AGDALENAUNDRIESANDTHENATIONARCHITECTUREOF - PDF document

AGDALENAUNDRIESANDTHENATIONARCHITECTUREOF CONTAINMENTJAMES M.SMITHUniversity of Notre Dame PressNotre Dame, Indiana Smith000.FM 7/12/07 1:58 Page Copyright © 2007 by University of Notre DameNotre Dame, Indiana 46556www.undpress.nd.eduAll Rights ReservedDesigned by Wendy McMillenSet in 10.3/13.6 Visage by Four Star BooksPrinted on 60# Williamsburg Recycled Paper by Versa PressLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataSmith, James M., 1966…Irelands Magdalen Laundries and the nations architecture of containment /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„History3. Church work with prostitutes„CatholicChurch.4. Unmarried mothers„Institutional care„Ireland„History.5. Reformatories for women„Ireland„History.I. Title.HV1448.I73S652007362.83'9„dc222007025510This book is printed on recycled paper. Smith000.FM 7/12/07 1:58 Page Introduction The Politics of Sexual KnowledgeThe Origins of Irelands Containment Cultureand 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 Gaelriting in the same year the Irish Free State was founded,James F. Cassidy, himself a Catholic priest, captured the inherent contra-ons informing contemporary Irish attitudes toward womens virtuelined the rami“cations for those women who violated the so-cial and moral ideal. Branded by the public as simultaneously a motherand a criminal, a family member and an outcast, the unmarried motherfaced shame, betrayal, and exile. With little or no social welfare systemto fall back on, her choices were limited to entering the county home,begging on the streets, or possibly resorting to prostitution. Cassidysscenario carefully avoided the unmarried mothers male partner, fatherto her illegitimate child. Similarly, he ignored the social powerbrokers„and state„that facilitated these communal responses. Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page 1 The historically powerful Catholic Church and the ”edgling Irish State cooperated increasingly throughout the 1920s as the self-appointedguardians of the nations moral climate. Already by 1925 this partner-ship had provoked legislation establishing censorship of “lms and pro-scribing divorce, characteristic hallmarks of the socially repressive FreeState society. These initiatives were followed by a series of of“cial in-vestigations, for example, the Inquiry Regarding Venereal Disease (1926),the Committee on Evil Literature (1927), and the Commission on theRelief of the Sick and Destitute Poor Including the Insane Poor (1928).Such inquiries typically generated lengthy reports that resulted in legis-lation addressing social and moral issues, including the Censorship ofPublications Act (1929), the Illegitimate Children (Af“liation Orders)Act (1930), the Legitimacy Act (1931), the Registration of MaternityHomes Act (1934), and the Dance Halls Act (1935). This chapter exam-ines the historical contexts informing one “nal church-state initiativefrom the early Free State years, the Committee on the Criminal LawAmendment Acts (1880…85) and Juvenile Prostitution (hereafter re-ferred to as the Carrigan Committee), its ensuing report, and the subse-quent Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935). The Carrigan Report, I pro-pose, was a formative moment in establishing an of“cial state attitudetoward sexual immoralityŽ and the subsequent legislation in authoriz-ing the nations containment culture.In its concrete form Irelands architecture of containment encom-passed an array of interdependent institutions: industrial and reforma-tory schools, mother and baby homes, adoption agencies, and Magasylums, among others. In its more abstract form this architecture com-prised both the legislation that inscribed these issues and the numer-ous of“cial and public discourses that resisted admitting to the existand function of their af“liated institutions (Smith 1997, 2001). In arriv-ing at a hegemonic discourse that responded to perceived sexual im-morality, the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Actsanitized state policy with respect to institutional provision. They dis-embodied sexual practice by obscuring social realities, especially ille-gitimacy, in discursive abstractions. And they concealed sexual crime,especially rape, infanticide, and abuse, while simultaneously sexualiz-ing the women and children unfortunate enough to fall victim to so-cietys moral proscriptions.Moreover, this of“cial discourse helped toconstruct an illusion of political nonpartisanship against the backdropSMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page 2 of post…civil war divisiveness. Finally, it helped to engineer widespreadpublic consent by way of the legislative agenda, even while the operativefunctions of the institutional response to sexual practice were shroudedin secrecy. An examination of the Carrigan Report and its political recep-tion in this context underscores how the discourse of sexual immoralityenabled, even as it was perceived to threaten, postindependent Irelandsnativist national imaginary.Recent feminist historiography has considered how the projectof national identity formation in the decades following independencemobilized Catholic notions of sexual morality in ways that were particu-larly oppressive for Irish women.Against the backdrop of partitionand fueled by the desire to create a new imagined community withinthe boundaries of the twenty-six-county state,Ž church and state fash-ioned a seamlessly homogeneous society (Gray and Ryan 1998, 126).Working in unison, these two institutions closed off internal chal-lenges and contradictions even as they represented society as pure anduntainted by external corruption (Clear 2000; OCallaghan 2002; Daly1995). In volume 4 of the , Marjorie Howes illu-minates this alliance, arguing that one method of de“ning and assert-ing the national character that enjoyed wide popular support, accordedwith the Free States now legendary social and economic conservatismand marked a clearly visible difference between Ireland and Englandwas the formal and informal enforcement of Catholic social teachings,particularly in the area of sexual moralityŽ (2002, 923…24). Catholicmorality became at once a hallmark of Irish identity, differentiating thenational community from its near neighbors, and an emblem of the un-contested political territory, enabling politicians to eschew party af“li-ation and seek unanimity through religious conformity.Maryann Vali-ulus outlines the consequences of this strategic allegiance of churchand state, arguing that political and ecclesiastical leaders in the IrishFree State constructed an identity for Irish women solely in domesticterms„women were mothers, women were wivesŽ (1995, 169).Thisidealization and objecti“cation required a series of legislative vehicleswith which to constrain women so that they might visibly conform tothe prescribed national paradigm (McAvoy 1999; Luddy 2001). Theprocess also necessitated a series of punishments to negate and ren-der invisible those women unlucky enough to countermand socialconventions.INTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page 3 Retelling the history of the Carrigan Report and the Criminal LawAmendment Act exposes the states willing abdication of responsibilityfor matters of sexuality and sexual education to the Catholic Church andchallenges the general avoidance of sociosexual issues in favor of thepolitical aspects of church-state relations in much Irish historiography(Whyte 1980, 24…61; Keogh 1986, 163…66, 205…8; Keogh 1995, 71…73;Lee 1989, 157…60). Recent scholarship