WHEN MARI STEED began searching for her birth mother in Ireland, she knew little about the system of secrecy and abuse that would lead her to co-found a social justice group to right its many wrongs. Born in 1960 in a convent-run “mother and baby” home in County Cork, Steed was one of more than 2,000 “banished babies” adopted from Ireland to the United States beginning in the 1940s. As an 18-month-old, she was taken to Philadelphia.
When Steed became pregnant as a teen, she was put in a Catholic-run home in Philadelphia and made to give up her child. In the mid-1990s, she decided it was time to find both the daughter who had been taken from her and the birth mother from whom she’d been taken. Her American family were “decent people,” Steed told me. “I don’t have any serious qualms with my upbringing. But I did begin to search for my mother to find out more about where I’d been.” She created a website to connect with other adopted people of Irish birth.
Eventually, Steed learned her mother, Josie, had given birth to her out of wedlock and had been born to an unwed mother herself. In Ireland, such circumstances put Josie on the full merry-go-round of church-and-state institutions before the age of 30: a county home, an industrial school, 10 years in a “Magdalene laundry,” and finally the mother and baby home. Steed, who lives in Virginia now, recalled she at first had no clue what all this information meant. “‘What are laundries?’ I didn’t even know what that was at the time.”
The answer led Steed down a rabbit hole of secrecy and obstruction. Originally founded in the 18th century as places of refuge for so-called “fallen women,” Magdalene laundries evolved into institutions where women and girls labored for no pay as penance for transgressing Catholic Ireland’s moral and class codes. In his book Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment, Boston College professor James M. Smith described a system of interconnected institutions “including mother and baby homes, industrial and reformatory schools, mental asylums, adoption agencies, and Magdalen laundries.” (Ireland’s first such institution was called the Magdalen Asylum for Penitent Females, using an archaic spelling of Magdalene.)
Smith wrote, “These institutions concealed citizens already marginalized by a number of interrelated social phenomena: poverty, illegitimacy, sexual abuse, and infanticide.” After 1916, when the Irish state began decolonizing from British rule, “those citizens guilty of such ‘crimes’ contradicted the prescribed national narrative that emphasized conformity, valued community over the individual, and esteemed conservative Catholic moral values,” he concluded.
Dismantling this oppressive social architecture has taken tremendous effort, primarily by survivors claiming their personal stories as a cause for social justice.
In Ireland, the laundries were run by four Catholic religious orders with state oversight and funding. Survivors testify that they had their names changed and their hair shaved off. Their children were boarded out or adopted or sent to industrial schools. Some children, like Steed, were unwillingly subjected to vaccine trials. More than 10,000 women and girls were incarcerated in Magdalene laundries between 1922 and 1996, when the last laundry in Ireland closed, around the same time that Steed was searching for her mother.
In 2001, Steed finally found Josie. “She was overjoyed and had been waiting patiently for the day I would find her,” Steed wrote in the book Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice.
From family research to righteous action
CLAIRE MCGETTRICK WAS born in Ireland in 1973 and adopted in-country at 6 weeks old. Since Ireland operates a closed adoption system that prevents adopted people from accessing their birth records, “I had no information about myself whatsoever, including my original name,” she said. Like Steed, McGettrick began researching her past in the 1990s. Along with Steed and Angela Newsome, whose mother spent nearly her entire adult life in Magdalene laundries, McGettrick campaigned for adopted people’s rights through a group called AdoptionIreland. But, McGettrick told me, what really got them fired up was a 2003 exposé in The Irish Times about 155 Magdalene women whose bodies had been exhumed.
In 1993, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, who operated a Magdalene laundry in the Dublin suburb of Drumcondra, had petitioned to sell land after the congregation had fallen into debt. But the Magdalene women buried on their grounds, in an abandoned area, were in the way of their land deal.
The plan was to exhume their remains, cremate them, and rebury them in a public cemetery. This required an exhumation license from the Department of the Environment with a list of the names of those scheduled to be reburied. Despite discrepancies between the number of remains found and the number of names on the license, the exhumation was rushed through. After this travesty, some Magdalene survivors organized to install a bench marker in the women’s memory. But, as Steed said, it felt as if more needed to be done. “That just seems so little for women who were literally slaves,” Steed commented.
