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Child Item

The Magdaline laundries

ilovesleep

I wanted to watch a movie tonight and went to my dvd collection and picked out the magdaline sisters movie.

I know it's only a movie but it's based on true events and it's probably not a patch of what went on in those laundries.
Truly shocking

After my movie, I browse online for a bit on my mobile and I stumble across a newspaper piece from the journal.ie, I think, about the magdaline laundries from two days ago.

More shame is due to be brought upon Ireland again next week. On Tuesday the 5th feb, a tribunal report on the madgaline laundries will be issued. I didn't know this. Last laundry/work-house was closed in 1996. And it's taken 17 years for a report. And that's it. Just a report. Any compensation or justice for the poor women tortured in those laundries?

Another disgrace for Ireland.

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Mouldy Mary

Grayson wrote: »

Great, now you're calling people liars.

I believe you're thinking of when people can vote. Not when they reach an age where they were considered independant.

Wrong again. The voting age was reduced to 18 in 1972. The age of majority continued to be 21 for about 12 years afterwards. A person was not considered independent at 18. Legally the parents could have the wages of their minor child paid directly to them by the employer. Parents were very strict on their daughters up to the age of 21.

Grayson

Mouldy Mary wrote: »

Wrong again. The voting age was reduced to 18 in 1972. The age of majority continued to be 21 for about 12 years afterwards. A person was not considered independent at 18. Legally the parents could have the wages of their minor child paid directly to them by the employer. Parents were very strict on their daughters up to the age of 21.

And this was the case with anyone under the age of 21 who had no parents? Because now the age is 18, but from 16 you'd be able to live independantly.

Any links?

Milk & Honey

Grayson wrote: »

And this was the case with anyone under the age of 21 who had no parents? Because now the age is 18, but from 16 you'd be able to live independantly.

Any links?

A 16 year old can't live independently. They can't enter binding contracts (other than for necessaries) and can't get a passport without parental approval.
The age of majority is 18 as defined by the Age of majority Act 1985.

http://www.bailii.org/ie/legis/num_act/1985/0002.html

Czarcasm

Milk & Honey wrote: »

A 16 year old can't live independently. They can't enter binding contracts (other than for necessaries) and can't get a passport without parental approval.
The age of majority is 18 as defined by the Age of majority Act 1985.

http://www.bailii.org/ie/legis/num_act/1985/0002.html

You'd be mistaken there. I was living independently at 16.

Milk & Honey

Czarcasm wrote: »

You'd be mistaken there. I was living independently at 16.

Maybe, but under legal disabilities.

Doc Ruby

Jimoslimos wrote: »

As a maturing nation we should take note and accept a degree of collective responsibility for what occurred and strive to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Who's this 'we' thing paleface. You're one of these people who always has to weigh in on Ireland-related threads, and when the subject of collective responsibility for English atrocities arises like what was done to the Mau Mau in Africa in the 1950s it's a unified chorus of 'but we didn't do naffin'.

Also, why does the OP not say a single word about the catholic church, which was the main entity behind not just the laundries but a lot more including child abuse on an industrial scale. DeValera made some fair howlers but his alliance with the church was one of the worst, leaving lasting scars on this country.

I know where the finger needs to be pointed when blame is assigned. The sooner we boot these holy rollers, of every stripe, the happier I will be.

steddyeddy

Mouldy Mary wrote: »

You are making that up. The age of majority was 21 at that time. Turning 18 was of no significance.

In fairness the b1tchs who ran the laundries hardly had any respect for the law so that makes no sense.

Duggys Housemate

Doc Ruby wrote: »

Who's this 'we' thing paleface. You're one of these people who always has to weigh in on Ireland-related threads, and when the subject of collective responsibility for English atrocities arises like what was done to the Mau Mau in Africa in the 1950s it's a unified chorus of 'but we didn't do naffin'.

Yes, the killing of 20,000 - 300,000 people in a de-coninization effort which included mass rapes, sodomizing of black people with bottles, torture, disintegrating people by dragging them behind land rovers, concentration camps, and ethnic cleansing. Cant be blamed on the Irish, or Catholicism, so it had better disappear from history like a bad dream.

The guilt of nearly every single European power is far greater than ours - France is bombing Africa once again, and expect some atrocities there before that is over, but we actually investigate our minor faults - in comparison.