allows for a fuller understand-ing based on the release in 1991 of the Department of Justices of“cial“les relating to the Carrigan Committee (Finnane 2001; Kennedy 2000).More recently still, in 1999 the National Archives made available theminutes of meetings and the “les relating to persons and organizationsgiving evidence before the committee.This introduction synthesizes this new archival material. it argues that the Carrigan Reports political reception„“rst the sup-pression of the report, then the legislative response„established aprecedent for church-state management of sociosexual controversies,proscribing visible manifestations of sexual immoralityŽ while failingto address, or choosing to ignore, the social realities attending them.This political response reveals how the discourse of sexual immoralitymarginalized the real-life sexual practice that resulted in single moth-erhood and illegitimacy while it simultaneously elided the pervasivereality of rape, incest, and pedophilia. Both the report and the ensu-legislation demonstrate a signi“cant discursive distortion, one thatwould enable Irelands church-state partnership effectively to crimi-nalize sexual relations outside of marriage and thereby inscribe moralpurity into the project of national identity formation. Thus, representa-tions of sexual immorality buttressed this collusive relationship. over, in concealing actual crimes against women and children, the dis-cursive distortion neatly collapsed sexual abuse into the disembodieddiscourse of sexual immorality. But by suppressing the compromisingrealities of sexual abuse within this broader discourse, the politics ofabstraction helped to constitute a “ction of Irish cultural purity on wthe national imaginary depended.Finally, this introduction explores the discursive claims of the Carri-gan Report and thereby reveals the distortions inherent instability. Byfocusing, in part, on women who presented testimony before the com-mittee, I reveal how Irelands political hegemony ensured that youngwomen would remain uneducated regarding their reproductive biologySMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page 4 and unaware of their civic and legal rights. I demonstrate how the statesreliance on a discourse of sexual immorality narrowly focused on il-legitimacy stigmatized young women even as it exculpated their malepartners. Likewise, I underscore how political discourses legitimizedstate practices of institutionalizing many of its most vulnerable citi-zens in mother and baby homes, Magdalen asylums, and industrial andreformatory schools. Does the womens testimony represent a striking instance of poten-tial dissent from hegemonic practice or, as seems more likely, a respby women themselves unable to imagine an alternative to the regula-tion, prosecution, and incarceration of social behavior deemed aber-rant by both church and state? The female witnesses too offered an in-stitutional response to seemingly transgressive sexuality, arguing thatunmarried mothers be con“ned to state-funded mother and baby and juvenile prostitutes to religious-run Magdalen asylums. Operatingas they were within a prescribed social and political system, however,the female witnesses very participation obliquely contests the con-tainment culture that the Carrigan Report effects. In the “nal analysis,nobody„not a single committee member or witness, not a single pcian or member of the judiciary„argued against or offered an alterna-tive to institutionalization as the solution to sexual immorality. Simi-larly, nobody suggested that the problem of sexual abuse and pedophiliashould take precedence over the problemŽ of the unmarried mother.In the absence of any overt contestation, the report and subsequent leg-islation licensed the states abstract, secretive, and punitive responseto sexual immorality. The origins of Irelands containment culture, inshort, are rooted in the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amend-ment Act of 1935.ISTORYWhat was the Carrigan Committee, what did its report recom-mend, and how did it in”uence the Criminal Law Amendment Act?James Fitzgerald Kenney, minister for justice in the Cumann na nGaed-heal government, appointed the committee on 17 June 1930 (Reportof the Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts 1931, 3).torians generally consider the appointment a deliberate attempt byINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page 5 William T. Cosgrave, president of the Executive Council, to de”ectpressure for legislation to ban contraceptives and to close theloophole in the Censorship of Publications Act (1929),which outlawedthe advertisement of contraceptives while not legally proscribing theirimportation or sale.The committees terms of reference were ambigu-ous; it sought recommendations to amend the 1880 and 1885 govern-ing statutes as well as legislative proposals to dealŽ with the problemof juvenile prostitutionŽ (Report1931, 3). William Carrigan, K.C., was ap-pointed chairman, and his name remains indelibly linked with mittee and its highly contentious report.On 20 August 1931, after seventeen sittings, the Carrigan Commit-tee submitted its “nal report to the minister for justice (Report 1931,43…44). The report recommended a combination of enlightened socialreforms together with a series of punitive legislative proposals, forexample, raising the age of consent to eighteen, abolishing the rea-sonable beliefŽ clause allowing male defendants to argue that they hadreason to believe their female partner was old enough to give informedconsent, extending to twelve months the period within which a pros-ecution could be initiated, revising judicial practice requiring corrobo-ration of a young persons testimony, allowing for courts to hear casesin camera, offering suggestions for the licensing of dance halls, and in-stigating a general prohibition on the sale of contraceptives, togetherwith recommendations for a series of strict “nes and custodial sentfor procurement, solicitation, and public indecency. Most controversially,the report recommended the reintroduction of ”ogging as punishmentfor those convicted of sexual crimes against young people and the black-listing of those found guilty of public indecency (Report1931, 40…41).AsMark Finnane argues, the reports “ndings proved profoundly unset-tling for the political and clerical elites governing Irish society (2001,525). They pointed to a general moral degeneration, evident both in ris-ing illegitimacy rates and in unassailable proof of sexual crimes againstvery young women and children. Such “ndings contradicted the pre-vailing language of national identity formation, which emphasized Ca-tholicism, moral purity, and rural ideals.The reception of the Carrigan Report reveals much about howpolitical decision making established a new Free State moral order. InAugust 1931, as Cumann na nGaedheal faced a looming general election,Cosgrave undoubtedly wanted to avoid placing the potentially polariz-SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page 6 ing aspects of the contraception debate before the public eye.quently, although the Carrigan Report as well as a fourteen-page De-partment of Justice memorandum were shared with members of theExecutive Council on 2 December 1931, no action was taken.The memo-randum called into question the Carrigan Committees judicialŽ expe-rience, indeed its impartiality.Moreover, the Department of Justicesuggested that the witnesses testimony presented a narrowly de“nedand publicly endorsed version of the facts and that these were singu-larly consistent with Catholic teachings on morality.It characterizedthe report as overly anxious to increase prosecutions and convictionsfor sexual immorality but as insuf“ciently concerned with measuresto prevent crime. The memorandum concluded by stressing the unde-sirability of making its “ndings public: The obvious conclusion to bedrawn is that the ordinary feelings of decency and the in”uence of re-ligion have failed in this country and that the only remedy is by way ofpolice action. It is clearly undesirable that such a view of conditions inthe Saorstat should be given wide circulation.