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Jim Duffy ✍ It looks like Marco Rubio is on his way out as Secretary of State. 

He has made the cardinal error in Trump world - never outshine the boss. Anyone who ever does that, as some found in his first term, are always, repeat always, axed. You can be as dumb as you want once you don't damage Trump's reputation. But never be too smart or intelligent or too competent. The moment Trump hears other people saying how good you are at negotiations, or how you are handling something superbly, you are a dead man or woman walking.

Trump may be the dumbest US president in history, nobody can risk coming across as more intelligent and competent than him. You must be his inferior to stay in his regime.

Other presidents, like FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, both Bush presidents, etc. were perfectly happy to have brilliant people around them. They did not care if they were outshone. They presumed they would bask in praise for having had the intelligence to choose such a person. And they very often did.

Not Trump though. He must be the dominant one, the star. If anyone else basks in praise, they are a rival and must be cut out as a cancer. That was the case with Trump in business too. He could have brilliant staff, and did occasionally, but they had to take extreme care never to let Trump know they were brilliant, even when they were negotiating with banks to save him from bankruptcy.

Their terror was that some journalist would write about them, or call them 'the power behind Trump's throne', or 'Trump's brain.' One good newspaper headline, and you were told. One journalist described someone who worked with Trump literally in tears pleading with her not to write about him.

Rubio's cardinal error has been to demonstrate that unlike Trump is is competent, well-read, knowledgeable and professional, and getting headlines praising him. When Trump sent him out to stand-in for his spokesperson a week or two ago it was a sign to those who know Trump that Trump was setting up Rubio for the sack. He was testing to see whether would decline with suitable grovelling, or take the bait. Rubio took the bait, becoming the centre of attention. Trump raged at the praise Rubio got.

Bannon knew the moment a newspaper called him "Trump's brain" that he was toast. Mattis was warned when he began getting good headlines to "watch your back! Don't overshadow the boss." Pompeo was not merely banned from being in the second administration, but anyone close to him was banned from it, simply because Pompeo was seen as too competent in the first administration.

The task of Trump's staff is simple. Always come across as less competent, less able, less knowledgeable, than Trump. Given how stupid Trump is, and his staff all know it, trying to come across as stupider and less able than the President is a tough order for anyone intelligent.

Usually, when Trump fires someone for overshadowing him, he tries to do it in the most humiliating way possible. He may convince them to submit a resignation, then announce before that resignation is announced that he has fired them, then say they were dumb, stupid, incompetent, and an idiot. If they had a military background, he will try to strip their pension off them, or demote their rank. Trump's mob of supporters on social media will target them for reputation destruction.

The only issue is when, not if, Rubio is fired.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Rubio On Borrowed Time

Normal Island News ★ There were celebrations across Tel Aviv last night as AIPAC candidate Ed Gallrein defeated Thomas Massie in the Kentucky primary. 

As a result of his victory, we can rest assured that no Republican will dare question Israel again. On the contrary, they will send America’s sons and daughters to fight in the next dumb war that Netanyahu demands. It truly is a great day for grassroots democracy.

Massie was something almost unheard of in US politics — a Republican with integrity. He would actually read bills and do his fucking job, instead of being told how to vote by donors. There was major concern that his whole “integrity” thing could resonate with voters who insist they are fed up with establishment politics, but it turns out Republicans aren’t ready for someone who is anti-paedophile. They wouldn’t want to be seen as woke, would they?

It’s fair to say that victory did not come cheap for the Epstein class. In the most expensive democracy money can buy, the Little St James gang spent a record $32 million on Kentucky. Fortunately, they can expect a 1,000,000% return on investment in terms of weapons packages supplied by people with no healthcare.

Weapons Packages Supplied By People With No Healthcare

Louth For Ever ★ writing on 26-April-2026.

A third and final note on the weekend the blockade ended: On the question beneath the government, the opposition, and the tradition, and on what comes after all three.
I owe the reader an honest opening. This essay is harder than the two that came before it, and I have put off writing it for longer than I put off either of them, because the question it addresses is harder than the questions those essays addressed.

The first essay named what had happened on the streets. The second named what had happened in the chamber of Dáil Éireann and in the party that should have met it. Both of those essays were diagnostic. They named things. Diagnosis is not easy but it is a register a writer can stand in without committing themselves to more than they can defend. You look at what is in front of you and you describe it accurately and you trust the reader to do the rest.

The third essay cannot stop there. The readership of the second essay, the one I had not imagined I had until the week I had it, has been generous and patient and has mostly asked one question in reply. What now? What should be built. What would an Irish politics look like that could meet a week like the one that just finished without collapsing into either the management of decline or the amplification of someone else’s playbook.

I do not know the full answer to that question. I want to say that at the start, because the honest cost of propositional writing is that it tempts the writer to perform a confidence the material does not yet support. What I have is a set of partial answers assembled from listening to people who have been thinking about this longer than I have. I will set them down as plainly as I can. The reader can decide whether the partial answers add up to enough.

I. The diagnosis, consolidated

Let me set down, as briefly as I can, what the honest voices on the past two weeks have between them established. The diagnosis is not retrospective. It is being demonstrated, on the front pages of every Irish daily this morning, in real time.

Sinéad O’Sullivan’s architecture gap is the first piece. An economy that transfers money at scale but has lost the capacity to build is an economy that can only respond to crisis by transferring more money. The €755 million package the Coalition reached for in the weekend the blockade ended was not a strategic choice among competing options. It was the only option the state had available. The space heater rather than the heat pump, as she put it. The structural incapacity to build a heat pump is not a political failure of this Coalition. It is the institutional inheritance of thirty years of choices made by several coalitions.

Ciara Murphy’s fossil fuel diagnosis at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice (@jcfjustice.bsky.social) is the second piece. A country that has no oil or gas of its own and depends on both for nearly every function of daily life; that has legislated ambitious emissions reductions and then actively worked to undermine its own Climate Act to permit more fossil fuel infrastructure; that calls itself energy insecure and responds to the insecurity by entrenching dependency on expensive imports — that country has, as she put it, a fossil fuel problem that operates at the level of contradiction rather than the level of policy. The contradictions are not accidental. They are what the architecture gap looks like when you apply it to a specific sector.

Saoirse McHugh’s (@saoirsemc.bsky.social) warning is the third piece. The framing that says the far right organised this space because the left failed to engage treats agrarian Ireland as an ideological blank sheet waiting for better outreach. McHugh, who comes from Achill Island, Mayo and has done the actual work in the actual constituencies, has pointed out this week that Irish agri-political culture has a developed conservative-to-reactionary worldview that reaches back three hundred years, and that many left-aligned people in rural Ireland have burnt themselves out engaging without being able to shift the ground. The belief that everybody is one good conversation away from switching ideologies, in her thinking, is a fantasy that flatters the left while underestimating the opposition. Patrick Bresnihan at Maynooth, quoted in Al Jazeera this week, named the underlying structural inequality: a grass-fed dairy and beef system oriented to commodity production for export processing, whose internal contradictions surface whenever the global price of inputs spikes. That system does not generate the politics of engagement. It generates the politics it currently has.

