Catholic forum for women. They are building castles in the air – it’s irresponsible journalism that is out there about the Magdalene laundries.”

Asked about the Taoiseach’s Dáil apology following the McAleese report, Sister A said it was “very important to remember that he didn’t just apologise for the State but he also apologised for the society. Because even if a woman did escape and jump the walls, she still wasn’t free from the stigma because the stigma was in society.”