Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment

Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries

IRELAND’S

MAGDALEN LAUNDRIES

AND THE NATION’S

ARCHITECTURE OF

CONTAINMENT

JAMES M. SMITH

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2007 by University of Notre Dame

Published in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, James M., 1966–

Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the nation’s architecture of containment / James M. Smith.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-268-04127-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-268-04127-X (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Women—Institutional care—Ireland—History. 2. Prostitutes—Rehabilitation—Ireland—History 3. Church work with prostitutes—Catholic Church. 4. Unmarried mothers—Institutional care—Ireland—History. 5. Reformatories for women—Ireland—History. I. Title.

HV1448.I73S65 2007

362.83'9—dc22

2007025510

ISBN 9780268182182

This book is printed on recycled paper.

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu.

To my parents,

Patrick J. and Rosaleen Smith

And to the memory of

Caridad A. Valdés (1941–2000)

and

Adele M. Dalsimer (1939–2000)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: The Politics of Sexual Knowledge: The Origins of Ireland’s Containment Culture and the Carrigan Report (1931)

Part 1

The Magdalen Asylum and History: Mining the Archive

CHAPTER 1

The Magdalen in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

CHAPTER 2

The Magdalen Asylum and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland

Part 2

The Magdalen Laundry in Cultural Representation: Memory and Storytelling in Contemporary Ireland

CHAPTER 3

Remembering Ireland’s Architecture of Containment: Telling Stories on Stage, Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed and Stained Glass at Samhain

CHAPTER 4

(Ef)facing Ireland’s Magdalen Survivors: Visual Representations and Documentary Testimony

CHAPTER 5

The Magdalene Sisters: Film, Fact, and Fiction

CHAPTER 6

Monuments, Magdalens, Memorials: Art Installations and Cultural Memory

Conclusion: History, Cultural Representation, … Action?

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I begin with those whose love and support sustains me on a daily basis, my wife, Beatriz, and our daughter, Isabel. I also thank my parents, siblings, other family members, and good friends for their constant encouragement over the years.

I acknowledge too the real-life victims and survivors of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries and the nation’s architecture of containment who inspired this project. I do not presume to speak for them. Rather, my hope is that this book will foster the emergence of a new dialogue about their place in Irish society, in the past and in the present. I owe a special debt of thanks to the survivors and advocacy groups that assisted me in the research and writing of this book, in particular, Imelda Murphy, Mari Steed, and Claire McGettrick; the members of and contributors to the Justice for Magdalenes listserv; and Patricia Burke Brogan, Patsy McGarry, Mary Raftery, Paddy Doyle, Cinta Rimbaldo, and Anton Sweeney.

Many colleagues, mentors, students, and friends at Boston College supported me in bringing this project to completion. Studying and then working in an interdisciplinary Irish Studies program taught me the value of collaboration and cross-disciplinary scholarly exchange. I appreciate their varied contributions to my work—as readers, conference organizers, or colloquium attendees, or in informal conversation. They not only improved the work by asking questions but also made the experience of writing it more rewarding.

This book emerged from a single chapter of my doctoral dissertation, and I thank my committee members for guiding me toward completion. Special thanks are due to Professors Kristin Morrison and Adele Dalsimer. Their generosity was constant, their assistance endless. For reading and providing insightful commentary on specific chapters, I thank Michael Cronin, Marjorie Howes, Kevin Kenny, Vera Kreilkamp, Robin Lydenberg, Robert Savage, Andrew Sofer, and Chris Wilson. I also thank Mary Crane for her guidance and encouragement.

I am also indebted to the larger Boston College intellectual community. The College of Arts and Sciences, in particular Dean Joseph Quinn, awarded me a Research Incentive Grant that funded a number of research trips to Ireland and underwrote the Undergraduate Research Assistant program from which I benefited greatly over the course of six semesters. The Center for Irish Programs, especially Professor Thomas Hachey, sponsored numerous research and conference trips. The Irish Studies Program provided opportunities to present my research and always made available its resources to enhance my goals. In addition to those already mentioned, I thank Catherine McLaughlin, Seamus Connolly, Ruth Ann Harris, Ann Morrisson Spinney, Philip O’Leary, Kevin O’Neill, and Liz Sullivan. Many of the Burns Library Visiting Professors in Irish Studies engaged with my research and provided important feedback. In a particular way, I acknowledge and thank Professor Maria Luddy, who read my complete manuscript and whose scholarship I am especially indebted to. Steve Vedder and the staff of BC Media Tech Services were generous in providing their expertise to produce the images that appear in the text.