Sébastien Lecornu’s speech in Paris last Friday is the fourth piece, and it is the one that matters most for the forward-looking part of what follows. A sitting European Prime Minister, in the same week the Irish government was cutting excise and delaying the carbon tax, doubled structural electrification aid to ten billion euros a year and refused to lower fuel taxes on the grounds that lowering them would only benefit oil-exporting countries and that, as he put it, as long as France depended on oil and gas it would continue to pay the price of other people’s wars. Lecornu is governing in the shadow of the Gilets Jaunes, who forced a previous French government to reverse a fuel tax increase that nearly collapsed its authority. The instruments France now reaches for are the instruments a state develops after it has already lost a round and learnt what losing cost. Ireland has not yet lost that round. Last weekend was the warning.

The McCarthy GoFundMe is the fifth piece and the one most people will have missed. One hundred and fifty-two thousand euros raised in days for a stated purpose, feeding the blockaders, that could never plausibly absorb the sum. A domain (Nationrises.com) registered on the 19th of February, seven weeks before the fuel protests began. A pivot, announced when the money exceeded the cover story, toward “wish granting for children in hospitals.” A donor list of six thousand people, some of them writing from abroad, several of them committing a thousand euros or more. Read that sequence carefully. The infrastructure was built in February for an organising project that did not publicly exist in February. The fuel protests were the first deployment of the infrastructure, not the reason for it. What McCarthy is building is not a party. It is a populist mobilisation apparatus that operates outside parties, outside the state, and outside the voluntary sector, funded directly by its supporters and legitimised by social media reach. The fuel protest was the recruitment event. The nation-rises is the movement. The six thousand donors are the list.

Five diagnoses. An architecture gap that cannot build. A fossil fuel dependency that cannot be named. A rural constituency with a three-hundred-year ideological inheritance that is not a blank sheet. A European policy model that shows what building looks like but whose instruments rest on institutional capacity Ireland does not have. And a parallel right-wing infrastructure already operational and already capitalised. These are the five pieces of the picture. They have each been named, carefully and well, by people who have thought about them longer than I have. What has not yet been named is what should be built between them.

II. The absorption pattern

Before I can say anything about what should be built, I have to name the pattern that every attempt to build it so far has walked into.

It is worth saying plainly. Every serious attempt to build a left political formation outside the two main parties in the history of the southern state has, within a generation, been absorbed into one of them. The Workers’ Party, the party that emerged from the 1970 Official-Provisional split and spent two decades trying to build a democratic-socialist electoral presence, fractured in 1992 into Democratic Left, the clean-hands breakaway that committed itself to constitutional politics and was supposed to be different. Within seven years Democratic Left had merged into Labour. Its leaders, Proinsias De Rossa, Eamon Gilmore, Pat Rabbitte, became senior figures in Labour’s front bench and eventually in the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition government of 2011. Gilmore became Tánaiste. The trajectory from founding to absorption took seven years. A political project that set out to be the clean break from the contaminated mainstream ended as Labour’s leadership in a Cabinet implementing the troika programme.

The Greens followed a variant of the same arc. The party that had spent three decades building a distinct ecological-political tradition entered government with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in 2020, spent four years defending decisions it would not have made on its own terms, and was reduced from twelve seats to one at the 2024 general election. Some of the party’s best voices, Saoirse McHugh among them, had left before the absorption, keeping publicly the commitment the party leadership had privately put aside.

Sinn Féin is on an earlier iteration of the same pattern, and the dissident-republican writers who have watched the party longest — Anthony McIntyre in his Pensive Quill archive, Tommy McKearney in From Insurrection to Parliament — have been naming the trajectory for two decades. The diagnosis need not be accepted wholesale to be taken seriously. McKearney’s formulation that the party’s bottom line is that it has no bottom line captures, in one line, a structural observation about a political formation whose posture is precisely to have no fixed position, because flexibility on principle has become the precondition for institutional survival. Read the fuel blockade week through that line and the handling makes sense.

The pattern is older than this party

The absorption pattern has a mechanism. The mechanism is that the institutional architecture of the Irish state rewards participation in its coalitions and punishes abstention from them. A left party that stays outside is condemned to permanent criticism of other people’s decisions. A left party that goes inside is given a handful of ministries, told what it cannot do, asked to defend what it would not have done, and slowly assimilated into the vocabulary of the state it was meant to change. The vocabulary is the training. The training is the absorption. The absorption is the point.

The third essay has to walk around this pattern. It has to. Because every proposition I can write: build a new left formation, fill the vacuum, organise the constituencies the establishment has lost is a proposition that has been tried before and absorbed before, and the honest writer cannot propose it again without engaging with why the previous attempts ended where they ended.

So the first thing a serious political project would have to do, before it did anything else, is understand the absorption mechanism well enough to build structural defences against it. That means organisational forms that resist leadership capture. It means decision-making processes that cannot be quietly moved inside a small group. It means a relationship to the state that is not defined by the ambition to occupy its chairs. It means, most of all, a bottom line that cannot be moved by the offer of office.

A party with an actual bottom line, a set of things it will not trade for inclusion, has a fighting chance of not ending where its predecessors ended. A party without one does not.

III. What a bottom line looks like

The difficulty with saying the project would need a bottom line is that the phrase is easy to write and hard to specify. So let me try to specify it.

A bottom line in this context is not a policy programme. Programmes can be negotiated down. A bottom line is the set of commitments the project cannot abandon without ceasing to be itself.

For a serious political project in the Ireland of the coming decade, I think there are probably four.

The first is fossil fuel honesty. The Irish state’s current climate posture rests on a set of contradictions Ciara Murphy has catalogued as cleanly as anyone has. The contradictions are the architecture gap applied to a specific sector. A political project that does not commit to naming them, that treats climate policy as a matter of percentage targets rather than structural dependency, will be absorbed the moment it enters a coalition that requires it to defend a data centre strategy, an LNG terminal, or a carbon tax freeze. The French Prime Minister told his country last Friday that as long as France depends on oil and gas it will continue to pay the price of other people’s wars. That is a sentence a Taoiseach could not have spoken last week, and the inability to speak it is a political precondition for everything that followed. A bottom line on fossil fuel honesty is the commitment that the project will not pretend this dependency is manageable by subsidy.

The second is the rebuilding of state capacity. This is the architecture-gap point turned into a positive commitment. A serious project commits to the patient, unglamorous work of rebuilding the institutional capacity to build. To construct housing, to run transport, to administer energy transition, to deliver public services. This is not a technocratic commitment. It is a political one. The populist right’s offer, in Ireland as elsewhere, is that the state is the problem and the nation is the answer. A serious left project has to make the opposite case: that the state is the only institution with the scale to do the things that need doing, and that the work of rebuilding its capacity to do them is the commitment that distinguishes a serious project from a performance of grievance.

The third is the refusal of enemy-of-the-people politics. The fuel blockade week demonstrated, with devastating clarity, what it costs when a movement cannot distinguish between hauliers with a legitimate grievance and the organised amplifiers using the grievance as cover. A serious project has to be able to stand with the hauliers on the question of diesel prices while naming, by their names, the people who told the hauliers where to park. It has to be able to do that without flinching, because the failure to do it is the mechanism by which legitimate grievance becomes reactionary politics. McHugh is right that many of the people on these streets are not one conversation away from switching ideologies. But some of them are, and the distinction between those who are and those who are not is itself the political work. A project that treats all grievance as legitimate becomes the vehicle of the worst grievances. A project that treats all grievance as suspect becomes a party of nobody. The distinction is the work.

