Madam, - James M. Smith (Rite and Reason, September 1st) and John Eardly (Letters, same date) correctly point to the lack of information from Roman Catholic religious orders which ran Magdalen asylums regarding the circumstances in which women were retained and restrained by them as unpaid laundry workers in the 19th and 20th centuries.
It is also interesting to consider the unfair trading situation which pertained for most of that time. Ordinary commercial laundries throughout Ireland paid their largely female workforce the going rate of pay, and published annual accounts which were filed in the Companies Office. But they had to compete with Magdalen laundries run on slave labour which, as registered charities, had accounts closed to public inspection. And for those charities that may also have been limited companies, a special section of Irish company law allowed religious orders to file their annual audits at the Companies Office without any disclosure of turnover, profits or capital assets. This special exemption is still in place and used by a number of RC organisations.
Much has been made of the selfless devotion of the individual nuns who worked in these institutions, but even they would surely admit that they did so voluntarily as part of their religious vocation and could have left at any time, unlike the unfortunate women who ended up in their care. It was a sickening final insult that the High Park nuns, having sold the land for a considerable fortune, did not even grant these women individual graves: they were institutionalised even in death.
We can only speculate on what happened to the accumulated profits generated by these businesses, but one can be reasonably certain that the canny and able administrator nuns invested in buildings and land.
Finally, we would like to broaden the debate to include the many religious-run Mother and Baby Homes, which were extensively funded by taxpayers' money (both capital and revenue) since the foundation of the State.
As with industrial schools and reformatories, payment was made on a per-capita basis - the more unmarried mothers and babies who were accommodated, the more the money that could be claimed from the State. The nuns persuaded State authorities that the girls and women needed to be detained for at least two years so that they could be properly "reformed" from their sinning ways. To our cynical eyes, this looks remarkably like a greedy desire to maximise their "headage" grants rather than Christian benevolence. How else can they explain precisely why some families were able to secure the earlier release of their sisters and daughters on payment of £100 in the 1950s and 1960s? What else was this but compensation for the State benefit which the nuns would have to forgo?
The Irish Roman Catholic church was the most heavily staffed (per capita) in the world, with 30,000 priests and nuns by the mid-1960s needing to be fed and housed. While many of these men and women may have been genuinely kind, well-meaning people who devoted their lives to the service of their God, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that taxpayers' money was often used to pay unsuitable people to deliver inadequate social services, unaccountable to Irish citizens, and that the profits generated were invested for the private capital enrichment of the institutional Church.
But the buck stopped with our elected representatives. They could have simply said "no". - Yours, etc.,
BERNIE HAROLD,
Chairperson, Natural Parents
Network of Ireland,
Dublin 4.