We should, but lets not feel too guilty.

Czarcasm

Milk & Honey wrote: »

Maybe, but under legal disabilities.

I'm not being funny M&H but "legal disabilities?". I didn't comment on the passport because at the time I never needed one. This was 20 years ago, but at 16 I was able to sign a rental agreement for a flat, I was employed in Supermacs, and I was still attending secondary school, independent of my parents.

Duggys Housemate

Czarcasm wrote: »

I'm not being funny M&H but "legal disabilities?". I didn't comment on the passport because at the time I never needed one. This was 20 years ago, but at 16 I was able to sign a rental agreement for a flat, I was employed in Supermacs, and I was still attending secondary school, independent of my parents.

That seems a bit off, given the law at the time. But landlords in Ireland are often prepared to turn a blind eye.

suicide_circus

Jimoslimos wrote: »

It was awful shocking what went on in the laundries and elsewhere in Ireland. As a maturing nation we should take note and accept a degree of collective responsibility for what occurred and strive to ensure it doesn't happen again.

However the desire for self-flagellation and self-hatred is overboard and dare I say it, a bit Catholic.

eh....NO.

I will take no responsibility, collective or otherwise, for the ****ing magdaline laundries.

Czarcasm

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

That seems a bit off, given the law at the time. But landlords in Ireland are often prepared to turn a blind eye.

Even now more than ever Duggy. And I wasn't the only one at the time either, but the other girl the same age as me also working in Supermacs, renting elsewhere, left school at 16 after her Junior Cert.

mikemac1

Nodin wrote: »

youtube

I was replying to the post above mine by Grayson which mentioned hospitals

Good Shepherd Convent in Cork was not a hospital

My fault, I didn't quote the poster above me so maybe it wasn't clear.
Or maybe some skip through the thread

Grayson

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

That seems a bit off, given the law at the time. But landlords in Ireland are often prepared to turn a blind eye.

From wiki just to define the term.

The age of majority is the threshold of adulthood as it is conceptualized (and recognized or declared) in law. It is the chronological moment when minors cease to legally be considered children and assume control over their persons, actions, and decisions, thereby terminating the legal control and legal responsibilities of their parents or guardian over and for them............
.....The age of majority is a legally fixed age, concept, or statutory principle, which may differ depending on the jurisdiction, and may not necessarily correspond to actual mental or physical maturity of an individual..............
........Age of majority should not be confused with the age of sexual consent, marriageable age, drinking age, driving age, voting age, etc., which all may sometimes be independent of, and set at a different age from, the age of majority.

Not being of age of majority doesn't mean that a person with no parent (like the first poster mentioned) couldn't live independantly and have a ward.

It al;so doesn't mean that a 16 year old can't work and can't rent a place.

Milk & Honey

Grayson wrote: »

From wiki just to define the term.

Not being of age of majority doesn't mean that a person with no parent (like the first poster mentioned) couldn't live independantly and have a ward.

It al;so doesn't mean that a 16 year old can't work and can't rent a place.

They can work but the parents are entitled to the wages. They can only rent a place if it is necessary. Most unlikely. They also can't consent to medical treatment. A 16 year old needs some person in loco parentis in order to fully function.

Madam_X

Solair wrote: »

The direct impact on the victims was horrendous but I think what compounds it even more is that Ireland became independent claiming to stand against all of this kind of thing.

We were supposed to be a republic which stood for liberty, equality, freedom and all of those positive things. Instead, we paid lip service to all of those things and handed power over to some of the most right-wing, oppressive, twisted, power-hungry, freedom-hating institutions and individuals that we could find.

Not only was this a terrible thing that destroyed lives, I think it actually destroyed the country.

The main thing we need to do is recognise what happened, stand up for the victims and do something to ensure that it never happens EVER again.

Maybe we need a new constitution, maybe we need a whole new system of Government but we cannot just go on as-is.

For example, why do we have our legislators in the Dail/Seanad and local authorities saying prayers before every meeting?

http://www.oireachtas.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=/documents/a-misc/prayer.htm

How the **** is that compatible with anything other than a christian theocracy? It's certainly massively out of place in a functioning republic.

FFS ! It's a meeting of a parliament not a mass!