The fourth is internal dissent as a positive value. A party that cannot disagree with itself cannot correct itself. This is the observation the dissident-republican tradition has been making for thirty years. That the structural reason a movement drifts without course-correction is that the culture of deference established during long periods of centralised leadership removes the party’s capacity to generate and tolerate internal disagreement. Internal dissent is not a weakness a serious project manages. It is an asset the project actively cultivates, because it is the mechanism by which the project stays honest to itself. The parties that have been absorbed were, without exception, the parties in which dissent had been most successfully suppressed before the absorption happened.

Four commitments. Fossil fuel honesty. State capacity. The refusal of enemy-of-the-people politics. Internal dissent as value. None of them are a policy programme. All of them are the ground a policy programme would have to stand on.

IV. What the right has already built

I want to return to the McCarthy piece, because it tells us something the left in Ireland has not yet fully absorbed.

The populist-right infrastructure that surfaced during the fuel week did not surface. It was already there. The domain registration in February tells us that. The speed with which the fundraising scaled — one hundred and fifty thousand euros in under a week, six thousand donors, international contributions — tells us the list was being assembled long before the fuel price spike gave it something to mobilise around. The pivot to “wish granting for children in hospitals,” announced when the cover story ran out of financial plausibility, tells us the organisers understood from the beginning that the fuel protest was the recruitment moment, not the movement.

This matters for the question this essay is asking. The populist right in Ireland has built, and is continuing to build, an organising infrastructure that operates outside the parties, outside the state, and outside the voluntary sector. It is funded by its supporters. It is legitimised by social media reach. It can deploy at speed against whatever grievance the moment supplies. It does not need a political party to function because it is building the substrate on which a party will eventually stand, when it chooses to constitute one.

The Irish democratic left does not have an equivalent infrastructure. It has political parties of varying size and varying coherence. It has trade unions with varying degrees of political connection. It has a network of NGOs and policy researchers. Ciara Murphy’s Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice is one; there are others, doing honest diagnostic work. It has a set of public intellectuals and journalists. What it does not have is the integrated organising substrate that would let it mobilise at the speed and scale the right has just demonstrated.

A serious political project, then, cannot be primarily a political party. Or rather, it cannot be a political party in the first instance. The party is the last thing to build, not the first. What has to be built first is the infrastructure on which a party could eventually stand: the fundraising capacity, the organising networks, the media channels, the policy institutions, the intellectual and cultural spaces where the four commitments above are developed, contested, and defended.

The mistake of every Irish left project for two generations has been to build a party first and an infrastructure afterwards, and the party has always been absorbed before the infrastructure was built to defend it. The right is currently making the opposite mistake in reverse — building the infrastructure first without a coherent party to carry it. The project this essay is trying to imagine would have to do what neither side has yet done, which is to build the infrastructure first and let the electoral form of it emerge later, from the strength the infrastructure had built rather than the weakness it was trying to compensate for.

V. The constituencies the project does not need to convert

McHugh’s BlueSky thread on agri-politics is important here, and the third essay has to engage with it honestly.

She is right that the left fantasy of being one good conversation away from converting conservative-to-reactionary constituencies is a fantasy. Three hundred years of rural political culture do not dissolve because a better-briefed candidate shows up at the door. Some of the people on the streets last week are the descendants of families who have held reactionary political positions for six generations, and they are not going to become progressive because an earnest young canvasser from Dublin, or Dundalk or Belfast, arrives with a leaflet on the just transition. This is true and it is worth saying.

But McHugh’s argument does not, I think, extend as far as some of the reactions to it have suggested. What she is naming is that the left has been wrong to treat agri-politics as a blank sheet. She is not, as far as I can read her, arguing that the left should abandon the countryside. She is arguing that the left should engage with rural Ireland as it actually is, with the political inheritance it actually carries, rather than as the left would prefer it to be.

The distinction matters because a serious political project cannot win a majority in Ireland without holding some of the rural vote. The electoral arithmetic does not permit it. What the project has to understand is that it is not competing for the whole of the rural constituency. It is competing for the rural voters who are available, the ones whose grievances are genuinely material rather than ideological, the ones whose politics have not already been captured by generational reactionary inheritance, the ones who are open to hearing that the grass-fed dairy-and-beef export model Bresnihan described at Maynooth is not actually working for them even if it is working for the processors.

That is a smaller constituency than the total rural vote. But it is not zero. And it is the constituency a serious project has to identify and address, without pretending the rest of rural Ireland is available and without writing off the part that is.

This is one of the places the project will have to be propositional without being prescriptive. I do not know how to address that constituency. I know that the policies are adjacent to the ones Bresnihan and Social Justice Ireland and the more serious rural-ecological writers have been sketching. A genuine diversification of rural livelihoods, a land-use transition that compensates the people whose livelihoods depend on the current system, a re-localisation of food economies that gives rural communities something to defend other than the export commodity chain. I know that the politics that makes those policies possible does not yet exist. The work of building it is the work the project would have to do.

VI. What I will not pretend to know

I have set down four commitments, an account of the absorption pattern, a reading of what the right has built, and a partial answer to McHugh’s challenge. The fuel crisis is not over. As I write, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, oil markets have opened sharply higher, the Coalition is asking the EU for trade relief on jet fuel, the strategic reserve is being publicly considered for release, and the Taoiseach is publicly committing to lead his party into the next election as internal unease over his handling of the first wave continues to surface. The conditions the essay diagnoses are not stable. They are accelerating. I want to close by naming what I do not know and will not pretend to know.

I do not know whether Sinn Féin can be the vehicle for any of this. The trajectory appears to be against it, and the Keir Starmer temptation: neutralising the far-right wave by adopting enough of its vocabulary to make the far-right redundant, is the path of least resistance for a party whose leadership has never been structurally anchored to a left position it could not abandon. I do not know whether Sinn Féin will reach for that temptation or resist it. The question is alive inside the party, as it is alive inside every party of the European left that has watched Starmer’s version of it succeed in electoral terms while emptying the party of the content it used to carry.

I do not know whether the existing small left parties and independents can coalesce around the four commitments in a way that avoids absorption. People Before Profit and the Social Democrats and smaller formations have each been doing honest work in their own registers, but none of them has yet demonstrated the scale of organising infrastructure the right is now building. The Greens, in the leadership of Roderic O’Gorman, are one of the few voices I heard during the fuel week naming the structural dependency and the embassy-level chain of cause and effect. Whether that voice can survive the next coalition offer is the question the Greens are going to have to answer again, having failed to answer it the last time.

I do not know whether the intellectual and cultural resources exist to build the infrastructure the project would need. The policy researchers are there. The journalists are there. The trade unions are partly there. The cultural figures are there. What I have not seen is the integrated form that would bring those resources together into something that could organise the available constituencies. That form will have to be built, or it will not exist, and the consequence of its not existing will be that the right-wing infrastructure already operational will continue to grow without serious opposition.

There is one piece of evidence worth naming before I close, because it happened this weekend and it bears directly on the question. Uachtarán na hÉireann, on her first foreign trip as head of state, travelled to Barcelona to share a platform with Lula, Petro, Ramaphosa, Sheinbaum and Sánchez at a summit framed explicitly as a defence of democracy against the global authoritarian right. In her address she asked how the international system had moved “from the crystal-clear language of the UN charter championing human rights to the crystal-clear language that now champions ‘might is right’”, and she answered her own question with a sentence worth copying out: “Each time a violation was absorbed without consequence, the threshold for the next one was raised.” She framed Ireland’s perspective in terms the Coalition has spent the last decade carefully avoiding, as a neutral, post-famine, post-colonial republic with an unbroken UN peacekeeping record since 1958 and an obligation to refuse the normalisation of war. The presidency does not make policy. What it can do is name what the state is doing and what it is not doing. This presidency has just named it. That does not amount to a political project, and the office is not one a political project can enlist. It does amount to evidence that the vocabulary a serious project would need to speak is already, quietly, available from at least one Irish institution.