Through my membership in scholarly organizations I was fortunate to meet, share ideas with, and learn from a host of fellow travelers in the world of Irish Studies. Those who generously read sections of this book in draft form include Margot Backus, Ruth Barton, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, Margaret Kelleher, George O’Brien, Donal Ó Drisceoil, Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh, Lauren Onkey, Margaret Preston, Paige Reynolds, and Eibhear Walshe. Others helped shape my ideas through conversations and scholarly exchange, including Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Jim Byrne, Claire Connolly, Kathryn Conrad, Gearoid Denvir, Frances Finnegan, Louise Fuller, Luke Gibbons, Breda Grey, Liam Harte, Richard Haslam, Colleen Hynes, Richard Kearney, Anthony Keating, Declan Kiberd, Joe Lee, Joseph Lennon, Moira Maguire, Yvonne McKenna, Sarah McKibben, Gerardine Meaney, Paula Murphy, Briona NicDiarmada, Brian Ó Conchubhair, Anne O’Connor, Eunan O’Halpin, Lance Pettitt, James Rodgers, Louise Ryan, and Kevin Whelan.

Because the nature of my work is heavily dependent on archival research, I owe a special debt of thanks to the many librarians who facilitated my scholarship. Kathy Williams, John Atteberry, Elizabeth Sweeney, Brendan Rapple, and Anne Kenny at Boston College found ways to make available even the most obscure material. The staff at Ireland’s National Library were always welcoming and encouraging. Likewise at the National Archives in Dublin, Caitriona Crowe and Tom Quinlan assisted this nonhistorian in primary research. David Sheehy, formerly Dublin Diocesan Archivist, Brian Lynch at RTÉ Archives, and Sunniva O’Flynn and Antoinette Prout at the Irish Film Center were generous with their time. Emma Stevens at the Office of Public Works library assisted me with information regarding the Magdalen Memorial Bench in St. Stephen’s Green.

Two sections of this manuscript were previously published. Chapter 1 appeared as The Politics of Sexual Knowledge: The Origins of Ireland’s Containment Culture and the Carrigan Report (1931) in the Journal of the History of Sexuality 13, no. 2 (April 2004). A version of chapter 5 and the conclusion appeared combined as "The Magdalene Sisters: Evidence, Testimony … Action?" in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32, no. 2 (Winter 2007). I thank the editors and anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful contributions to my research and the journal editors for permission to reprint. Diane Fenster kindly gave permission to reprint images from her installation, Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries. Likewise, Gerard Mannix Flynn kindly gave permission to reprint images of his extallation, "Call Me by My Name": Requiem for Remains Unknown, 1889–1987. Patricia Burke Brogan kindly arranged permission for Sarah Fitzgerald’s photographs of Eclipsed that appear in chapter 3. Thanks to Terry Fagan for permission to reprint the historic photograph that appears in chapter 5; and to Jane Roche at Element Films for arranging permission to reprint images from The Magdalene Sisters. Thanks also to Robert Savage and Hugh Smith for permission to use their photographs in chapter 6. Finally, I acknowledge the two reviewers who read and provided invaluable critical commentary on the manuscript for the University of Notre Dame Press and Barbara Hanrahan and her staff at the press for their patience, perseverance, and support in seeing the book through the production process.

Obviously, any errors are of my own making.

Preface

This book has three primary objectives. First, it offers a partial history that connects Ireland’s Magdalen laundries and the nation-state’s nativist politics in the postindependence era. Second, it critically evaluates cultural representations of the Magdalen laundries that have, over the past fifteen years, recovered these institutions from the amnesia at the center of state politics. Third, it challenges the nation—including church, state, and society—to acknowledge its complicity in Ireland’s Magdalen scandal and to respond by providing redress for victims and survivors alike. This study is by necessity an interdisciplinary project: history, cultural critique, and, in the end, a call to action.

