Magdalene Laundries

What were they?

Also known as Magdalene asylums

Institutions usually run by Roman Catholic orders

Operated from the 18th to the late 20th centuries

Run ostensibly to house "fallen women"

~ 30,000 of women were confined in these institutions in Ireland

Dublin 1993, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity

Owners & operators of the laundry lost money in share dealings on the stock exchange; to cover their losses, they sold part of the land in their convent to a property developer

Discovered 133 unmarked graves & 22 other bodies

The Sisters arranged to have the remains cremated and reburied in a mass grave at Glasnevin Cemetery, splitting the cost of the reburial with the property developer

Death certificates existed for only 75 of the original 133, despite it being a criminal offence to fail to register a death that occurs on one's premises

All 155 bodies were exhumed & cremated

Unkown

Why?

. These "large complexes" became a "massive interlocking system…carefully and painstakingly built up…over a number of decades"; and consequently, Magdalen laundries became part of Ireland's "larger system for the control of children and women" (Raftery 18).

Examples were Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge and the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, who ran the largest laundries in Dublin

Aim to "save the souls primarily of women and children"

Several religious institutes established even more Irish laundries, reformatories and industrial schools,

Smith: "we do not know how many women resided in the Magdalen institutions" after 1900

Vital information about the women's circumstances, the number of women, and the consequences of their incarceration is unknown.

Smith: "We have no official history for the Magdalen asylum in twentieth-century Ireland"

Due to the religious institutes' "policy of secrecy", their penitent registers and convent annals remain closed to this day, despite repeated requests for information.