Rethinking Occupied Ireland: Gender and Incarceration in Contemporary Irish Film

4 Washed Away

201 4 Washed Away Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and Religious Incarceration I N 19 4 0 , C H R I S T I N A M U L C A H Y gave birth at a home for single mothers run by Catholic nuns. She had gotten pregnant by her boyfriend and would have married him, but the nuns intercepted the couple’s communication . After the birth, Mulcahy tried to return home, but her father barred her from entering the property and sent his daughter—who at age twenty-two was an adult by legal standards—to the Sisters of Mercy Magdalene laundry in Galway. There, Mulcahy became a “penitent,” paying for her transgression under an austere regime of prayer, hard labor, and physical and psychological deprivation. Mulcahy eventually escaped, finding shelter at the home of a nearby friend, who had had no idea that she had been shut away “in that madhouse up the road.” Fearing she would be caught and returned to the laundry if she stayed in the country, Mulcahy fled across the border to Northern Ireland. Safely out of reach from her family, the Church, and the agents of the state who enforced their will— such as An Garda Síochána (the Irish police force)—Mulcahy became a nurse, married someone else, and raised a family. She remained silent about the past for over fifty years, finally telling her story to her family shortly before her death from cancer in 1997 (Sex in a Cold Climate 1998). Roughly fifty years after Mulcahy’s ordeal, another young woman was detained by the state in what became known as the X Case. In 1992, a fourteen-year-old girl was raped by the father of one of her classmates and became pregnant. With her parents by her side, she traveled to England to seek an abortion. But, because her father had asked the gardaí if the 202 ◎ Rethinking Occupied Ireland DNA from the fetal tissue could be used to identify his daughter’s rapist, the attorney general learned of the family’s intentions, and while they were in England, the parents received an injunction preventing their daughter from having an abortion. They returned home, “where the Irish High Court ruled that the young woman could not leave the country for nine months” (Conrad 2004, 102). News of her detention provoked national outrage against the government, which was seen as hypocritical in its willingness to sacrifice the welfare of an assaulted child in order to maintain the official national fiction that Irish women do not have abortions (Smyth 2005, 92). Eventually, after repeatedly threatening suicide, the young woman was allowed to terminate the pregnancy. Mulcahy’s search for asylum took her from south to north, from the Irish Republic to the (British) province of Northern Ireland, reversing the trajectory typical of nationalists fleeing incarceration and disturbing the Irish nationalist dichotomy that imagines the North to be the “fourth green field” that remains in “bondage” while the rest of Ireland is free. In Mulcahy’s story, the Irish Republic is a space of internment and detention, a zone of exclusion where the civil rights of women and girls are routinely suspended for the greater good of a pious nation whose very existence is imagined to be under constant threat by rampant female sexuality. As Martyn Turner’s 1992 cartoon for the Irish Times indicates, the X Case also raised unpleasant similarities between the Irish Republic and the repressive state to its north. In it, a little girl holding a teddy bear stands inside the borders of the Irish Republic, which are secured by fencing and barbed wire. The text accompanying the drawing reads, “17th February, 1992. The introduction of internment in Ireland—for 14-year-old girls” (reprinted in Conrad 2004, 108). But, as Mulcahy’s earlier story demonstrates, Turner’s choice of inaugural date is far too recent. Seventy years before the X Case, almost twenty years before Mulcahy’s, and half a century before the North had men behind the wire (as the Long Kesh internees were known), Ireland had begun interning women behind convent walls. From 1922 to 1996, the Catholic Church ran detention centers for women who failed to meet a national standard of femininity that demanded either virginity or married motherhood (or ideally, both). Often rejected by their families and a wider Washed Away ◎ 203 Irish society, these women were effaced from...