What I know is that the diagnosis is now available from enough honest voices that the question has changed. The question is no longer whether we can see the shape of what is happening. The question is whether we can build the political form that would let us act on what we see.

The tradition I write from has an answer to this question, and the answer is that building is harder than diagnosing, and that the people who have paid most for previous attempts to build are not the people who will lightly authorise the next attempt. That is why the weight of the diagnosis, the weight Sinéad O’Sullivan and Ciara Murphy and Saoirse McHugh and Patrick Bresnihan and Roderic O’Gorman and Fintan O’Toole have each contributed to, from their different vantage points, has to be held carefully. It is not a mandate. It is an invitation.

The invitation is to take the diagnosis seriously enough to act on it before the infrastructure being built against it becomes impossible to catch up with. That is the work. It is slower than the news cycle and it will not land on any editor’s desk as a scoop. It is the work anyway.

I will keep writing while it is being done. The people actually doing it, the ones I will not name because they are still deciding whether to be public about what they are building, will do more than I will. This is a small contribution to a conversation that will have to be had properly elsewhere, in rooms I do not sit in, by people who have more at stake than I do.

What comes next is theirs to build. What I can do is keep the question alive until they are ready to answer it.

Sources and further reading

The five diagnostic voices this essay draws on, in the order they appear in Section I:

Sinéad O’Sullivan, “Mind The Gap,” But This Time It’s Different (Substack).

Sinéad O’Sullivan, “The protests aren’t just about fuel, they’re a revolt against a hollow state,” The Journal, 14 April 2026,

Ciara Murphy, “We have a fossil fuel problem,” Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, 15 April 2026.

Saoirse McHugh, thread on agri-politics and the left, Bluesky, April 2026 — @saoirsemc.bsky.social

Patrick Bresnihan, quoted in Tommy Greene, “Why are fuel price protests sweeping the Republic of Ireland?,” Al Jazeera, 16 April 2026.

Sébastien Lecornu, televised address reported in America Hernandez, “France doubles electrification aid to cut fossil fuel dependency,” Reuters, 10 April 2026.

Stephen McDermott, “What happens now to the €150,000 raised on GoFundMe to feed the fuel protesters?,” The Journal, 16 April 2026.

Additional context:

Fintan O’Toole, “Rule of the ‘breakfast roll-atariat’ — this is how Ireland’s far-right movement will emerge,” Irish Times, 14 April 2026 — 

Keith Kelly, “‘Too much is at stake’ — Catherine Connolly tells world leaders ‘democracy is under attack’ on first foreign trip as president,” Irish Independent, 18 April 2026.

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.

What Would Have To Be Built

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Ninety One

 


Hate Theology @ 1

 

A Morning Thought @ 3165

Gary Robertson ⚽ Dunno about you but I hate international friendlies and Saturdays did nothing to earn my love.
 
I watched it, simply because it was football and it helped pass the time til the Champions league final. It was either that or housework and whilst the prospect of watching Scotland scrape past a team ranked 84th in the world didn’t appeal neither did mopping floors. And as I’d just made a coffee I figured I might as well sit on my arse and tune in.
 
To put this into context, Curacao are a country with a population almost equivalent to the size of the city of Dundee (although that’s where the comparisons end though as one’s an island paradise in the Caribbean and the others on the east coast of Scotland). Well done Dundee for getting a mention without me moaning about the Tannadice pitch. 

So it came as absolutely no surprise to anyone anywhere ever when Curacao took the lead. Chong of Sheffield Utd slotting home past 43 year old Craig Gordon to put the visitors a goal up. (Curaçao are ranked one place higher in FIFA rankings than Haiti whom everyone (least on this side of the Irish Sea) assumes we will beat with ease in the USA). 

Scotland were up against it and whilst the final score of 4-1 looks pleasing on paper we were rank rotten and but for the sending off of Miami FCs Locadia in the 38th minute the story could have been -  would have been - completely different. 

Curaçao came with a game plan: they weren’t here to kick a ball around and lie down, they came to compete, and competitive it was. Indeed competitive enough for Scotland midfield wizard Billy Gilmour to suffer an injury that’s ruined his chance of playing at the World Cup. When I saw him limping away I feared the worst and although he’s a youngster of 24 this may have been his one and only chance of ever playing for the what was the Jules Remit trophy. I hope it’s not but Scotland's inability to qualify for these tournaments mean it’s highly likely. I’m angry, bloody angry. Sure, I mean, yeah, play some fringe players in friendlies but we knew Billy would have been a regular starter so what did he have to prove? Fuck you Steve Clarke and Fuck the SFA.
 
We’ve another pointless friendly coming up against Bolivia at on Saturday, (9pm kick off and available on the BBC if you’re desperate. If not, I could give you a couple of movie suggestions. Just ask. Oh, and no Scottish TV are showing England v New Zealand so no point turning over, unless it’s to sleep.

In other news St Mirren managed to retain their SPL status having taken care of Partick Thistle in the play offs.
 
Congratulations also to Auchinleck Talbot who won the Scottish junior cup for the 15th time in the club's history.
 
And finally …
 
Congratulations to Celtic FC women who despite being reduced to ten after Emma Lawton was awarded a second yellow still managed to overcome their bitterest rivals at Hampden and lift the women’s Scottish Cup. It’s been a rocky old season for Celtic women after losing coach Elena Sadiku. And under new manager, former Hibs boss Grant Scott, it looked like a season to write off but as has been said before “there’s something of a fairy tale about this club”. And against the odds Kelly Clark’s ghirls did the business. A goal from Morgan Cross and some outstanding keeping from American keeper Adelaide Gay gave captain Kelly Clark and manager Grant Scott a lot to cheer about at the end of a difficult 25/26.

This Friday June 5th Scotland women line up against Israel as they do again on Tuesday the 9th. I believe we should take a stand and refuse point blank to play these matches. As long as Israel continues to commit genocide and war crimes daily we shouldn’t be turning away and pretending everything is fine. Maggie Chapman of the Scottish Greens and Leòdhas Massie of Your Party have along with councillors across the board urged the SFA not to let these games go ahead. But whilst it might be a lion on the badge we’re ran by cowards and they’ll carry on regardless.

Israel is a genocidal state committing war crimes and backed by the US and UK is carrying out atrocities that would give Putin nightmares. Shame on the SFA.

Til next time

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Carrying On Regardless

Double Down News ★ Abby Martin Went To Israel 🪶 It's Worse Than You Think.

Recommended by Enda Craig.

The Fourth Reich

Barry Gilheany 🔖 Writing about the concentration camp system in Nazi Germany, vicar and columnist Rev Giles Fraser once described as repositories for “Germany’s shit;” . . . 


. . . places where those who deviated from the norms of the healthy, warrior, blue eyed Germanic master race would be detained, out of sight and out of mind. 