We need to stop looking at this country through green-tinted glasses and start addressing some of the massive problems with how we do things.

How about having TDs/Senators etc swear an oath to carry out their jobs only in the interest of the people instead of praying and basically swearing allegiance to the church!?

We cannot keep handing power over to religious organisations like this. It's crazy!

Until we run this country as an actual democracy i.e. no more corporatism, no more vested interests influencing everything from the inside, we will always have abuses of power be they horrendous physical attacks on citizens like these institutional abuses or massive financial stuff like the banking mess.

People don't just hand over power knowing it will be abused. They don't have crystal balls. The blame lies with those who abuse the power, nobody else. I hate this "We" voted them in stuff; "we" get the politicians "we" deserve. Why the need to shift the blame? It's lazy and unfair.

Doc Ruby wrote: »

Who's this 'we' thing paleface. You're one of these people who always has to weigh in on Ireland-related threads, and when the subject of collective responsibility for English atrocities arises like what was done to the Mau Mau in Africa in the 1950s it's a unified chorus of 'but we didn't do naffin'.

Also, why does the OP not say a single word about the catholic church, which was the main entity behind not just the laundries but a lot more including child abuse on an industrial scale. DeValera made some fair howlers but his alliance with the church was one of the worst, leaving lasting scars on this country.

I know where the finger needs to be pointed when blame is assigned. The sooner we boot these holy rollers, of every stripe, the happier I will be.

In fairness, Jimoslimos means let's not let it happen again. He even said himself the self flagellation by some Irish is ridiculous.
The OP is always whinging about Ireland and the Irish (despite being Irish herself and living here). Nothing new there.

ilovesleep

Madam_X wrote: »

The OP is always whinging about Ireland and the Irish (despite being Irish herself and living here). Nothing new there.

Ireland faces a lot of problems and issues. We have a government that only care about themselves and many people that are apathetic sitting idly without giving a toss for their country and what we leave behind for the future and the children of today.
You wrote that I'm always whinging about Ireland and the Irish. What problem do you have with me questioning things? If it was up to you I and others here on boards that don't hold your views and opinions would be sitting passively and meekily by handing up whats demanded of us from our leaders.

wolfpawnat

I love how people think if the nuns, priests and brothers are old, they should be exempt from paying for their crimes, they kept women against their will, they enslaved them for the profit of their church and they treated them as subhuman. Not to mention the amount of women who gave birth in laundries who were not in the outside world for a day of their adult life, there were only a few men around them in their prison-esque life and that was the priests!!!!

http://www.thejournal.ie/margaret-died-of-her-slave-related-injuries-a-magdalene-daughter-shares-her-story-780887-Feb2013/

A woman kept in a laundry since she was 2 and gave birth to twins....... I am going to say it was NOT the immaculate conception there!

I know older people say that "sure they were just little tramps" so what if they were promiscuous, Christ, it is not a reason to remove their human rights. And that was what these places were, an infringement of their basic human rights.

I had an old bítch tell me recently I would have been put in there years ago for having my son out of wedlock, I reminded her that she too availed of the greater life and lifestyle we are lucky to have these days and if she wants to have those old-fashioned views, she should live as a woman of her age at that time would have, with little or no pension and she could kiss her free pass and medical card goodbye, that shut the old coot up!

These girls deserve justice and the right to know where their children were sent, regardless of the age of the nuns now. I hate to Godwin, but there were people being tried for Nazi war crimes in 2009, when a man was 89 years old! (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/29/nazi-crime-demjanjuk-trial-begins )These nuns should be treated the same. They did not care about these girls, part of me thinks we should show them the same lack of respect!!!!

clairefontaine

It should certainly be included in the secondary school history curriculum.

PopePalpatine

clairefontaine wrote: »

It should certainly be included in the secondary school history curriculum.

It is briefly mentioned in the leaving cert history syllabus, in a section about Ireland in the 1950s.

This report is making me dread one thing: the inevitible reaction of John Waters or one of the Iona spokespeople which will try to minimise this disgusting abuse of human rights.

Solair

clairefontaine wrote: »

It should certainly be included in the secondary school history curriculum.

The problem is that it's almost current, some of these women were *STILL* in those institutions in the mid 1990s!!!!