In its concrete form, Ireland’s architecture of containment encompassed an assortment of interconnected institutions, including mother and baby homes, industrial and reformatory schools, mental asylums, adoption agencies, and Magdalen laundries. These institutions concealed citizens already marginalized by a number of interrelated social phenomena: poverty, illegitimacy, sexual abuse, and infanticide. In its more abstract form, the nation’s architecture of containment also comprised the legislation that inscribed these issues, as well as the numerous official and public discourses that denied the existence and function of their affiliated institutions. Those incarcerated included unmarried mothers, illegitimate and abandoned children, orphans, the sexually promiscuous, the socially transgressive, and, often, those merely guilty of being in the way. This bureaucratic apparatus operated as a bulwark to the state’s emerging national identity. In a still-decolonizing society those citizens guilty of such crimes contradicted the prescribed national narrative that emphasized conformity, valued community over the individual, and esteemed conservative Catholic moral values.

At precisely the moment the fledgling state was authoring a new story of Irish identity, institutional provision became the favored response to perceived social and moral deviancy. As I demonstrate in the introduction, postindependence Ireland contained what it perceived as sexual immorality by locking it away—out of sight and out of mind. My project underscores the regulatory function of this institutional system that supported the state’s nativist politics. The existence of sites of confinement functioned as a constant reminder of the social mores deemed appropriate in Catholic Ireland and of the consequences awaiting transgressors of those standards. As the church’s institutional infrastructure continued to expand in this climate, it increasingly relied on the state’s legislative, judicial, and financial support. My interdisciplinary examination of the Magdalen asylums reveals the complexities of this sinuous relationship between church and state, exposing the collusion between these hegemonic partners in social control. Ultimately, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment asserts that the state was always an active agent in the operation and function of the Magdalen laundries.

While this book addresses the ten Catholic Magdalen laundries operating in the Irish nation-state between 1922 and 1996, I recognize that there is nothing essentially Irish or Catholic about these asylums for fallen women. And yet, I argue, the Irish variety took on a distinct character after political independence. Chapter 1 traces their origins in Ireland back to 1767, and Protestant and Catholic lay organizations continued to operate these institutions at least until the 1830s. While religious congregations of women would assume control and eventually dominate the Catholic asylums after 1850, the majority of Protestant lay asylums closed their doors or changed their mission by the early decades of the twentieth century. The Good Shepherd Sisters’ Magdalen asylum in Belfast operated for much of the twentieth century but did so in a different political jurisdiction and thus falls outside the scope of this study of the nation-state’s containment culture.

Magdalen asylums were a common feature in many societies outside Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth century; by 1900 there were over three hundred such institutions in Victorian England and at least twenty north of the border in Scotland (Finnegan 2001, Mahood 1990). The history of the Good Shepherd Sisters is a history of the worldwide spread of these institutions, from the congregation’s French foundation at Angers, stretching to Britain, Ireland, the rest of continental Europe, America, Australia, and beyond. The first asylum for fallen women in the United States, the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia, was founded in 1800 and closed its doors in 1916. Other North American cities, including New York, Boston, Chicago, and Toronto, proudly boasted a similar institutional response to prostitution and the reform of sexually active single women. Many of these institutions shared overriding characteristics, including a regime of prayer, silence, work in a laundry, and a preference for permanent inmates. Women across the continents sought to escape the harsh working conditions in which they toiled in these asylums, suggesting that their punitive nature is not unique to the Irish context (De Cunzo 2001; New-York City Magdalen Asylum 1869; Cushing 1944; Hoy 1997; Murray 2004; An Asylum That Is Not a Refuge 1878, Cells in the Magdalen Asylum 1878; Plunged from Third Storey to Freedom 1948; Mahood 1990).

There are, as I argue in chapter 2, a number of distinct characteristics to the Irish asylums, foremost their longevity. According to survivor testimony, women were still entering the Magdalen laundries in the 1980s. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, the Irish institutions were functioning less and less as rehabilitative short-term refuges. Fewer women entered these asylums voluntarily, as they did in the nineteenth century, and women were detained for longer periods, many for life. In the postindependence decades, these institutions increasingly served a recarceral and punitive function. Consequently, at precisely the time when their foreign equivalents were closing their doors or reforming their mission to become more vocational in orientation, the Irish asylums were progressively more secretive and opposed to public scrutiny. Also, after 1922 the asylums’ population changed significantly. Historically consisting of two distinct classes of women—the fallen (prostitutes) and the preventative (young women in moral danger)—Irish asylums in the twentieth century hosted an ever more diverse community of female inmates, including hopeless cases, mental defectives, infanticide cases, those on remand from the courts, transfers from industrial and reformatory schools, and voluntary committals. This heterogeneous population contradicts the religious congregations’ stated mission to protect, reform, and rehabilitate.