These deviants included political opponents; asocial elements including the unemployed; mentally subnormal and atypical; LGTB+ people and others who violated the Nazi aesthetic be they sexually liberated women, prostitutes and “degenerate” artists and writers. Of course they also held those whose very existence as opposed to behaviours was an affront to Nazi ideals, namely Jews and Gypsies who were to pay the ultimate collective price for it. In her book on the operation of and the inmates trapped in the Magdalen Laundries The Fallen, the academic Louise Brangan whose expertise is in the areas of injustice and imprisonment, describes a similar dynamic in the operation of the carceral archipelago of clerical run institutions of detention, “care,” “welfare” and reformatories that were constructed in independent Ireland. 

While lacking the exterminatory logic and praxis of Nazi Germany, Brangan dissects a system in which Ireland’s excreta was contained. Such institutions operated in plain sight and yet away from the prying eyes of those who knew and yet refused to know. The figure of the fallen woman occupied a particular form of Übermenschen in Irish society. For to be pregnant out of marriage was the ultimate, unmentionable sin in Ireland. For it was family reputation and honour that was being violated in the gossip strewn large village that was Ireland for at least five decades after independence. It was to avoid the shame and disgrace, the threat of which largely held together a social structure which had emerged in the decades after the Great Famine, that the carriers of the ultimate taboo and stigma had to be shepherded into permanent incarceration. Moral purity was the ideological mission statement of post-independence Ireland just as racial purity was the overarching principle of Nazi Germany; those who transgressed the national ethic were not just to be punished but disappeared into the unknowing Kafkaesque realm of the Irish morality gulag.

Much has been written both in academic texts, personal biography and in the dry tomes of government commissions on the horrors of the Irish Catholic ideal. The extent of child sexual abuse by priests, bishops and nuns has been well documented. As have the dimensions of the systematic and almost ritual psychical brutality of the Industrial Schools run by the Christian Brothers (over and above the regular, almost banal abuse in the schools that order ran), the cruelties of the Mother and Baby Homes.

The legalisation of the right to choose abortion after the deletion of Article 40.3. or the Eighth Amendment in the 2018 referendum resolved Ireland’s tortuous history over reproductive rights. The struggle for full LGTB+ rights was fully won by the legalisation of same sex marriage in the 2015 referendum. It is worth stating such developments would have been scarcely imaginable as recently as the 1990s. 

Louise Brangan fills a surprising lacunae in the literature and chronicles of the death of Most Holy Catholic Ireland by her coruscating study of the Magdalen Laundries, the publication of which was timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the closure of the last Laundry in 1996. Surely this closure should have laid to rest yet another harrowing episode in Irish history. However the inter-generational trauma that is a legacy of the institutional cruelty of this node in Irish Catholicism’s gulag ensures that it is very much a live issue for scholars of this regime and a festering scar on the Irish collective psyche. Brangan thus performs an invaluable therapeutic task in telling the forgotten story of the Magdalen Laundries, through the testimonies of the women who suffered the indignities of the system, the nuns who presided over them and the communities who lived in physical proximity to these sites of indefinite incarceration, but who often chose to avert their gaze from them.

It is the through the stories of six inmates/residents/detainees (choose whatever the appropriate descriptor is for you the reader) Carmel, Brigid, Eileen, Nora, Catherine, and Katie that Brangan brings to awareness the corporeal reality of the Laundries and sheds light on the hidden and not so hidden cruelties and hypocrisies of “respectable Ireland.” We learn in raw, unflinching oral evidence how Carmel ended up in the Laundries because the nuns decided that even though she was eighteen, she was not ready for Civvy Street. To escape the Laundries, she had to escape Ireland. We are told how “for giddy acts of truancy” Brigid paid the ultimate price. For when she crept back into society, she was an adult woman in a world that she could not engage with, within a community unwilling to accept her. We are informed how without any explanation, discussion or justification, Eileen was sent to the Laundry because, Matrix or Minority Report style, some strangers had judged her predelinquent, too weak to avoid the seduction of the world around her and so doomed to the fate of no longer in the world at all. There is Nora whose pregnancies and babies had to be hidden to ward off the public shame that would have descended on her family. There were girls like Katie who were dispatched to the Laundries like refugees, because the State had abandoned them and Catherine who, like many other children, were deposited in the Laundries because their parenting resources depended on love, money, and respectability and any one of them could be critically absent.[1]

Ireland’s Prisons of Patriarchy

It is one of the cruellest ironies of the history of the Republic of Ireland that for the first three or four decades that at one time the liberal and permissive use of temporary release in the Irish men’s prison system - to avoid what prison administrators thought of as long, degrading and inhumane periods of imprisonment - earned for Ireland a temporary reputation in the twentieth century for having one of the more humane prison systems in the world[2], that by the 1950s, one in every seventy Irish persons over the age of 24 was confined in an asylum. Be it psychiatric hospitals (or the more common moniker mental asylums), industrial and reformatory schools for poor orphaned children, County Homes (formerly workhouses rebranded after Irish independence), and Mother and Baby Homes, where women and girls’ pregnant outside marriage were accommodated (as was also the practice in the UK). And superimposed on these care/remand centres were the Magdalen Laundries. Taken as an aggregate, these institutions held over 1 per cent of the Irish population.[3]

In 1951 when the Laundries were at their peak of operation, for every 100,000 males, 27 were in prison, of which there were only five. While for every 100,000 females, seventy were in a Laundry. They were for females virtually beyond redemption. They were considered to be beyond the help of the Mother and Baby Home, beyond the industrial school, beyond the prison, and beyond the remit of modern life. They were the end of the line. They were the termini, a concept developed by the criminologist Richard Sparks, who used it to describe the extreme forms of prison segregation and the ‘recurrent capacity’ of our systems to control, ‘to develop the deepest places – ends-of-the-lines; termini.[4]

The Irish government ‘s official calculation is that 10,012 women and girls were sent to the Laundries; a figure which is rightly contested as an underestimate. However another figure which was casually thrown into the public domain is equally open to challenge; this is the statistic of in excess of 56,000 young women who in the closing credits of the 2024 film Small Little Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy, based on the bestselling novella by the Irish author Claire Keegan and set in 1985 in the New Ross Magdalene Laundry in County Wexford ‘were sent to the Magdalene Laundries’ and to whom the film was dedicated to as well ‘as the children who were taken from them’. However this was the headline figure from the official State investigation which was exclusively concerned with the Mother and Baby Homes which had held 56,000 women and girls across the twentieth century.[5]

The history of the Magdalene institutions is not of linear and all-pervasive cruelty. Brangan describes how they had initially been benevolent refuges run by ordinary people of both Catholic and Protestant religious persuasion to work with prostitutes and other ‘fallen women,’ as well as the homeless and alcoholics – all of whom were adjudged to be in need of moral and spiritual recovery, heroically described as ‘rescue work.’ The first Protestant Magdalene asylum was established in 1765 and by the end of the 18th century there were at least forty-one of these refuges. Catholic nuns also operated Magdalene Refuges, though these were usually larger enterprises than the ones operated by lay people. While daily life in the convent Laundries were regimented and religious, they were not coercive or established for profit and the women and children under their care could leave and return at will.[6]

By the early twentieth century, the numbers of women attending the smaller lay Magdalene Refuges steadily declined until they were abandoned completely, leaving only the larger religious institutions in operation. On its independence from Britain in 1922, there were only ten Catholic Laundries across Ireland ran by four religious orders: Religious Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, and the Good Shepherd Sisters. Located close to the edges of the island, this decemvirate of institutions encircled the new nation. On the east coast there were four Laundries in the capital Dublin; two on the south-east coast in New Ross, Wexford and in County Waterford; two more in the southernmost city of Cork; one each on the western seaboard in Limerick and Galway and one across the new frontier in the newly established state of Northern Ireland.[7]

Brangan’s book is a forensic yet harrowing account of the Work Hard and Pray Hard ethos that was the imprimatur of these institutions told through the stories of the main actors; the detained women and custodial nuns as well as an examination of their archives and the decision-making processes of the state agencies that acted in collusion. However to understand how the monotonous cruelty of the Laundries could furnish, one must look at the Ideological superstructure of the new Irish state and its underpinnings.