ŽAlmost immediately,therefore, the Carrigan Report became a de facto censored governmentdocument.February 1932 witnessed a general election and the “rst democraticchange of political power in the history of the Free State. Feelings ofanimosity and suspicion ran high.The Eucharistic Congress later thatyear probably eased partisan political tensions, for by the ensuing au-tumn, when the newly appointed minister for justice, James Geoghegan,again took up the issues raised by the Carrigan Report, political dis-cord had dissipated. At the 27 October meeting of the Executive Coun-cil, Eamon de Valera, leader of Fianna Fáil, and his cabinet decided toestablish a committee consisting of representatives of all partiesŽ toconsider on a strictly con“dentialŽ basis what course to follow in re-sponse to the Carrigan Report.There ensued a series of communica-tions between Geoghegan and Cosgrave, now leader of the opposition,to ensure that the eight-member committee be so representative as tobe likely to fully criticize the report . . . , with a view to avoiding as faras possible public discussion of a necessarily unsavoury nature.ŽTheprocess of closed-door deliberations, however, had only begun.Geoghegan sought counsel from two leading members of the Catho-licclergy and subsequently met a delegation representing the StandingCommittee of the Catholic hierarchy. Both clerics, Rev. J. Canavan, S.J.,INTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page 7 and Rev. M.J. Brown, agreed in large part with the Department of Jus-tices negative estimation of the report as too drastic, lacking in judg-ment, and unworkable.ŽThey recommended that the report form thebasis of new legislation, with Canavan speci“cally calling for a bill re-”ecting the committees “ndings to be passed intdiscussion in the Dáil.ŽNeither priest accepted the departments criti-cisms of Carrigans proposals to raise the age of consent as merely puni-tiveŽ and vindictive,Ž arguing instead that the object of this law is cer-tainly [a] deterrent.ŽCanavan maintained that the Government shouldseek, in the “rst place, to stop the earths, to remove, as far as possible,the occasions of offenceŽ; in particular, he asserted the need for rig-orous controlŽ of dance halls and motor cars used for immoral ends.Whereas Brown recognized the potential bene“t of shocking the FreeState population into greater awareness through public debate, in theend he joined his fellow cleric in advising against publication, admittingthat the reports “ndings will rejoice our enemies.ŽGeoghegans negotiations with members of the hierarchy requireddelicate handling, especially as he navigated between the governmentssecular and religious loyalties. In a meeting with Dr. David Keane,bishop of Limerick, and the bishops of Ossory and Thasos on 1 Decem-ber 1932, Geoghegan assured the bishops that he would like to see aBill go through which would bring the law into accord with the bestCatholic practice and teaching.ŽHowever, when the delegation of bish-ops sought greater in”uence over the informalŽ committee of Dáil depu-ties, Geoghegan informed Keane that it could best do its work privatelyand to avoid lobbying there should not be any announcement of namesfor the present.ŽThe minister did solicit a memorandum representingthe hierarchys views. Keanes reply amounted to a wish list of concernsthe Catholic Church sought to have addressed in any legislation.Spe-ci“cally, the hierarchy gave priority to four issues: a general prohibitionon the sale and importation of contraceptive appliances, raising the ageof consent to eighteen, effective licensing of public dance halls, and leg-islation dealing with moral abuse in motor cars.The informal committee met eight times between December 1932and May 1933, while, with the cabinets consent, Geoghegan organizedpreparation of legislation to amend the criminal law.the level of secrecy that members of the Dáil were not privy to thecommittee membership.Geoghegan and his cohort “nally arrived at aSMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page 8 watered-down version of what the Carrigan Report initially proposedbut one that substantially incorporated the hierarchys concerns. Thedraft headsŽ proposed that the age of consent would be seventeen,not eighteen, and that unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl between “f-teen and seventeen would remain a misdemeanor, not a felony, as wouldattempted unlawful carnal knowledge with a girl under the age of “f-teen. The committee resisted the reports suggestion both that the of-fense of solicitation be rede“ned and made applicable to men as wellas women and that whipping be reinstated and sex offenders namesbe published.At the meeting of the Executive Council on 17 November 1933 deValera and his cabinet accepted all but two of the informal committeessuggestions for what became the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, 1934.First, after extended deliberations, the cabinet replaced the general pro-hibition that allowed for exceptional circumstancesŽ based on reli-gious conviction or medical need with an absolute ban on the sale orimportation of contraceptive appliances and drugs.Second, the cabi-net excised the heads pertaining to licensing of dance halls and, afterminor revisions, created the separate Dance Halls Bill, 1934.These were considered and approved at the Executive Council meeting inJune 1934, followed by second stageŽ and committee stageŽ hearings inboth the Dáil and the Seanád. Throughout, the government maintainedthe secret and closed nature of deliberations leading to both pieces ofIn the end, both the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935)and the Dance Hall Act (1935) passed into law without any substantivedebate or public participation.RIESTSANDThe traditional history of the Carrigan Report and the CriminalLaw Amendment Act only partially captures the full signi“cance of thesemoments in the early Free State period. Archival material re1999, speci“cally, the minutes of evidence and the various memorandasubmitted by organizations and individuals presenting testimony, per-mit excised segments of this story to be reinserted.Public access tothis material is signi“cant for a number of reasons but especially be-cause in August 1931 only Carrigans “nal report, with its eight-pageINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page 9 general statementŽ summarizing witness testimony, was forwardedto the minister for justice. The Department of Justice immediately iden-ti“ed the impact of withholding the various witnesses memorandaand the committees of“cial minutes of meetings: The Committee ex-plains that it was considered necessary to take evidence in private andwhile dif“culty would probably have been encountered if any othercourse had been adopted, the fact remains that the reader of the reportis presented with the Committees conclusions without having accessto the evidence on which those conclusions were based. In these cir-cumstances, it is not easy to assess the value of the Report.