How can we account for the Irish asylums’ atypical development after political independence? Why did they mutate from their original mission, and why did they continue to operate in an Irish setting later into the twentieth century? Reliable answers to these questions must await a comparative historical study of Irish and non-Irish asylums, and such a study falls beyond the scope of this project. Nevertheless, at least two features mark Ireland as different from the countries listed above. First, the history of twentieth-century Ireland is largely the history of the nation-state’s emergence from a colonial experience. It is a history, moreover, that makes manifest the characteristic hallmarks of a still-decolonizing society caught in a nativist stage of postcolonial development. For the purposes of this study, therefore, I identify Ireland’s postcolonial status as a determining factor shaping the nation’s containment culture. Second, although a number of other countries had large Catholic populations, the overt relationship between Catholicism and nationalism, especially at the level of the state, makes the situation in Irish society distinctive. Irish nationalism merged with religion, more specifically a Catholicism that was both Ultramontanist and Jansenist in character, to establish the hegemonic partnership between church and state in the postindependence era, a partnership that determined the formation and function of Ireland’s architecture of containment.

This book is not the history of the Magdalen laundries in twentieth-century Ireland. Indeed, no such history can exist until the religious congregations afford scholars access to their archival records—penitent registers and convent annals—of women entering the asylums after 1900. As a result, definitive answers to important questions remain beyond the scope of this project. How many women passed through these institutions after 1900? Where did they come from? What brought them to the Magdalen? How long did they stay? What became of them if and when they left? How many lived and died behind the convents’ walls? The historical vacuum that surrounds these questions, however, does inform one of this book’s major contentions, namely, that the Magdalen laundry exists in the public mind chiefly at the level of story (cultural representation and survivor testimony) rather than history (archival records and documentation). This is the first study to evaluate critically the entire range of contemporary cultural representations emerging since the early 1990s, including available archival records, legislative documents, and survivor testimony, as well as an assortment of dramas, documentaries, art exhibitions, films, poetry, and other cultural reenactments.

Contemporary cultural representations hold the potential to speak out about aspects of the nation’s history so long constrained by secrecy and silence. On the one hand, they educate society at large about the sexual double standard by which the patriarchal nation-state institutionalized problem women, and they relocate the problem from the individual psyche to the social and political institutions that imposed a rigid national morality. They also inspire victims to act constructively on their own behalf and thus make the transition from passive victim to active survivor. On the other hand, cultural representations, especially those in the popular media, sensationalize and exploit: they appropriate survivor testimony for its shock value, they eroticize traumatic memories of abuse, they scapegoat easily identifiable targets as culpable while ignoring the collusion and complicity of other social and political agents. In other words, recent cultural representations of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries have paradoxically appeared empowering even while they have sometimes unwittingly facilitated the recuperation of dominant ideologies (Alcoff and Gray 1993, 261–63).

And yet it is important to tell the story of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries and of the women in these institutions who constitute the nation’s disappeared. They are women who did not fit the model of the Irish family cell and thus were excluded, silenced, or punished (Conrad 2004, 4, 9–10). They did not matter, or matter enough, in a society that sought to negate and render invisible the challenges they embodied: they were sexually active when Irish women were expected to be morally pure; they were unmarried mothers of illegitimate children when the constitution rendered motherhood and marriage inseparable; they were women who killed their babies when the symbolic icon of Mother Ireland would not allow for this material contradiction; they were the victims of physical and sexual abuse by men under a legal double standard that evaded male culpability and condemned female victims as criminals; they were young women in state residential institutions who might fall pregnant and further burden the state’s welfare system.¹ And in some cases they were more obviously innocent women, women perceived to be wayward, deemed simple or in the way, women who might go awry at home. In a society where even the faintest whiff of scandal threatened the respectability of the normative Irish family, the Magdalen asylum existed as a place to contain and/or punish the threatening embodiment of instability.

