“The future of the former Magdalena laundry in Dublin is discussed,” said one of the titles of the Eire public television on 28 June. That day, more than a hundred people met to discuss how the Dublin City Hall negotiations with the multinational of Toyo are going to build a 350-room hotel, a supermarket and 76 homes on the site of the sad old building. The controversy is alive: many citizens want that place to become a public space that will remind Magdalena.

The Catholic Church of Mary Magdalene, to which the Gospels of Christians refer, praises it as holy on July 22, but it is Magdalene who dominates the imagination of the plain people who led the lost woman to the right path. In Ireland, where the Church has controlled almost everything from independence until now, Magdalene, a young lady in a laundry, bore that stigma: a woman who has gone wrong on the wrong road, who is dragging the Catholic nuns, washing her sins in a laundry...

French Professor Nathalie Sebbane has just summarised in her article “Les silences d’Irlande” the harsh reality of thousands of Irish people. “Thanks to the success of Magdalene Sisters, those organisations that Ireland has used to punish persecuted women are already in the collective memory. But at the social level much progress has been made, victims have not yet obtained an official request for forgiveness or compensation.” Since 1922, more than 10,000 women have been imprisoned in forced confinement.

It is not a system of repression invented in Ireland. In the 13th century, the first of this kind, named María Magdalena, was opened in Italian Florence to collect women who, as repentant women of prostitution, could be at risk of falling into it. They have since spread throughout England and Ireland, initially financed by rich philanthropists.

In Ireland, in the 19th century, four orders of Catholic nuns were taken over and “the institutionalization of houses of refuge was an almost totalitarian regime”. The so-called shelters were given hours of work, and at first it became what should be to study a trade to finance the institution.

There were muffins all over Ireland (Dublin, Galway, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, New Ross, Tralee, Belfast..), each united to a convent and usually next to him a single mothers' protection house Mother and Baby Home and an Industrial School where sinful children worked as they grew up. Here is a whole system organized between the State and the Church so that the people of the towns and neighbourhoods can take root in fear.

“In addition to the moralizing and religious significance of this regime,” says Sebban-, it also has a strong social mark. The thousands of women who, against their will, had been imprisoned in these laundries, had left much of the poorest families and poverty joined immorality.”

That the daughter is not ashamed of the whole family

To each of the women who locked her in a laundry of the Magdalene, they gave her a new name, that of a saint, the first step to erase her past and put him on the path of salvation. His hair was cut off from the temptation of a sin that is vanity. They made her navigate in ugly, dark-colored costumes, to conceal any trace of femininity. They then inflicted exhausting days, days of prayers, forced labor and forced silences on him.

Although Irish public opinion was long regarded as the opposite, the responsibility for keeping thousands of women prisoners under these conditions was not exclusive to the Catholic Church. Court judges, police and even medical services sent Magdalena laundries to people at risk of exclusion, orphans or single mothers with their bastard children, condemning them to stay in this network throughout their lives.

However, most of the 10,000 women who have been in these reformatories were introduced by their families with the help of the cure. “As a guarantee of moral power,” says Sebban-, parish priests recommended families to send their allegedly lost daughters to a laundry to avoid embarrassment and protect the honor of the family. Sometimes it also happened that sending several young people to the city was simply too nice and ran the risk of falling into sin or causing children. There were also girls who left by their own decision, because they found no other solution.”

Officially, these establishments were private entities and the only source of income was the work of the pool owners. Women who were incarcerated never received any salary. In Social Security, no one ever left a quote. Some managed to return to their families after a shorter or longer stay. There were also some who managed to flee opening the fence. Others might have found a job as a maid. But many remained long years in the shadow, abandoned by their family members, forgotten by society.

In the 1990s, major scandals rocked the Catholic Church, a pillar of Irish society for a long time: the sexual abuse of children and young people caused by religious priests, bishops and male congregations, who are responsible for an important part of the country’s educational system. Ireland was exposed to a hidden face of its history. But despite the strong disorders that occurred in the Industrias School, the tumult did not reach the laundries of Magdalena, which were the most sensitive link in that repressive control system. The last women who had left them had left England, silent and ashamed, in search of a new life.

A new explosion in 1993: When the largest laundry in Dublin was sold by nuns to build housing, the bones of dozens of women, anonymous laundries illegally buried without the corresponding death certificate appeared upon entering the excavating machines.

Groups of women were mobilized and the Justice for the Magdalenes campaign was heated. The responsibility of the State had to be demonstrated. Although these laundries were officially private institutions, in 2013 a special commission of the Dublin Parliament showed that the State indirectly financed its laundry services for the carrying out of tasks of military carnivals, hospitals and other public units.

The truth is moving slowly for women. They have not yet been awarded any compensation. The latest Muffins shut down in silence.