Žlikely that the civil servants who authored the Department of Justicescritical evaluation ever had access to the evidence,Ž just as it is certainthat the politicians who constituted Geoghegans informal committeeThe witness testimony was never discussed in public either: at its “rstmeeting the committee decided to withhold evidence from the press.The following analysis, initially focusing on the clerical witnesses andGen. Eoin ODuffy, resituates the signi“cance of their testimony in lightof my argument that the church-state formulation of sexual immoralitybecame an enabling discursive distortion. The political responses tothese witnesses„“rst the report and then the legislation„foregroundhow perceptions of sexual practice (in the case of the clerics) and the re-ality of sexual abuse (in ODuffys testimony) were accommodated andtherefore contained by the discourse of sexual immorality. This accom-modation, I argue, buttressed even as it helped to constitute Irelandsnational imaginary.Of the twenty-nine witnesses, six were members of the Catholicclergy. The most prominent was Rev. R.S. Devane, S.J., author of socio-logical writings on illegitimacy, the unmarried mother, and Irish Ecclesiastical Record(De-vane 1924a, 1924b, 1928, 1931a, 1931b).For much of the 1920s Devaneand like-minded social thinkers heralded the Free States opportunityto “x the legal standard of morality in true consonance with the idealsset before them by the teaching of the Catholic ChurchŽ (Devane 1924a,58; see also Glynn 1921, 461…67; MacInerney 1921, 140…56; MacIn-erney 1922, 246…61; An SagartŽ 1922, 145…53). In pointing to underly-ing problems determining immoralityŽ in the Free State, Devane wasunique among his religious brethren who appeared before the com-SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page mittee. He articulated critical concerns that would remain prominentin sociological debates for decades, for example, the dual standard ofmorality accepted in this country, as in perhaps no other,where thewoman is always hounded down and the man dealt with leniently.Ž De-vane was especially alert to the implicit hypocrisy of the well-meaningin Free State society, suggesting that the citizen too often appearedinterested in the welfare of any others child or sister . . . rather thanones own.Ž Most devastating, perhaps, he surmised that an exclusivelymale point of view in the administration as well as legislationŽ elidedany adequate appreciation of female psychology in matters involvingmorality.ŽThe Carrigan Report largely ignores Devanes signi“cant challenges.Instead, it disproportionately privileges those elements of the clericstestimony that were loudly echoed by his fellow priests, in particular, aseeming obsession with the dangers associated with popular amuse-ments, especially the dance hall. In contrast to Devanes sociologicalobservations, Fathers Fitzpatrick, Lee, Flanagan, Roughneen, and Gildeareported that they waged war against moral degeneration in their re-spective parishes. Such anecdotes conjure a level of authenticity morein tune with the committees predilections: boys and girls lay[ing] bythe roadsides near Limerick,Ž the dangers arising from the return late at night of young boys and girls from dance halls,Ž and 2 casesof domestic servants„both under 20 years of age„who had been se-Lobbying to eradicate sexual immoralityŽ at its point of origin,these clerics attributed the recent rise in illegitimacy almost entirely tothe viceŽ imported by popular entertainments. This con”ation of viceand immorality was not necessarily exclusive to the Catholic Church;indeed, the committees very name„Committee on the Criminal LawAmendment Acts (1880…85) and Juvenile Prostitution„and the of“cialreport of the same title similarly elide immorality and juvenile pros-titution. In effect, then, such discourse transformed every unmarriedmother into a potential prostitute. Devane also joined his colleagues inidentifying contemporary sources of immoralityŽ: the loss of parentalcontrol, the perversions of modern cinema, the illicit book, of supervision and the licensing of dance halls, and the opportunitiesafforded by the misuse of motor cars.ŽRather than directly confront the social consequences attending ex-tramarital sexual practice or sexual abuse, clerical witnesses focusedINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page their censure on visible manifestations of sexual immorality. But singu-larly focused as they were, they failed to contain compromising reali-ties. For example, in their comments regarding bad housing accom-modationŽ and the appaling the appaling manner in which members of famare crowded on each other,Ž both Fr. Fitzpatrick and Fr. Flanagan wereaware that incest contributed to increased numbers of unmarried ers and illegitimate children.But, as J.J. Lee concludes, the obses-sion with sex permitted a blind eye to be turned towards the social that dis“gured the face of IrelandŽ: on this occasion the clerics obses-sion with the visibility of sex de”ected attention from the plight of in-dividuals occluded by sexual immorality: the unmarried mother, the il-legitimate child, and victims of rape, incest, and pedophilia (1989, 159;see also Finnane 2001, 530). In its uncritical emphasis on clerical con-cerns, the Carrigan Report replicates this unwillingness to consider thesocial conditions fostering incest and illegitimacy, including poverty, theabsence of birth control, and the need for education regarding sexuality and legal entitlements.In contrast to the clerics focus on extramarital sexual practice, Gen-eral ODuffy, commissioner of the Garda Síochána (the states policeforce), focused his testimony on prosecutions for sexual offenses,addressing the modern nations need to legislate against immorality,especially rape, incest, and pedophilia.ODuffy in”uenced the shape of the committees “nal report and theeventual legislation.Prior to his appearance he submitted a statisticalsurvey documenting sexual crimes between 1924 and 1930, including abreakdown by year for each county, capturing the De“lement, CarnalKnowledge, or RapeŽ of girls under ten, between ten and thirteen, be-tween thirteen and sixteen, between sixteen and eighteen, and over eigh-teen. This survey similarly details Indecent Assault on Girls,Ž Incest,ŽSodomy,Ž Indecent Assault on Boys regardless of Age,Ž and Besti-ality.ŽFor each offense it charts the numbers of prosecutions and ul-timate convictions. ODuffy also submitted a twenty-eight-page analy-sis of these statistics in which he provided signi“cant detail about thenature and quantity of sexual crime in Ireland. Like Devane, he urgedthe newly independent state to legislate against immorality accordingto Irish Catholic principles: The present state of the law is disgracefulin a Christian country, and the whole question of morality crimes be now dealt with from an Irish point of view.ŽODuffys memoran-SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page dum included summary particulars for thirty-four sexual offenses dur-ing the year 1930 to date; during his testimony he addressed each casemore fully with the bene“t of the actual case “les„seven involvinggirls under ten years of age.Despite graphic anecdotal and irrefutable statistical evidence sug-gesting widespread sexual crime in Free State Ireland, the Carrigan Re-port attempted to rein in this damaging portrait of Irish society. Thereport edits out ODuffys most speci“c charges and textually minitroubling comparisons suggesting, for example, that children of thepoorer classesŽ in the Free State are less protected than in Great Brit-Nevertheless, the report could not avoid reproducing ODuffysmajor contention, that there was an alarming amount of sexual crimeincreasing yearly, a feature of which was the large number of casesof criminal interference with girls and children from 16 years down-wards, including many cases of children under 10 years.