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Ten years after the exhumations, investigative journalist Mary Raftery took another look for The Irish Times. She discovered, unbeknownst to the public, an additional 22 remains had been exhumed in 1993 and there were numerous discrepancies between the names on the exhumation license and the names on the headstones at Glasnevin Cemetery. Even worse, in many cases, their ashes had been bundled two or three to a grave to save on costs, resulting in commingled remains (a practice outside of Catholic teaching).
Raftery’s investigative articles galvanized Steed, Newsome, and McGettrick into action. As adopted people whose own identities had been obscured or erased, they realized “this could be any one of us,” said McGettrick. “The way I look at it, the same system that took my identity away is the very same system that held women against their will, forced women to work without pay, and let women and children die.”
In 2003, the three women co-founded Justice for Magdalenes. Over time they added to their team Boston College’s Smith, Katherine O’Donnell of University College Dublin, and Maeve O’Rourke of the Irish Centre for Human Rights. These five form what is now known as Justice for Magdalenes Research (JFMR), a survivor-led advocacy group with the mission of helping Magdalene survivors and other Irish institutional survivors find their truth and gain justice.
When I asked Smith about the group dynamics of involving nonsurvivors in a survivors’ advocacy group, he mentions JFMR’s twin core tenets: “It’s about the women” and “Do no harm.” As survivors and co-founders, Steed and McGettrick are the ethical heart, said Smith, and the other members defer to them and to those who come to them to seek justice.
How did this group’s advocacy lead to a state apology in 2013 for Magdalene laundry survivors, a “guerilla archives” of testimony and information that counters the Catholic Church and Irish state’s secrecy, and a greenlighted project to turn a former Magdalene laundry into a national “site of conscience”?
A litany of names
ONE OF STEED, Newsome, and McGettrick’s first efforts was the Magdalene Names Project, which offered a narrative honoring those who lived and died behind Magdalene laundry walls. The trio photographed the gravestones at the reburial site in Glasnevin Cemetery and then posted the names as a memorial in an online adoption support group. Later, McGettrick compared them to newly released materials from the 1901 and 1911 census, revealing lengthy periods of confinement. These “guerilla archives,” as McGettrick called them, gave survivors and families a place to start accessing information. When JFMR’s political campaign for a state apology and redress got underway in 2009, the archives helped counteract the official narratives that women in the laundries went into them willingly, that none were incarcerated for life, and that their experiences “weren’t that bad.”
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Smith, who teaches courses on Irish literature in his Jesuit university’s Irish studies program, focuses course readings on the outsiders in his native country, those who were controlled or hidden away in church- and state-run institutions. He became involved with JFMR while researching his book on the laundries.
Smith pointed out the benefit of having an academic at a Catholic university as part of the JFMR team. For years, JFMR’s mission had been stymied by Irish government and church alike. The archives of the Catholic orders in Ireland were — and still are — closed. Through Boston College, Smith had access to historical archives that proved without doubt that the Irish state sent women to laundries and was financially complicit in the abuse and injustice inflicted on these women.
Building a case for human rights
HUMAN RIGHTS ATTORNEY Maeve O’Rourke was introduced to JFMR while working on her master’s degree at Harvard. Steed said that the arrival of O’Rourke was “our turning point.” In her early 20s at the time, O’Rourke “completely dedicated herself to the mission. She was not about to let any minister talk her down or treat her like some young thing who didn’t know what she was doing,” Steed recalled.
O’Rourke is credited with bringing an international human rights lens to JFMR’s political campaign. But if it wasn’t for survivors’ testimonies, O’Rourke’s focus might not have landed on the human rights issues in her home country. O’Rourke said she clearly remembers the evening in 2009 when Michael O’Brien, a former mayor and survivor who had testified in the government’s inquiry into the treatment of industrial school children (which was published in 2009 as the Ryan Report), spoke out on live television about the abuse he suffered as a child. He said members of the Laffoy investigating commission had called him a liar. O’Brien’s fierce, emotional statement left O’Rourke at a loss for words. Watching his testimony at home in Dublin with her father, she said, “I don’t know why I’m going anywhere [else] to work on human rights.”
O’Rourke also realized there were “gender differentials” when it came to redress for survivors. The Ryan Report focused on child victims of male clergy but ignored the women of the Magdalene laundries and women religious. She began working with JFMR. O’Rourke’s master’s thesis, accompanied by Smith’s research, became the legal submission to the Irish Human Rights Commission making the case for human rights violations against Magdalene survivors.
