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Unwed Mothers, Asylums and Immersive Theatre

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Performing Statelessness in Europe

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Abstract

This chapter analyses an unusual type of asylum where unwed Irish mothers were confined in institutions, deprived of their children and identities, and used as slave labour. The chapter indicates the resemblance of the unwed mothers to refugees in their unlimited detention and their reduction to a social status equivalent to what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’. It also demonstrates how theatrical and filmic performances as well as journalistic research have shone a light on those who were rendered invisible to society. Films such as Philomena and dramas such as the deeply disturbing Laundry, directed by Louise Lowe in an immersive style in a former Dublin convent, have awakened the Irish public to a misguided practice (which finally ended in 1996).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This chapter has been adapted from ‘Biopolitics in the Laundry: Ireland’s Unwed Mothers’ in Wilmer and Žukauskaitė (2016).

  2. 2.

    One of the early chinks in the bastion of religious authority occurred in 1992 when Annie Murphy named Bishop Eamon Casey as the father of her son Peter and published a book about their affair called Forbidden Fruit (Murphy and De Rosa 1993). Amidst reports that he had also embezzled funds from a public charity as well as from the diocese to provide maintenance for his son, Bishop Casey resigned as Bishop and fled abroad to avoid public scrutiny. In the wake of this scandal, the lid seemed to be lifted off a Pandora’s Box of troubles within Irish Catholic institutions. Numerous priests were publicly accused of paedophilia and sexual abuse, including the notorious Father Brendan Smyth, who raped or sexually abused more than 100 children over a period of forty years (including raping one of my own students who was fifteen at the time). See BBC (2010).

  3. 3.

    The success of Eclipsed and the ensuing revelations about the laundries by the media led Brogan to set Stained Glass at Samhain in the 1990s, with the property developers unearthing the corpses and digging up memories of the past. She showed in this play that the nuns had become easy scapegoats for the condemnation of these institutions and that others were equally to blame. See Smith (2007, pp. 106–12).

  4. 4.

    According to Tom Inglis (1998, p. 230):

    The export process was operated by nuns. It was sanctioned by the Archbishop of Dublin and administered by the Department of External Affairs. The export of babies for adoption arose because the idea of an unmarried mother looking after her child was outside the realms of morality as set down by the Church and embodied by the laity. The head of the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau described single mothers as ‘fallen women’ and ‘grave sinners’ whose children were the victims of ‘wickedness’. The story reveals the collusion between the state and the Church and the determination of both institutions to create a secret Irish solution to breakdowns in Catholic morality. Instead of women being exported for abortion—the present solution [by going to England where abortion is legal]—their babies were exported for adoption. Such was the Church’s moral monopoly in the 1950s and such was the state’s willingness to acquiesce in this, that the Archbishop of Dublin was able to lay down strict guidelines which demanded that the adopting parents not only be Catholic, but well-off and be willing to guarantee that the baby be brought up as a Catholic, be sent to a Catholic school and, if it arose, to a Catholic university.

  5. 5.

    See The Philomena Project website, http://thephilomenaproject.org/, accessed 29 October 2017. As a result of public pressure, on 25 November 2016, the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Katherine Zappone, published the Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill 2016 that would provide for a government agency to keep a record of adoptions. ‘An adopted person aged 18 years or over who was adopted prior to commencement will have a statutory entitlement to the information required to apply for his or her birth certificate, subject to certain conditions…The Bill also provides for specified personal or birth family information to be provided to an adopted person on request.’ See Department of Children and Youth Affairs (2016).

  6. 6.

    See Justice for Magdalenes website, http://www.magdalenelaundries.com/, date accessed 29 October 2017.

  7. 7.

    See Justice for Magdalenes’ submission to the United Nations Committee Against Torture (2011).

  8. 8.

    See One in Four website, http://www.oneinfour.ie/, date accessed 18 January 2015.

  9. 9.

    See Magdalene Survivors Together website, http://magdalene-52.wix.com/magdalenesurvivorstogether#!home, date accessed 29 October 2017.

  10. 10.

    According to Sinéad O’Shea (2015) writing in the Irish Times, ‘the procedure [of symphysiotomy] involved cutting the pelvic bone to create more space during childbirth and was favored over Caesarean sections by some doctors as it would enable women to have larger families. The procedure was abandoned in most parts of the world by the middle of the 20th century, but continued to be used in Ireland for what is considered to be a mix of religious and cultural reasons. Common long-term effects for the women included impaired walking, chronic pain and incontinence.’ See also O’Carroll (2012). As of November 2016, ‘Almost 400 women have received awards of more than €30 million under the Government’s symphysiotomy payment scheme’ (Cullen 2016).

  11. 11.

    For example, two victims of Father Brendan Smyth successfully sued Cardinal Sean Brady in 2011 for forcing them to take an oath of silence after being abused and preventing them from going to the police. Brady thereby failed to stop Smyth from sexually abusing more than 100 children over a 40-year period. When the British government was seeking to extradite Smyth, he hid in a monastery in Ireland and the Irish government delayed extradition procedures. When this was discovered, the Irish government was forced to resign and hold new elections. Smyth was later convicted and died in prison. See, for example, Cooney (2010) and McGarry (2011).

  12. 12.

    Moreover, the number of people attending monthly confession declined from 47 per cent in 1974 to 14 per cent in 1995 (Inglis 1998, p. 209). According to research conducted by the Association of Catholic Priests, weekly mass attendance had declined to 35 per cent by 2012 (ACP 2012).

  13. 13.

    Tom Inglis (1998, p. 212) records that between 1966 and 1996 ‘the number of vocations dropped from 1409 to 111, a decrease of 92 per cent’. He also notes that the ‘proportion of religious as full-time teachers in secondary schools fell from 48 per cent in 1965 to 9 per cent in 1991’ (p. 225). By 2014, the annual number entering seminary in Ireland to study for the priesthood had dropped to fourteen (McGarry 2014b).

  14. 14.

    As an indication that the ordinary Irish person no longer listens to the Church teaching on sex, the number of unwed mothers has increased dramatically. According to Tom Inglis, writing in 1998 (p. 240), ‘In 1961, 2 per cent of births occurred outside of marriage. This has now risen to 20 per cent. Furthermore, one in three of first births are to unmarried mothers’.

  15. 15.

    Kathy Sheridan (2014), a journalist for the Irish Times, was clearly upset by the reportage, writing that:

    The media was shown at its worst when the tragic heart of the story—that 796 children with no burial records had died in a Tuam mother-and-baby home between 1925 and 1961—was hijacked by sensational headlines sent flying around the world, suggesting that the infants were all ‘dumped’ in a septic tank. Corless, who had dedicated many years and thousands of euro to her research, told my colleague Rosita Boland that she had never said that. Her truth needed no embellishment.

  16. 16.

    The Tuam burial site was still being excavated during the winter of 2016–17, and on 3 March 2017, the Irish Times reported that ‘Human remains of a significant number of babies and infants up to three years of age have been found on the site […] The commission said it had not yet determined what the purpose of this structure was but it appeared to be a sewage tank […] “In this second structure, significant quantities of human remains have been discovered in at least seventeen of the twenty underground chambers which were examined,” it said’ (Edwards 2017).

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  1. Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    S. E. Wilmer

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Wilmer, S.E. (2018). Unwed Mothers, Asylums and Immersive Theatre. In: Performing Statelessness in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69173-2_5

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