ŽEspeciallytroubling for the politicians and civil servants who were to decide thefate of the report was ODuffys assessment that less than 15 percent ofsuch cases were prosecuted in any given year. He attributed this lowrate chie”y to peculiarities in the judicial process that required corrobo-ration of a single witness or mandated that a judge warn the jury ofdanger of convicting the accused on uncorroborated evidence.Ironically, the Carrigan Report thus demonstrated how prevailing ju-dicial processes operated to mark young women and children as ac-complices to a crime rather than as victims of an outrage.Yet the De-partment of Justice memorandum considered precisely this aspect ofthe report unbalanced. It is understood that many competent authori-ties have grave doubts as to the value of childrens evidence,Ž it noted.A child with a vivid imagination may actually live in his mind thesituation as he invented it and will be quite unshaken by severe cross-Would the issue of child sexual abuse have been handled differentlyby the civil servants in the Department of Justice and by the male leg-islators in the Dáil and Seanád if the Carrigan Report or ODuffys testi-mony had entered into public debate? The refusal to acknowledgabuse as a concern and the elision of that issue in the political and jour-nalistic arenas guaranteed its invisibility (McAvoy 1999, 261). Only afterthe deluge of revelations in the 1990s regarding contemporary childsexual abuse (e.g., the various clerical pedophilia scandals involving,INTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page among others, Fr. Brendan Smyth and Fr. Sean Fortune, the KilkennyIncest Inquiry, and the West of Ireland FarmerŽ [a.k.a. Joseph McCol-gan] case) can the signi“cance of suppressing the Carrigan Committeetestimony and report be fully appreciated.The precedent establishedbetween 1930 and 1935, which legitimized secrecy and silence as a re-sponse to child abuse and pedophilia, reverberates for twentieth- andtwenty-“rst-century survivors of these crimes throughout the nation.Carrigans report only once alluded explicitly to participation inthe proceedings by women and then only to representatives from theIrish Women Doctors Committee who challenged of“cial statistics onillegitimacy as failing to re”ect the actual condition of the country.ŽSuch an underrepresentation is especially egregious given that eigh-teen of the twenty-nine witnesses were women. Although the reportacknowledged that these witnesses represented a range of charitablesocial welfare organizations protecting women, children, and unmar-ried mothers, treating sexual disease, and reforming offenders, it failedto incorporate the expertise the women brought to the committeesdeliberations.The recent reemergence of the minutes of evidence andthe various organizations memoranda help to redress this historicalThe womens testimony diverged signi“cantly from the prosecu-torial and regulatory emphasis of ODuffy and the clerics. As practic-ing social workers and doctors, these women dealt with womens andchildrens medical, educational, and social welfare needs. In their testi-mony they suggested a systematic provision of care and emphasizedprevention rather than punishment. Pointing to the practical conse-quence attending legislative and judicial proscriptions, they advocateda more charitable social environment for the vulnerable in society.Although their testimony anticipated issues that were to burden so-cial welfare provision for much of the twentieth century, these womenwere silenced in the of“cial discourse of the state, which established afurther precedent in the area of social provision as church and statecountered expertise with resistance and failed thereby to respond tosocial need. SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page Three speci“c aspects of the womens testimony demonstrate force-fully the states failure. Many witnesses emphasized the need to edu-cate young Irish women about human sexuality.Apparently graspingthe need to bridge their concerns with the committees political agenda,they argued that female ignorance about reproductive biology inillegitimacy rates, the incidences of sexually transmitted diseases, and awide range of related social ills. Many of the witnesses distinguished be-tween young women in Ireland and in Britain. According to Dr. AngelaRussell, representing the Irish Women Citizens and Local GovernmentAssociation, Irish girls were physically more immature than thoseof equal age abroad and temperamentally they were more trusting andLikewise, Mrs. J.M. Kettle, representing the Dublin CountyUnion, argued that Irish Girls were less sophisticated than Englishgirls.ŽDrs. Delia Moclair Horne and Dorothy Stopford Price, repre-senting the Irish Women Doctors Committee, were more forthright incalling for enhanced instruction, pointing to young Irish womens re-markableŽ ignorance about physical facts. Both doctors cited personalknowledge of thirteen-year-old girls who had recently become moth-Mrs. Margaret Gavin Duffy and Dr. Ita Brady, visitors to the LockHospital in Dublin, claimed that such ignorance appeared to make girlsreleased from industrial schools an easy prey to designing menŽ andsuggested a direct correlation between the industrial school system andthe prostitutes they visited in the Lock.They concluded that femaledoctors attending such girls schools should impart sexual education.The Carrigan Reports evasion of this testimony suppressed theseprofessional womens call for education, particularly for members ofsociety marginalized by poverty or institutionalization. Such conceal-ment occurred repeatedly in subsequent Irish discussions of sexualimmoralityŽ„in the Catholic hierarchys resistance to pre- and postnatalcare in debates surrounding the Mother and ChildŽ scheme (1951) and,more recently, in attempts to thwart the Stay SafeŽ program (1993).The reports suppression of female testimony reveals how church andstate worked to ensure that neither school nor dispensary nor even homewould provide the necessary education to combat ignorance abouthuman sexuality. Moreover, this cultivated ignorance not only reinfa stereotype of the pure Irish woman; it also enabled state leaders toimagine an ignorance that may not have been that profound. The lega-cies of these political choices resonate in a series of sociosexual IrishINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page controversies since the early 1980s: the Ann Lovett case, the Kerry ba-bies inquiry, and the various industrial schools scandals (Maguire 2001,3…35; Inglis 2003; Hug 1999; Raftery and OSullivan 1999).Another focus of the womens testimony concerned Irish societysintolerance of sexual immorality in general and unmarried mothers andtheir children in particular. Many witnesses suggested that an inhos-pitable social environment stigmatizing illegitimacy contributed dito prostitution, infanticide, and emigration among young women.M.J.Cruice, secretary of St. Patricks Guild, maintained that the majority ofunmarried mothers arriving in Dublin from the provinces sought to es-cape their shame and conceal their children.Horne and Stopford related this issue of secrecy to the underreporting of sexual crimesagainst women