The Devane Rites Of Irish Catholicism

After independence, the Catholic Church which had developed an authoritative hold on the Irish people in the decades after the Great Famine, now found itself to be the most important power bloc in the new nation and one to whose whim the nascent Irish state would steadily genuflect towards in the coming decades. The new Irish authorities found themselves dealing with the legacies of the War of Independence and the bitter Civil War which followed the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921; the impoverishment caused by the ‘famine like conditions” in the 1920s and the appalling financial strictures forced on the Cumann na nGaedheal government which led to cuts in public expenditure from £42 million in 1923-24 to £24 million in 1927 and then to a paring of the already meagre welfare budget, including a 10 per cent cut to the pension. The consequent falls in wages and welfare payments led to a cost of living crisis and throughout the 1920s infant mortality, overcrowded living and unemployment spiralled and emigration took on such proportions that by 1927, the population had plummeted to its lowest recorded level since the 1840s.[8] 

The government also had to deal with the residual bitterness of and the challenge to its legitimacy from the losing side in the Civil War which sometimes found an outlet in violence; the most notorious incident being the assassination of Government Minister Kevin O’Higgins in 1927. Internationally, there was a febrile atmosphere across Europe in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution which found expression in widespread fear of Communism among authority and power holders including the Irish Catholic Church hierarchy.

But for the Irish episcopate there was much greater danger to the Irish nation than far off revolutionary movements or even the grinding poverty. This was the threat to the Irish soul from the ‘tyranny of the senses’ produced by the Roaring Twenties. For the Twenties represented not just the birth of a new Irish democratic nation state but that of an age of modernity that for at least some of almost 50 per cent cohort of the Irish population that was under 25 years of age must have had appeal. It was the era of jazz, modernist literature (think DH Lawrence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Sons and Lovers notoriety or Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness which scandalised prudish British sensibilities), new music, changing fashions and new dance forms such as the Charleston. This culture’s celebration of individualism, ordinary people, and mundane bodily pleasures, such as James Joyce’s remorseless stream-of- consciousness style in Ulysses represented a contemporary middle finger to Catholic values of modesty and self-denial. In the dance halls, liberated bodies danced sensuously to the shimmy, Black Bottom, Charleston, shag, and jitterbug (which would have disturbed racial sensitivities of the time) were eclipsing the native reel and jigs.[9]

The terrain on which the struggle between the Church and ‘alien’ culture and morality was to be contested was women’s corporeality. The spectacles of women wearing shorter skirts and shimmering drapery designed to accentuate their movements were, in the view of the bishops, ‘bordering on indecency.’ These modern women were reviled as no more than ‘fag-smoking, jazz-dancing, lip-sticking flappers.’ Since the Catholic ideal for women was the Virgin Mary, these new trends were condemned as the ruin of Irish maidens’ fundamental ‘Christian virtue’ and represented a national crisis as the ‘future of the country is bound up with the dignity and purity of the women of Ireland.[10] For some prelates the solution to such immorality lay at home. So the advice from Bishop O’Doherty of Galway to parents whose daughters stayed out late was to “lay the lash on their backs. That was the good old system, and that should be the system today.”

It was not just the institutional Church that was outraged by the menace of modernism. The 1920s saw the emergence of a lay fundamentalist Catholic movement which sought to enforce social and doctrinal purity. They consisted of groups such as the Catholic Truth Society, the Catholic Society for the Protection of Girls, the Kinship of Christ and, the most prominent of their number, the Legion of Mary. Such right-wing social movements operating outside the official remit of the Church hierarchy such as the Maria Duce movement of the 1950, the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign in the 1980s, Youth Defence in the 1990s and the Iona Institute in recent decades do emerge at key moments of challenge to clericalism and resultant backlash. And it was in just sort of a milieu that the moment of one of the most consequential thinkers and activists in the early years of the Irish state emerged – Father Richard Devane. Despite his relative obscurity in Irish Catholic historiography, he is worthy of a biography because of his role in the construction of the most repressive edifice of clericalism in Western Europe (outside of the Franco regime in Spain) and the evasion of democratic scrutiny that this process involved, and which Louise Brangan superbly brings to light.

Born in Limerick in 1876, Father Devane returned to his native city in 1904 after a spell as a curate in England. His experience of the class system in England, English liberalism and its unhindered accumulation of wealth proved to be a very formative experience for the young curate as he soon developed his life mission to promote social purity as part of his campaign for a Catholic counter kulturkampf in Ireland. An immediate objective of his was to rid Ireland of the ‘filthy Sunday cross-Channel papers’ because of their capacity and intention to scintillate and arouse through coverage of gruesome murders, divorce and “adulteresses.’ 

He had no qualms about working ‘outside the law’ and in 1911 he struck his first blow for purity by the seizure of British newspapers by his Vigilance Committee at Limerick railway station, their ceremonial burning in a public park and a successful boycott of Limerick shops who stocked these newspapers.[11] 

With independence won, he sought through his writings in newspapers, pamphlets and periodicals exposing such evil as foreign newspapers, the bad book and unmarried mothers to investigate how the ‘new won powers’ could be instrumentalised to ensure that Ireland would be organised ‘according to Irish ideals and Catholic standards.'  Devane proposed the regulation of dance halls, censorship of films and the prohibition or high taxation of foreign materials. But his most far reaching and chillingly punitive suggestions were for female transgressors of the new Irish moral code. Girls could be charged with immoral behaviour. Unmarried mothers and their illegitimate offspring dealt with expediently and in secrecy. Then there were those morally degenerate, mentally defective, or perverse creatures (free spirited young women in other words) who needed to be protected from their own base instincts by committal to a Good Shepherd Home, namely a Magdalene Laundry. Detention would be the only way to ensure that ‘the public is safeguarded.’[12]

Long before Hannah Arendt and scholars like Professor Sam Finer had coined the term ‘totalitarian’ to characterise the state in Nazi Germany and the USSR under Josef Stalin, Fr Devane mused about the possibility of how:

we Christians develop such a totalitarian Christian faith (like the all-consuming faith of fascist and communist regimes) of a like white-heat intensity?

For this Utopia to happen, a purge was required. All distractions had to be removed, all recourse to indolence squashed and all cultural expressions of the values or aesthetic of individualism be erased. The challenge for Devane was how to introduce laws to uphold the Catholic social ideal without exposing those of purity of mind to the spiritual pollution of immoral thoughts and actions. To avoid such a vista, he pondered ‘would it be asking too much of the government’ to instead make legislation by a private committee of people who could bring the law into harmony with Catholic spiritual values?[13]

The answer to Devane’s prayers came in the form of the Carrigan Report which was the outcome of the work of a review committee tasked by the Department of Justice in 1930 to reappraise the criminal law bill, with specific attention paid to the age of consent and juvenile prostitution, and to produce a report with their recommendations. The committee was comprised of Catholic and Protestant clerics and health and welfare professionals and was chaired by a judge named William Carrigan. Throughout the 1920s the pressure has intensified from militant lay groups as well as the Church hierarchy to enshrine Catholic moral principles in the law of the new Irish Free State and for the expurgation of ‘foreign influences’ like cross-channel newspapers from Irish society; there were growing moral panics about the rate of illegitimate births and venereal disease and the spectre of the ‘fallen woman’, and women were being steadily being removed from the public sphere through the civil service and teaching marriage bans and the removal of woman from automatic membership of juries. The Committee on Evil Literature had been formed in 1926 to examine the need for stricter censorship laws. But as Louise Brangan describes the reach of the Carrigan Report and its subsequent influence on the criminal law of the Irish Free State proved to be a democratic outrage.