After the Irish Human Rights Commission ignored the case, O’Rourke brought it in 2011 to the United Nations Convention against Torture (UNCAT). There JFMR met with success. UNCAT affirmed JFMR’s case and selected it as one of four urgent cases that required action and correction within 12 months. The international pressure for the Irish state to own up to its systematic abuse of women was on. Finally, the Irish government began a formal inquiry into the Magdalene laundries.
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Under an obligation to the truth
TO MAKE A strong legal case for survivors, JFMR needed testimonies.
Katherine O’Donnell was director of the Women’s Studies Center at University College Dublin when Smith contacted her to join JFMR’s campaign. Originally, O’Donnell was attracted to JFMR out of admiration for their work. Then she met some of the women.
“There’s an Irish phrase called faoi geasa, and it means ‘being under an obligation.’ It’s a very ancient phrase, and it also means someone has kind of put a spell on you. It felt like a very intense sense of obligation once I met Magdalene women,” she said.
Her role within JFMR has centered on oral histories. She says as the state was conducting its inquiry, it was crucial for JFMR’s campaign to gather testimonies from the women right away. Why? The government had placed the Ryan Report survivors under a gag order, under penalty of a steep fine and two years’ imprisonment, before granting them any compensation. If an apology and redress were not won for Magdalene survivors, O’Donnell wanted a bulwark of voices to counter the official narratives of Irish history, which even now leave out many voices. “Even if we lost the campaign to get a state apology, we had a history,” said O’Donnell.
The Irish government launched an 18-month formal inquiry in 2011. The McAleese Commission’s report, published in 2013, represented the first attempt by the Irish state to examine the church-run Magdalene laundries and to determine the role of the government and its agencies in their operation throughout the 20th century. The report was deeply flawed. The redress plan saw major bungling and stalling. The McAleese Report claimed women were not held in laundries against their will, were not used as slave labor, were not subject to abuse, did not spend lengthy sentences or lifetimes in them but only about three years on average. Survivor groups questioned the accuracy and reliability of the commission’s findings.
Even so, on Feb. 19, 2013, Ireland’s Taoiseach (prime minister) Enda Kenny formally apologized to women who had been incarcerated in the Magdalene laundries.
After the apology
HOW DID JFMR — and survivors — respond to the report and apology? First, in 2018, JFMR organized a two-day event in Dublin to honor Magdalene survivors. More than 200 women participated, many returning to Ireland for the first time in decades. On the second day, O’Donnell led a listening exercise that gathered the women in groups to ask them three questions: What do they want people to know about their experience? What lessons should be learned? How do they want to be remembered?
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Repeatedly, the women said they want younger generations to know about the laundries so that history won’t repeat itself. Schools should teach this history, they said. They also want the church and state to open their archives and allow survivors and their families full access to their information. Lastly, they want more than just a statue.
On July 4, 2022, the Dublin City Council voted unanimously to turn over a former Magdalene laundry to the Office of Public Works for a national site of conscience. Known as the Sean McDermott Street laundry, the 19th-century building was operated by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity from 1887 to 1996, when it became the last Magdalene laundry in Ireland to close. The site will provide a repository for national archives related to Ireland’s church and state institutions. Plans include lecture and performance space, a memorial garden, and affordable housing.
JFMR is hopeful about the future of the project, known as Open Heart City. McGettrick hopes the national archives at the site will include adoption records, and she continues to advocate for Ireland’s decriminalization of adopted people seeking their personal information. O’Rourke also hopes the recent focus on the site of conscience won’t ignore immediate needs that have still not been met. Among these are effective and swift redress for survivors of all Irish church-state residential institutions, including those whose experiences were diminished or questioned in the report released by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation in 2021. This report, like the Ryan and McAleese Commission reports before it, included denials of culpability. The commission also sealed its records for 30 years.
O’Rourke and McGettrick have formed the Clann Project (Ireland’s Unmarried Mothers and their Children: Gathering the Data), a joint initiative by Adoption Rights Alliance and JFMR. They continue to advocate for survivors and push back against church and state secrecy and obstruction.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story lacked precision on the 1993 exhumation and investigation process. It has been updated for clarity.
René Ostberg lives in Illinois and has spent extensive time in Ireland. She is currently working on a master’s degree at Dominican University in Chicago. JFMR’s most recent book, REDRESS: Ireland’s Institutions and Transitional Justice, includes the testimonies of eight survivors in Ireland, the U.S., and the U.K. It will be available in the U.S. in January 2023.
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