and children. Both witnesses argued that in their ex-perience young girls admitted to rape or assault only if and when theybecame pregnant.Representatives from Dublins Lock Hospital cor-roborated this testimony, describing the young womans reluctance todisclose the name of her betrayerŽ or to seek recourse through the re-cently passed Illegitimate Children (Af“liation Orders) Act.Carrigans“nal report echoes these recurring observations: it acknowledges theimpossibility of knowing the annual number of illegitimate births thatunmarried girls„in their distressful plight and shameŽ„sought to con-The report notes the number of unmarried Irish mothers sup-ported by various charitable societies in Ireland that were not includedin the Department of Local Government and Public Healths of“cialIt also documents information from Catholic rescue homesin Liverpool, Manchester, for The report not only portrays the relation-ship between stigmatization and underreporting of sexual immoralitybut also reveals that incarceration and emigration were the acceptedsocietal responses to manifestations of embodied sexual practice.Political responses to the edited report thus easily sidestepped theunpleasant contradictions highlighted by the suppressed female testi-mony. A developing rhetoric of national identity formation, in particu-lar, the of“cial discourse of Irish motherhood, refused to acknowledgeand therefore ignored the maltreatment of unmarried mothers and children. By preventing public debate, the political response legitthe stigmatization of illegitimacy and contributed to the perpetuationof oppressive conditions directly and disproportionately impinging onSMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page women and eliding male culpability. Perhaps anticipating this formof political resistance, the female witnesses had petitioned to increasethe age of consent to at least eighteen for the general population andtwenty-one for female employees, claiming that the current age of con-sent was related directly to increasing illegitimacy rates. The CriminalLaw Amendment Act diluted such suggested measures, and legislativeproscriptions did little to alleviate the underlying social and culturalprejudice. Because the nation-state effectively criminalized morality, in both the legislative response and societal disnalized single mothers and their children as well as the victims of rape,incest, and pedophilia; they were indiscriminately marked as aber-rant and deemed deserving of scorn and punishment. Irish society con-tinued to stigmatize single mothers and their illegitimate offspring formuch of the twentieth century, driving the lucky ones abroad in searchof new lives and condemning the most unfortunate to incarcerationand forced separation at home (Milotte 1997; Batts 1994).This too ispart of the Carrigan Reports legacy.The female witnesses most controversial goal, perhaps, was to under-mine the easy con”ation of viceŽ and sexual immoralityŽ that wasso unproblematically presented by their male colleagues. Speaking onbehalf of the Irish Women Citizens and Local GovDr. Angela Russell and Ms. I. Dodd warned that prostitutionŽ accountedfor only 20% of the . . . immoralityŽ in contemporary Ireland.lishing a distinction between prostitution and extramarital sexual prac-tice and sexual abuse would rescue women from prosecution and im-prisonment and simultaneously rehabilitate the unmarried mother intosociety. These witnesses also sought to decriminalize juvenile prostitu-tion and provide opportunities for reform, education, and rehabilitationto so-called young offenders.Institutional provision, however, remained central to the womensproposals. Their attention to rehabilitation, education, and spiritual re-form on the one hand and alternative forms of institutional con“ne-ment on the other signals a transitional moment in sociological thinking:assumptions of late-nineteenth-century Victorian philanthropy weregiving way to emerging trends in professional social work (Luddy 2001,805…6; Luddy 1995a; Clear 1987; Finnegan 2001). Numerous witnesses,including Cruice, Gavan Duffy, Brady, Dodd, and Russell, called for theestablishment of separate voluntary institutions for unmarried mothersINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page and their children to accommodate the large volume of cases currentlydependent on county homes, former Irish workhouses long evoking so-cial stigma. After noting that county homes„funded by state and localgovernment„provided for 2,105 unmarried mothers in 1928, Carrigansreport tellingly points to the objectionable fact that unmarried moth-ers cannot be maintained apart from the other inmates (the decent poorIn contrast to such class and moral prejudice, the femalewitnesses sought to rehabilitate “rst-time unmarried mothers: they rec-ommended that so-called “rst-fall offenders be protected from bothpublic ostracism and the contaminating in”uence of more hardenedprostitutes also residing among the county homes population.As a solution, the state should establish and subsidize homes for un-married mothers, according to the representatives of the Irish WomenWorkers Union, Helena Moloney and Helen Chenevix.These motherand baby homes, to be operated by female religious, would train andprepare inmates for their return to ordinary life.K.M. Sullivan, rep-resenting the Probation Of“ce, as well as Cruice, Russell, and Dodd, alsoargued vehemently against imprisoning young girls convicted of pros-titution in Borstal-type institutions; they claimed that a short periodof imprisonment would be less detrimental to such offenders than along period of detention in an InstitutionŽ and recommended a systemof suspended sentences for women agreeing voluntarily to enter a re-ligious Home or Refuge.ŽA representative from one such home, EmilyBuchanan, of the Protestant-run Magdalen asylum on Dublins LeesonStreet, praised her institutions success in bringing religious in”uenceto juvenile prostitutes.Gavan Duffy and Brady called for similar pro-vision for juvenile prostitutes in Catholic-run Magdalen institutions.Given what is now known about the appalling conditions of motherand baby homes such as Bessboro and Castlepollard or Magdalen asy-lums such as Gloucester Street and Sundays Well, the female witnessesrecommendations for institutionalization complicates the subversivenature of their testimony.Only with the bene“t of recent representa-tions of these institutions„June Gouldings disturbing memoir of lifein one of Irelands mother and baby homes (1998), Patricia Burke Bro-gans play (1994), Peter Mullans movie The Magdalene Sis-ters(2002), and documentaries such as Sex in a Cold Climate(1998)Washing Away the Stain(1993)„do the consequences of the wit-SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page nesses recommendations emerge. Yet these professional women in theearly years of the nation appeared to seek provision for rather thanprosecution or abandonment of those in Irish society marginalized bythe hegemonic discourse of sexual immorality. From their perspectivein the early 1930s, voluntary incarceration would enable rehabilitation,giving the unmarried mother or the victim of sexual abuse a chance to re-join society with her character intact. By contrast, the prevailing modesof con“nement„the county home, the Borstal, and the prison„offeredpermanent stigmatization or criminalization. Thus, the testimony ofthese women re”ects a particular moment in history; it re”ects boththeir class and professional backgrounds and the in”uence of Catholicsocial thinkers such as Devane, M. H. MacInerney, and