In the first instance, the Committee appeared to have expanded their scope of inquiry beyond their mandated realms of ‘social morality’ and ‘evil’ to concern about the ‘suppression’ of ‘public vice.’ The sources of Ireland’s societal deterioration were neatly laid out: popular amusements such as ‘dances of a disgusting character’ and ‘misbehaviour’ in cinemas; male predators, immoral girls, illegitimate children, and an absence of tougher laws to surveil, punish and remove them. These immoral characters were the product of bad families in which parents had balefully ceded control. In particular, they focused attention on the industrial schools which were, in their opinion, designed for ‘delinquents.’ On departure from these institutions, these children because they ‘are usually without responsible friends or relatives’ were a special threat to national purity as they drift into ‘evil ways.’ Girls particularly so, since the ‘girl of 16’:

is often mentally and emotionally unstable… has not finished developing; and cannot really appreciate the nature and result of the act to which she consents. 

The vulnerability of these girls to exploitation by their ‘vicious associates’ was the source of the endless cycle illegitimacy and, by extension, Ireland’s degeneration. [14]

Among the measures recommended to ‘purge the State of these evils’ were additional monitoring of children leaving industrial schools and if necessary ‘further detention;’ the setting up of special borstals for ill-natured girls and the appointment of ‘women police’ to help deal with the marked characteristics of female deviance. Regarding male sexual offending, flogging and public shaming should be reinstated for miscreants and the details of the offence, along with the name and address of the guilty party, should be published in the newspapers.[15]

The then Minister of Justice, Enda Fitzgerald-Kenney, rejected the Carrigan Report and left it in abeyance in the hope that a future administration would resume the mantle. This duly happened with the entry into office of the populist nationalist party Fianna Fail, the party of the losing side in the Civil War and led by Eamon de Valera, one of 20th century Ireland’s most towering political figures. The new Minister for Justice, James Geoghegan, after reading the Carrigan Report, agreed with its main animating contention, that something needed to be done about Ireland’s moral malaise. Geoghegan wanted the law brought in alignment with ‘the best Catholic teaching and practice' but he also wanted to do it without the appropriate parliamentary scrutiny; in other words the democratic process was to be by-passed. 

This is precisely what happened. On 26 November 1932, Geoghegan convened a secret committee of sitting politicians who shared ‘the Catholic view’. For six months, he kept the bishops and De Valera up to speed of their progress. The committee produced the bill, but as they lacked the power to ratify it, it had to pass through the Oireachtas. The formulation of amendments would require a parliamentary reading and discussion of any new laws, where all the evidence of Ireland’s dark underside; its ‘unsavoury’ ‘sex problems’ would be uncovered and the resulting scandals would be raked over in the newspapers.[16] As Michel Foucault describes it in The History of Sexuality Volume I, under this regime of taboo and repression; sex was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Its universality was being spoken through silence. As one member of the Seanad put it, when it came to the public, ‘the less that is known about it the better. The public, perhaps, know too much.’[17]

It was under this shroud of secrecy and total absence of debate that the 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act and the 1935 Public Dance Halls Act became statutory laws. They encompassed a near total ban on contraception, a stricter licensing regime for dance halls and the criminalisation of acts of public indecency that offended ‘modesty or cause scandal or injure the morals of the community.’ The Criminal Law Amendment Act legalised incarceration in places other than a prison for the ‘moral reclamation’ of prostitutes. This oblique reference to the Magdalene Laundries is one of the very few extant in Irish law.[18]

These legislative measures, along with the edifice of censorship and the explicitly Catholic and patriarchal articles of the 1937 Constitution drawn up by De Valera in extensive consultation with Archbishop John McQuaid represented the triumph of Fr. Devane’s dreams of a totalitarian type Catholic regime. It was the culmination of social and ecclesiastical trends that had been underway in the aftermath of the Famine; the centralisation of Church power under Cardinal Paul Cullen; its seizure of control of education and the accompanying Devotional Revolution plus the dominance of a class of peasant proprietors defined by Professor Emmet Larkin as the thirty acre tenant farmers who dominated the stem family system of primogeniture which had replaced the pre-Famine modes of subdivision and whose ideology of “amoral familism” had become hegemonic. The post-independence panoply of clericalist legislation and the popular piety pervading Irish society made the new Irish state a very cold place for liberal intellectuals and Protestants but most of all for women and specifically the ‘deviant’ or ‘fallen.’

The Prisoners of Patriarchy

Louise Brangan describes the trifecta that characterised the black hole of incarceration and slavery: penance, slavery, and erasure. Thus on her entry into the New Ross Magdalene Laundry in 1963 after serving her sentence in the local Industrial Centre, Carmel would have her name taken from her. Once she was anointed with a new house name; she was not permitted to speak her name while enclosed within the four walls of the Laundry. She was then ritually instructed to take off her clothes and shoes in front of a nun who would then issue her with black, ill-fitting clothes and shoes which she was to discover was to be her uniform. The next act in the depersonalisation process was the shearing of her ‘very dark, down to my waist beautiful hair.’ Then she was escorted to her dormitory which was designed to minimise contact with others where, on her bed, ‘I cried my eyes out.’ The most disquieting moment for the new entrant as it was for many survivors was the realisation that her roommates were old. The sight of ‘worn-out women, crooked, with rotted teeth, short white hair, glazed expressions, silent demeanours’ must have been a uniquely frightening one without even the knowledge that these women had effectively been resident there for generations and that this was Carmel’s and so many other new inmates’ destiny. [19]

After the morning call for prayers at 6 and breakfast taken in total silence in a dreary refectory with long communal tables, Carmel processed into the industrial rooms underneath arches, one of which proclaimed ‘Unless Ye Do Penance, Ye Shall All Perish.’ It may as well have read “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.” And it was into the Hades of sweat and smell, that Carmel and countless thousands like her stepped. Even at the start of the working day, the atmosphere in the laundry room was overpowering, like a heaving greenhouse with the sibilant spitting of the irons and the hot exhales of the compressors. Those who worked in the sorting room where the clothes were separated found it vile. The big sacks of laundry were, in the words of one woman, ‘all filthy dirty and the smell of it and everything was awful.’ Nobody could adjust to the fetid air; ‘reeking, stinking, bleach, swell of piss, urine and the smell of it and everything was awful’[20]. In this way the literal stains of the business and professional classes of Ireland were literally washed away for nothing. Yet the women were not permitted to wash their sweat soaked bodies, nor even to soak and sooth their weary limbs with wash day being every other Sunday, when an auxiliary filled a cast-iron bath and one after another the women would scrub themselves with carbolic soap.[21] The nuns rarely missed an opportunity to make derogatory remarks about their detainees’ bodies and physical hygiene.