It is important to tell this story because the Magdalen laundries are part of Ireland present, not just Ireland past. More specifically, this story is important for at least three distinct groups of former Magdalen penitents. The first are those who remain confined. As recently as 1996, when the nation’s last Magdalen laundry closed its doors, there were at least four such communities living in the care of and dependent on Catholic religious congregations—two in Dublin, one in Waterford, and one in Galway. Most of these women are elderly and after years of incarceration too institutionalized to return to society. The second group comprises the larger community of Magdalen survivors, those who escaped or left and are imperiled by the natural passage of time. The majority of these women, as is their right, remain silent about this aspect of their past. Unlike survivors of the industrial and reformatory schools, comparatively few Magdalen women choose to come forward to provide testimony. This suggests that the stigma traditionally associated with these institutions, a stigma rooted in the perception of the Magdalen asylums as a corrective to prostitution, still operates in Irish society today. This misapprehension feeds off secrecy, silence, and shame; telling the story of these institutions promotes understanding and awareness. The third community of former Magdalen women lie buried in anonymous and, until recently, unmarked communal graves. These women died behind convent walls, some as a result of medical maltreatment, others naturally after a life spent toiling in the laundry. In some cases, the women’s final resting places have been disturbed. As former convents fall victim to dwindling vocations and are purchased for redevelopment, some graves have been exhumed and the human remains cremated and reinterred, again anonymously. Other former Magdalen buildings have been purchased, refurbished, and reborn by universities and colleges in Limerick, Waterford, and Cork. The historical traces of this chapter in Irish history—convent archives, survivor testimony, human remains, and concrete remnants—are slipping away on the tide of post–Celtic Tiger economic development and newfound cultural confidence. Telling the story of the Magdalen laundries defies the elision of this history.

The difficulty attending the writing of this book was not, as one might expect, in the research tasks of compiling the resources and mining through the archives, or in the methodological demands of maintaining its interdisciplinary balance. The challenge, rather, was how to separate academic detachment from personal indignation. Moral outrage and academic objectivity do not sit easily on the same page. Irish historiography, moreover, privileges empirical evidence as the only basis for understanding the past; lack of detachment in historical research can lead to criticisms of personal bias, subjective interpretation, and retrospective applications of today’s moral standards on readings of the past. The three history chapters, the introduction and part 1, work hard to respect the disciplinary conventions that allow the past to speak on its own terms, letting the evidence reveal the conditions of its own making. The structure in part 1 is chronological in nature, although there is a deliberate disjunction in its organization. The introduction focuses on a particular moment in time—the Carrigan Committee (1930–31), its ensuing report (1931), and the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1935. Chapter 1 returns to the nineteenth century to examine the origins and development of the Magdalen asylum in Ireland. Chapter 2 returns to the twentieth century and moves forward in time from where the introduction left off.

Part 2 struggles with a different aspect of the moral indignation problem. The four chapters in this part are thematic rather than chronological; they each evaluate how popular and popularizing forms (drama, documentary, film, visual art) reimagine the elided history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries. Although they give voice to a population that was intentionally silenced, and represent the nation’s hidden containment culture, these cultural forms have the potential to close down the past. Popular indignation here takes the form of validating the present as modern and progressive by comparison. Condemning those bad nuns, something that has happened wholesale in the popular Irish media since the early 1990s, allows the state and society to scapegoat the church for all the sins of the past. The nation-state, as a result, evades culpability not just for complicity and collusion in past institutional abuses but also for the unresolved challenges of that history in the present. The writing of this book has demanded a constant struggle to redirect the energies of moral indignation—personal as well as collective—away from the easy targets in the past and the easy scapegoats in the present and to identify a broader obligation to respond. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment will achieve its goal only if it increases awareness and understanding that ultimately lead to action and change.

1. The use of the terms fallen, penitent, and illegitimate throughout this book reflects Irish society’s rendering of women and children transgressive of social norms. Hereafter, the terms appear without quotation marks.

Introduction

The Politics of Sexual Knowledge

The Origins of Ireland’s Containment Culture and the Carrigan Report (1931)

Whenever a child is born outside wedlock, so shocked is the public sense by the very unusual occurrence, that it brands with an irreparable stigma, and, to a large extent, excommunicates the woman guilty of the crime.