On the one hand we were talking about parity of esteem and all sorts of positive things in the NI peace process and working towards 'prosperity and fairness' in social partnership, while turning a complete blind eye to this kind of thing.

Sadly, the state's elite seems to be full of complete hypocrites even if many of the people aren't necessarily so.

While the institutions were certainly the perpetrators, the state authorities and any adult who had eyes, a mouth, an ability to write / speak about it and didn't was complicit in it.

I am utterly sickened that nobody did *anything* until this generation!

You'd have to wonder what kind of bullied, cowed, conservative sheep of a society we had in the 1930s-1990s!

Even worse, this was the same society that was prepared to protest about anything to do with national identity and took on all sorts of international causes e.g. apartheid etc.

I don't understand how we didn't wake up to what was going on under our own noses. Was it that well hidden, or was the whole place brainwashed or ???

It just makes me wonder about what kind of a society we had. It's embarrassing, shameful and I will not defend it to anyone. What went on was absolutely disgusting.

Rapidly losing any sense of national pride, at least for that conservative 'greasy till' generation. They really make me feel ill.

Yeats' September 1913 poem was right on the money about the society we were building.

seenitall

Solair wrote: »

was the whole place brainwashed

IMO, yes, that's the long and the short of it. Hidden it certainly wasn't. I watched an RTE documentary a few years ago about abuses by priests, and people interviewed in it were commenting on how their parents/relatives at the time were seeing boys in the company of priests and had little 'knowing' jokes about it all.

Disgusting, but understandable, once you take into account that pretty much ALL Irish people were utterly brainwashed by an all-pervasive, supremely authoritative power structure from their very births onwards; and that the most insidious brainwashing wasn't remotely about anything spiritual - it was about the complete infallibility and divine-like status of the Church and the dire consequences for anyone falling under their remit who dares choose anything but a lifestyle or path morally approved by them.

"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man" is a quote by the founder of Jesuits, Francis Xavier, and is the means and the tools used to obtain the extraordinary power over so many people's minds that this Church (alongside most other ideological vehicles, to be fair) has the world over. He got it right.

Grayson

In the journal there's an article where the mention a Senator speaking about them in the 50's. He knew they were horrible. he mentions that women who were sentanced to them by judges begged to be sent to prison instead.

It's not like nobody knew. And a few did speak out against them. Everyone else who knew anything should be ashamed of themselves.

lazygal

Everyone knew. My father came from a town in rural Ireland and the threat if a child misbehaved was to be sent to the orphanage where 'the nuns will put manners on you', and they knew it wasn't some sort of finishing school. My FIL would have the same stories about Artane. I also recall seeing a documentary on Sean Fortune, and it seemed an open secret that he was into young boys for his kicks, several women and men interviewed made 'jokes' about it that were pretty horrifying when you realise small children in their town were being abused and raped by him. I think sometimes people don't want to think about the reality of what went on, its easier to think of things in an abstract 'bad things happened in the past' way, when I ask my father why no one did anything, he generally wants to change the subject.

seenitall

^^ Yes, I think that might be the programme I mentioned there.

Your father's reaction is so telling. Everyone knows on some level what is abuse and wrong, but being both brainwashed and scared into submission by either hell-fire or possible far-reaching social consequences, it would be extraordinarily difficult for people to make a stand against the whole rotten system.

Solair

I was a de facto atheist anyway i.e. never really believed in any of it, but when I started hearing about all the abuse scandals, I just felt I had to distance myself from the Catholic Church entirely so actually wrote to them a few years ago to do a formal defection.

Just felt they needed to know and I was damned if I was going to have some kind of collective responsibility for something that I'd nothing to do with and absolutely repulsed me.

Wrote a polite, but firm letter to my local archbishop explaining why I was parting company and sent it along with the formal defection notification that you could fill in at the time. They cancelled that service when a lot of people started to leave. AFAIK, it's no longer possible to formally get out that way anymore.

I just don't want my name supporting that organisation.

I honestly think that as long as people continue to support the organisation, it will never learn.

I mean, OK, I know it was a little less complex for me as I wasn't exactly religious to start with, but even for someone who is deeply religious, there are lots of alternatives or just private faith and perhaps it's time for some of the clergy in the Catholic Church to show some backbone and call a halt to all of this and just organise a split!