The hazardous nature of the work – the bleach spattering off hand brushes, the searing hot metal, machines spinning at 100 miles per hour – was heightened by the nuns’ absolute lack of technical know-how. If machinery looked to be vulnerable to collapse, the nuns would simply say a prayer rather than call a tradesman and so expose the girls to masculine danger. Burns from machines and corrosive industrial bleach were common, and on handful of occasions women were reported to have lost hands and arms.[22] So these women endured physical as well as the routine psychological penance.

In these dark satanic places, the slaves of the Magdalenes toiled to a background of the incessant incantation of litanies, rosaries, and stations of the cross. The merging of the monotonous drone of prayers and the rhythmic cadence of their collective voice created a deafening wall of sound[23]; an aural version of George Orwell’s symbol of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four of the perpetual boot on one’s neck. And in these black holes of detention, there was one golden rule – a version of Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. For on the first page of the Magdalen Home Rules and Honarium – issued by the Sisters of Mercy who ran three convents in the country and the honarium being the hourly schedule – it was ‘strictly forbidden to mention anything concerning their past life or associates.’ Thus, in the words of women, ‘silence was everything.’ On arrival, there was no formal explanation of the reason for an entrant’s detention. During work and at meal times, no gossip or chat was exchanged. The hearsay was that fellow detainees were prostitutes or had illegitimate children, but the regime of silence prevented new entrants from finding out why the elderly women were there; that they too had been abandoned and rejected[24].

Long after their release from the institutional cruelty of the Laundries, the women could not escape adversity as they still bore the stigmata of abandonment and the message, reinforced almost daily by nuns, that they were worthless either because they were sinners in need of perpetual redemption or children who required perpetual supervision. Brangan remarks that the thousands of pages and hours of survivor testimony are suffused with account after account of what it was like for survivors to cloak their identity and conceal where they had been. On her return home Nora found that even though her family had known exactly what had happened ‘it just was a non-event, but a non-event to be ashamed of. And nobody else was, so I didn’t either …” 

Most likely because of Nora’s highly probable collusion into her disappearance into the labyrinthine of Ireland’s unique penal industrial complex. Carmel found that in her first hospital job as a domestic; she had to conceal her history from the inquisitiveness of her fellow native Wexford work mates. She could not tell them that she had done the rounds of the most shameful institutions: born in a county home, raised in an industrial school, dumped in a Magdalene Laundry. She knew, as Nora Connolly O’Brien - who as a Senator in 1960 had first drawn public attention to its stigmatic nature - observed that being in a Laundry was a permanent mark of immorality, that you had done something truly despicable, that you were truly despicable.[25]

Betty, who spent six years shutting between three different Laundries from 1971 to 1977 and who came across “as ebullient and upbeat” in her testimony also found that casual conversation at work was a danger zone. An even more devastating effect of the loneliness that swirled around survivors like Betty was on her ability to make loving relationships. She found that despite her desire to belong to someone, a declaration of love from a man she courted instantly chilled her mood as it meant he was ‘gone tomorrow.’ For ‘How could he love me, like, and my mother didn’t even love me?’ For if ‘you feel you weren’t wanted all your life and what is this man now saying he loved me for?’ For those like Laura and Michelle who did marry and have children; the imperative to silence remained. Under no circumstances, were husband and children to know of their incarceration and the reasons for it.[26]

Another survivor, Marge, said that she had always understood that the Laundry system was designed not just to silence and depersonalise its inmates from the inside but to permanently exile them in a socially reinforcing regime of silence on the outside upon release. The women had been ‘locked away, shamed away’ and they were expected to ‘go to their graves’ as ‘the silent people.’ And in the first five decades of Irish independence, this paralysis of silence was tightened by its great accomplices: gossip and scandal.[27]

Justice Served?

In the aftermath of the tsunami of revelations of the systematic physical, sexual and emotional abuses of children and women by the institutional Church and the accompanying cultural revolution in relation to Irish religiosity in the decades either side of the turn of the millennium attention finally turned towards the necessity of the recognition of and restitution for the lifelong sufferings of the thousands of Irish women who had effectively been interned without proper recourse to justice in the Magdalene Laundries. It came on 19 February 2013 when Taoiseach Enda Kenny rose to address the Dail and the nation and international media and deliver the apology for the Laundries almost four years to the day when Bart O’Keefe, then Minister of Education, dismissed any claim that the Magdalene survivors had to the State redress scheme for victims of historical child abuse on the grounds that the Laundries were privately-owned and did not come within the responsibility of the State. 

Announcing his intention ‘not just to commission the Report (to be authored by Martin McAleese, husband of the former President Mary) ‘but to actually study it and having done so to reflect on its findings,’ in his nineteen-minute address, Enda Kenny stated that these women had experienced a ‘profound and studied indifference.’ “It was a humbling and inspiring experience’ to hear the women’s stories which while individually different shared a particular experience of a particular Ireland: judgemental, intolerant, petty and prim.’ He went on:

We forgot you or, if we thought of you at all, we did so in untrue and offensive stereotypes. This is a national shame, for which again say, I am deeply sorry and offer my full and heartfelt apologies.

He concluded in a voice almost breaking with almost uncontainable emotion by hoping that:

this day and this debate … heralds a new dawn for all those who feared that the dark midnight might never end.

Cue applause from the survivors in the public gallery and applause in turn from the parliamentarians.[28]

The challenge for the McAleese report, for Brangan, was how to speak factually about a past that was once unspeakable? She argues that the Report was hobbled at the outset by the use of neutral language designed to stigmatise or cause bias against the nuns, the Laundries, or the women. Thus it was decided that the women should not be referred to as penitents, or inmates; nor, however, should be understood as survivors, let alone victims. The Report acknowledged that the Laundries were ‘frightening and lonely places’ and a ‘harsh and physically demanding work environment ‘but that ‘they were not systematically abusive’ compared to the horrors of the industrial schools. Brangan concludes that the factual narrative of the Laundries, based as it was on a narrow factual base of State and the nuns’ archives, is what gave the Committee its biggest blind spot: they lost the capacity to process and assimilate the nature of the Laundries and the experiences of the women who were sent there. But can something like human suffering on that sort of mass scale be quantified or conveyed through dry metrics?[29] How can a life not lived be measured? Indeed how can any sort of institutional crimes against humanity be narrated properly?

References

[1] Brangan p.273

[2] Ibid, p.43

[3] P.12

[4] p.12; Richard Sparks, (2002), ‘Out of the Digger: The Warrior’s honour and the guilty observer’, Ethnography, 3 (4), pp.556-81

[5] Brangan Pp.17-18

[6] Ibid Pp.12-13

[7] Ibid Pp.13-14

[8] Ibid Pp.56-57

[9] Ibid Pp.48-49

[10] Ibid P.49

[11] Ibid Pp.51-52

[13] Ibid Pp.53-54

[14] Ibid Pp.65-67

[15] Ibid P.67

[16] Ibid Pp.69-70

[17] Ibid Pp.70-71

[18] P.71

[19] Ibid pp.81-87

[20] Pp.87-91

[21] Ibid P.102

[22] Ibid P.95

[23] Ibid P.96

[24] Ibid P.98

[25] Ibid Pp.191-96

[26] Ibid Pp196-98

[27] Ibid Pp.199-201l

[28] Ibid Pp.247-48

[29] Ibid Pp.250-56

Louise Brangan (2026) The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries & Ireland’s Legacy Of Shame London: Bodley Head.

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. 

The Fallen

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