James F. Cassidy, The Woman of the Gael (1922)

Writing in the same year the Irish Free State was founded, James F. Cassidy, himself a Catholic priest, captured the inherent contradictions informing contemporary Irish attitudes toward women’s virtue and outlined the ramifications for those women who violated the social and moral ideal. Branded by the public as simultaneously a mother and a criminal, a family member and an outcast, the unmarried mother faced shame, betrayal, and exile. With little or no social welfare system to fall back on, her choices were limited to entering the county home, begging on the streets, or possibly resorting to prostitution. Cassidy’s scenario carefully avoided the unmarried mother’s male partner, father to her illegitimate child. Similarly, he ignored the social powerbrokers—church and state—that facilitated these communal responses.

The historically powerful Catholic Church and the fledgling Irish Free State cooperated increasingly throughout the 1920s as the self-appointed guardians of the nation’s moral climate. Already by 1925 this partnership had provoked legislation establishing censorship of films and proscribing divorce, characteristic hallmarks of the socially repressive Free State society. These initiatives were followed by a series of official investigations, for example, the Inquiry Regarding Venereal Disease (1926), the Committee on Evil Literature (1927), and the Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor Including the Insane Poor (1928). Such inquiries typically generated lengthy reports that resulted in legislation addressing social and moral issues, including the Censorship of Publications Act (1929), the Illegitimate Children (Affiliation Orders) Act (1930), the Legitimacy Act (1931), the Registration of Maternity Homes Act (1934), and the Dance Halls Act (1935). This chapter examines the historical contexts informing one final church-state initiative from the early Free State years, the Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts (1880–85) and Juvenile Prostitution (hereafter referred to as the Carrigan Committee), its ensuing report, and the subsequent Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935). The Carrigan Report, I propose, was a formative moment in establishing an official state attitude toward sexual immorality and the subsequent legislation in authorizing the nation’s containment culture.¹

In its concrete form Ireland’s architecture of containment encompassed an array of interdependent institutions: industrial and reformatory schools, mother and baby homes, adoption agencies, and Magdalen asylums, among others. In its more abstract form this architecture comprised both the legislation that inscribed these issues and the numerous official and public discourses that resisted admitting to the existence and function of their affiliated institutions (Smith 1997, 2001). In arriving at a hegemonic discourse that responded to perceived sexual immorality, the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Act sanitized state policy with respect to institutional provision. They disembodied sexual practice by obscuring social realities, especially illegitimacy, in discursive abstractions. And they concealed sexual crime, especially rape, infanticide, and abuse, while simultaneously sexualizing the women and children unfortunate enough to fall victim to society’s moral proscriptions.² Moreover, this official discourse helped to construct an illusion of political nonpartisanship against the backdrop of post–civil war divisiveness. Finally, it helped to engineer widespread public consent by way of the legislative agenda, even while the operative functions of the institutional response to sexual practice were shrouded in secrecy. An examination of the Carrigan Report and its political reception in this context underscores how the discourse of sexual immorality enabled, even as it was perceived to threaten, postindependent Ireland’s nativist national imaginary.³

Recent feminist historiography has considered how the project of national identity formation in the decades following independence mobilized Catholic notions of sexual morality in ways that were particularly oppressive for Irish women.⁴ Against the backdrop of partition and fueled by the desire to create a new imagined community within the boundaries of the twenty-six-county state, church and state fashioned a seamlessly homogeneous society (Gray and Ryan 1998, 126). Working in unison, these two institutions closed off internal challenges and contradictions even as they represented society as pure and untainted by external corruption (Clear 2000; O’Callaghan 2002; Daly 1995). In volume 4 of the Field Day Anthology, Marjorie Howes illuminates this alliance, arguing that one method of defining and asserting the national character that enjoyed wide popular support, accorded with the Free State’s now legendary social and economic conservatism and marked a clearly visible difference between Ireland and England was the formal and informal enforcement of Catholic social teachings, particularly in the area of sexual morality (2002, 923–24). Catholic morality became at once a hallmark of Irish identity, differentiating the national community from its near neighbors, and an emblem of the uncontested political territory, enabling politicians to eschew party affiliation and seek unanimity through religious conformity.⁵ Maryann Valiulus outlines the consequences of this strategic allegiance of church