We absolutely need to split our state + the church (or any other vested interest group too).

The Irish State should be by the people, of the people and for the people, not a reflection of some religious view point.

[Deleted User]

Jimoslimos wrote: »

It was awful shocking what went on in the laundries and elsewhere in Ireland. As a maturing nation we should take note and accept a degree of collective responsibility for what occurred and strive to ensure it doesn't happen again.

However the desire for self-flagellation and self-hatred is overboard and dare I say it, a bit Catholic.

Your spot on. Im going to break the cycle and praise us as a nation for once.

Despite having to pay back huge debts to the EU/IMF, etc, because of the behaviour of traitors and fat cats and moron politicians, Ireland was voted the most charitable nation in Europe for the second year in a row. The majority of us have always had big hearts even if our wallets were small.

In the 80s for example, Colin Mcstay received huge donations when he needed a life saving operation in the US. The year afterwards the Irish donated more per head then anyone to Live Aid. We can be gullible and naive falling for the bullsh*t of Bertie Ahern and other politicians as well as the catholic church but overall we are a good decent society spoiled by the selfish acts of a minority and some of the trappings and obstacles of life that some of us sadly fall under. We are a great community that looks out for one another whatever part of the world we end up in.
The trouble with modern society is we dont seem to see the good stuff. We only see a half empty glass instead of a half full one. I love this country and to be honest if I had to leave it permanently it would absolutely break my heart.

http://www.thejournal.ie/ireland-is-the-most-charitable-country-in-europe-724412-Dec2012/

[Deleted User]

As for the Magdalene laundries or the many institutions that people and especially children were unfortunately placed in for whatever reason or another, these institutions despite committing vile and horrible acts do not represent the vast majority of Irish citizens no more then Josef Fritzl or Adolf Hitler represent the ways of the Austrian people, but it does cause for self examination that as a society, we must ensure that things like this never happen again.

up for anything

seenitall wrote: »

Your father's reaction is so telling. Everyone knows on some level what is abuse and wrong, but being both brainwashed and scared into submission by either hell-fire or possible far-reaching social consequences, it would be extraordinarily difficult for people to make a stand against the whole rotten system.

You make it sound like people were weak back then which they were but it wasn't due to brainwashing or social consequences but fear for themselves and their families. The results of just one person or even a few trying to make a stand back then would be a bit more akin to a Muslim woman ripping off her burqa at the Masjid al-Haram and yelling that she was equal to men.

The whole country was so under the grip of the Catholic Church, the State and Civil Service that any one person making waves would have sunk under them very rapidly. If you stepped out of line you had the massed forces against you and it would have taken a very brave person to step out to join you. The result would have been no job/no customers, your every move dogged by the local guard, denouncement from the pulpit, your children would have suffered in school both from the teacher and from their erstwhile friends. Your older children would very probably found themselves in the laundries and industrial schools. Nazi Germany had nothing on Ireland back in the day.

I am sure that there were people who tried to stand up and be counted but were silenced in one way or another.

Solair

We have our positive and negative points.
Hopefully as we mature, we'll develop a bit of moral backbone that's not dependent on some outside religious institution.

I actually feel that the Catholic Church pretty much hijacked Irish identity in the early 20th century. All of a sudden what was supposed to be "Ireland" turned into some kind of "holy catholic Ireland" instead and being Catholic and Irish were somehow convolved all of a sudden.
It's only really in recent years that that messy connection has finally started to unravel.

We really need to be able to stand up and say that we're Irish, and that Ireland stands for something very positive.

In the past we even had John A. Costello (former Taoiseach) coming out with this

"I am an Irishman second, I am a Catholic first, and I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the hierarchy and the church to which I belong."

in the 1950s..

It was one STRANGE society at that time.
I mean, put that into a different context, can you imagine a PM coming out with a statement like :
"I'm an Irishman second a freemason first"... there'd be uproar!

In the past Church = State = Church ... wasn't meant to be that way, but that's what happened.

Other than the fact it was still a democracy, Ireland in those days had a lot in common with Franco's Spain (apart from the dictatorship). The oppressive polices, the corporate Church-State merger etc etc.

I find the two places quite similar in that respect. Once we got out from under the thumb of the oppressive conservatives, ti turned out the people were actually quite liberal and nice!