Sir Joseph The institutional aspect of the womens testimony, like the proposals oftheir male counterparts, nonetheless facilitated the maintenance of Ire-lands national imaginary. By institutionalizing unmarried mothers andjuvenile prostitutes, if only to effect their rehabilitation, these womencontributed to the containment of embodied sexuality crucial to theproject of national identity formation.Whereas the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Actlargely ignored the womens suggestions regarding education and thestigma of illegitimacy, they silently incorporated institutional provisionas Irish societys preferred response to an undifferentiated sexual im-morality. They also ensured that incarceration would remain shroudedin a web of secrecy and denial, thereby reinscribing the institutionspunitive rather than rehabilitative function. Church and state embracedthe institutional impulse not only because it accorded with acceptedpractice„punishing women for sexual transgressions while avoidingculpability„but also because it sustained their collusive relation-ship with respect to moral purity and the project of national identity for-mation. This solution to sexual immorality proved mutually bene“cial toIrelands powerbrokers, which explains the states abdication of respon-sibility for the women and children placed under church control. Womenwere promised secrecy and rehabilitation. In return, church and statenegated the comprising realities of embodied sexual practice. Contain-ing sexual immorality, speci“cally, illegitimacy and prostitution, behindthe walls of Irelands mother and baby homes and Magdalen asylumshelped to constitute and to perpetuate the “ction of Irish cultural purity.INTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page ONCLUSIONSome six years after the Criminal Law Amendment Act becamelaw, the fate of one survivor of child sexual abuse was revealed beforeDublins Central Criminal Court. The judgment, delivered on 16 June 1941,demonstrates how Irelands containment culture operated.The courtdetermined that the girl, who had been raped repeatedly by her fatherwhen she was between the ages of eleven and fourtliving incircumstances calculated to cause or encourage . . . prostitution orseduction.Ž Under the terms of section 21 of the Children Act (1908),she was removed from her home and committed to High Park Convent,the location of one of the largest Magdalen asylums in the country. Ina letter to the county registrar, Elizabeth Carroll, the probation of“cerhandling the case, explained that Irelands industrial and reformatoryschool system refused to admit the girl, fearing that her mere presencewould contaminate her young peers. Moreover, Carroll admitted to beingsorryŽ that we could not “x the girl in a better HomeŽ and quicklymoved to explain, But you know our dif“culties, and in any event sheis better where she is than at home.ŽAlthough the young girl was the victim of a crime, the various au-thorities initially regarded her as a threatening embodiment of sexualdeviancy. In the absence of an acceptable alternative, she was aban-doned to High Park and its population of adult women and routine ofhard labor, incessant prayer, and submission to a religious rule focusedon cleansing the body of sexual impurity. Questions regarding her re-lease persist, as they do for all women who entered the Magdalen: thecommittal order stipulates a six-month stay, but it is not clear when orwhether she was eventually released.SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Page ONCLUSIONSome six years after the Criminal Law Amendment Act becamelaw, the fate of one survivor of child sexual abuse was revealed beforeDublins Central Criminal Court. The judgment, delivered on 16 June 1941,demonstrates how Irelands containment culture operated.The courtdetermined that the girl, who had been raped repeatedly by her fatherwhen she was between the ages of eleven and fourtliving incircumstances calculated to cause or encourage . . . prostitution orseduction.Ž Under the terms of section 21 of the Children Act (1908),she was removed from her home and committed to High Park Convent,the location of one of the largest Magdalen asylums in the country. Ina letter to the county registrar, Elizabeth Carroll, the probation of“cerhandling the case, explained that Irelands industrial and reformatoryschool system refused to admit the girl, fearing that her mere presencewould contaminate her young peers. Moreover, Carroll admitted to beingsorryŽ that we could not “x the girl in a better HomeŽ and quicklymoved to explain, But you know our dif“culties, and in any event sheis better where she is than at home.ŽAlthough the young girl was the victim of a crime, the various au-thorities initially regarded her as a threatening embodiment of sexualdeviancy. In the absence of an acceptable alternative, she was aban-doned to High Park and its population of adult women and routine ofhard labor, incessant prayer, and submission to a religious rule focusedon cleansing the body of sexual impurity. Questions regarding her re-lease persist, as they do for all women who entered the Magdalen: thecommittal order stipulates a six-month stay, but it is not clear when orwhether she was eventually released.SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material nesses recommendations emerge. Yet these professional women in theearly years of the nation appeared to seek provision for rather thanprosecution or abandonment of those in Irish society marginalized bythe hegemonic discourse of sexual immorality. From their perspectivein the early 1930s, voluntary incarceration would enable rehabilitation,giving the unmarried mother or the victim of sexual abuse a chance to re-join society with her character intact. By contrast, the prevailing modesof con“nement„the county home, the Borstal, and the prison„offeredpermanent stigmatization or criminalization. Thus, the testimony ofthese women re”ects a particular moment in history; it re”ects boththeir class and professional backgrounds and the in”uence of Catholicsocial thinkers such as Devane, M. H. MacInerney, and Sir Joseph The institutional aspect of the womens testimony, like the proposals oftheir male counterparts, nonetheless facilitated the maintenance of Ire-lands national imaginary. By institutionalizing unmarried mothers andjuvenile prostitutes, if only to effect their rehabilitation, these womencontributed to the containment of embodied sexuality crucial to theproject of national identity formation.Whereas the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Actlargely ignored the womens suggestions regarding education and thestigma of illegitimacy, they silently incorporated institutional provisionas Irish societys preferred response to an undifferentiated sexual im-morality. They also ensured that incarceration would remain shroudedin a web of secrecy and denial, thereby reinscribing the institutionspunitive rather than rehabilitative function. Church and state embracedthe institutional impulse not only because it accorded with acceptedpractice„punishing women for sexual transgressions while avoidingculpability„but also because it sustained their collusive relation-ship with respect to moral purity and the project of national identity for-mation. This solution to sexual immorality proved mutually bene“cial toIrelands powerbrokers, which explains the states abdication of respon-sibility for the women and children placed under church control. Womenwere promised secrecy and rehabilitation. In return, church and statenegated the comprising