Cartoon history of nuns in Ireland needs to be challenged

The recent comments of two nuns who belonged to a congregation involved in running Magdalene laundries, broadcast on RTÉ on condition that the nuns or their order were not identified, have served to extend reaction to the recent McAleese report.

The confrontational tone of the nuns’ assertions – “all of the shame of the era is being dumped on the religious orders . . . the sins of society are being placed on us” – has been seized on by some as crass and self-serving and by others as offering a necessary corrective to a one-sided narrative.

The polarity of the responses is predictable and understandable, given the emotiveness around this subject recently. The narrative of the laundries with which we have become familiar is one of slavery, harshness and a legacy that includes now mostly elderly women sometimes overcome as they recount cruelties, lost youth, and mental and physical pain.

That the voices of the women incarcerated in the laundries were heard was essential but it is not in any sense to diminish their suffering or belittle their vindication by appealing for more history and less targeting of scapegoats. There is much in the McAleese report that can, will and should be contested and it is to be hoped that in time it will be rigorously dissected to test its accuracy and the logic underpinning its content and conclusions.

In his recent apology, Enda Kenny described the report as a “document of truth”, which is far-fetched; producing a report that would justify that description is an impossibility given the fragmentary nature of the evidence available. The methodology of the report is also open to criticism, particularly in terms of the weight attached to evidence.

To give one example, the contention in the report that the laundries were not profitable is in no way justified, given the acknowledgement that surviving statements of income and expenditure have not been independently audited, and that “the only available direct documentary record held by any of the religious congregations in relation to the organisations and entities which used the services of the Magdalene laundries operated by them relates to the laundry at Seán McDermott Street, Dublin”. That record consists of just a single ledger from the 1960s.

‘Profound hurt’
The report also gives prominence to the assertion of members of the congregations that they “have experienced a profound hurt in recent years . . . their position is that they responded in practical ways as best they could in keeping with the charism [power to inspire devotion], of their congregations to the fraught situations of the sometimes marginalised girls and women sent there by providing them with shelter, board and work”.

That defence can be contested, and nuns of course are not immune from embracing selfish distortions of reality, but it does deserve consideration and context. It is unfair and unhistorical to decide all nuns involved in this area were devoid of humanity, and the “bad nun” version of history needs to be challenged to generate a more nuanced approach to the relationship between State, society and sexuality, and in relation to power and gender in modern Irish history.