realities of embodied sexual practice. Contain-ing sexual immorality, speci“cally, illegitimacy and prostitution, behindthe walls of Irelands mother and baby homes and Magdalen asylumshelped to constitute and to perpetuate the “ction of Irish cultural purity.INTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material and their children to accommodate the large volume of cases currentlydependent on county homes, former Irish workhouses long evoking so-cial stigma. After noting that county homes„funded by state and localgovernment„provided for 2,105 unmarried mothers in 1928, Carrigansreport tellingly points to the objectionable fact that unmarried moth-ers cannot be maintained apart from the other inmates (the decent poorIn contrast to such class and moral prejudice, the femalewitnesses sought to rehabilitate “rst-time unmarried mothers: they rec-ommended that so-called “rst-fall offenders be protected from bothpublic ostracism and the contaminating in”uence of more hardenedprostitutes also residing among the county homes population.As a solution, the state should establish and subsidize homes for un-married mothers, according to the representatives of the Irish WomenWorkers Union, Helena Moloney and Helen Chenevix.These motherand baby homes, to be operated by female religious, would train andprepare inmates for their return to ordinary life.K.M. Sullivan, rep-resenting the Probation Of“ce, as well as Cruice, Russell, and Dodd, alsoargued vehemently against imprisoning young girls convicted of pros-titution in Borstal-type institutions; they claimed that a short periodof imprisonment would be less detrimental to such offenders than along period of detention in an InstitutionŽ and recommended a systemof suspended sentences for women agreeing voluntarily to enter a re-ligious Home or Refuge.ŽA representative from one such home, EmilyBuchanan, of the Protestant-run Magdalen asylum on Dublins LeesonStreet, praised her institutions success in bringing religious in”uenceto juvenile prostitutes.Gavan Duffy and Brady called for similar pro-vision for juvenile prostitutes in Catholic-run Magdalen institutions.Given what is now known about the appalling conditions of motherand baby homes such as Bessboro and Castlepollard or Magdalen asy-lums such as Gloucester Street and Sundays Well, the female witnessesrecommendations for institutionalization complicates the subversivenature of their testimony.Only with the bene“t of recent representa-tions of these institutions„June Gouldings disturbing memoir of lifein one of Irelands mother and baby homes (1998), Patricia Burke Bro-gans play (1994), Peter Mullans movie The Magdalene Sis-ters(2002), and documentaries such as Sex in a Cold Climate(1998)Washing Away the Stain(1993)„do the consequences of the wit-SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material women and eliding male culpability. Perhaps anticipating this formof political resistance, the female witnesses had petitioned to increasethe age of consent to at least eighteen for the general population andtwenty-one for female employees, claiming that the current age of con-sent was related directly to increasing illegitimacy rates. The CriminalLaw Amendment Act diluted such suggested measures, and legislativeproscriptions did little to alleviate the underlying social and culturalprejudice. Because the nation-state effectively criminalized morality, in both the legislative response and societal disnalized single mothers and their children as well as the victims of rape,incest, and pedophilia; they were indiscriminately marked as aber-rant and deemed deserving of scorn and punishment. Irish society con-tinued to stigmatize single mothers and their illegitimate offspring formuch of the twentieth century, driving the lucky ones abroad in searchof new lives and condemning the most unfortunate to incarcerationand forced separation at home (Milotte 1997; Batts 1994).This too ispart of the Carrigan Reports legacy.The female witnesses most controversial goal, perhaps, was to under-mine the easy con”ation of viceŽ and sexual immoralityŽ that wasso unproblematically presented by their male colleagues. Speaking onbehalf of the Irish Women Citizens and Local Government AssoDr. Angela Russell and Ms. I. Dodd warned that prostitutionŽ accountedfor only 20% of the . . . immoralityŽ in contemporary Ireland.lishing a distinction between prostitution and extramarital sexual prac-tice and sexual abuse would rescue women from prosecution and im-prisonment and simultaneously rehabilitate the unmarried mother intosociety. These witnesses also sought to decriminalize juvenile prostitu-tion and provide opportunities for reform, education, and rehabilitationto so-called young offenders.Institutional provision, however, remained central to the womensproposals. Their attention to rehabilitation, education, and spiritual re-form on the one hand and alternative forms of institutional con“ne-ment on the other signals a transitional moment in sociological thinking:assumptions of late-nineteenth-century Victorian philanthropy weregiving way to emerging trends in professional social work (Luddy 2001,805…6; Luddy 1995a; Clear 1987; Finnegan 2001). Numerous witnesses,including Cruice, Gavan Duffy, Brady, Dodd, and Russell, called for theestablishment of separate voluntary institutions for unmarried mothersINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material controversies since the early 1980s: the Ann Lovett case, the Kerry ba-bies inquiry, and the various industrial schools scandals (Maguire 2001,3…35; Inglis 2003; Hug 1999; Raftery and OSullivan 1999).Another focus of the womens testimony concerned Irish societysintolerance of sexual immorality in general and unmarried mothers andtheir children in particular. Many witnesses suggested that an inhos-pitable social environment stigmatizing illegitimacy contributed dito prostitution, infanticide, and emigration among young women.M.J.Cruice, secretary of St. Patricks Guild, maintained that the majority ofunmarried mothers arriving in Dublin from the provinces sought to es-cape their shame and conceal their children.Horne and Stopford related this issue of secrecy to the underreporting of sexual crimesagainst women and children. Both witnesses argued that in their ex-perience young girls admitted to rape or assault only if and when theybecame pregnant.Representatives from Dublins Lock Hospital cor-roborated this testimony, describing the young womans reluctance todisclose the name of her betrayerŽ or to seek recourse through the re-cently passed Illegitimate Children (Af“liation Orders) Act.Carrigans“nal report echoes these recurring observations: it acknowledges theimpossibility of knowing the annual number of illegitimate births thatunmarried girls„in their distressful plight and shameŽ„sought to con-The report notes the number of unmarried Irish mothers sup-ported by various charitable societies in Ireland that were not includedin the Department of Local Government and Public Healths of“cialIt also documents information from Catholic rescue homesin Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and London caring for The report not only portrays the relation-ship between stigmatization and underreporting of sexual immoralitybut also reveals that incarceration and emigration were the acceptedsocietal responses to manifestations of embodied sexual practice.Political responses to the edited report thus easily sidestepped theunpleasant contradictions highlighted by the suppressed female testi-mony. A developing rhetoric of national identity formation, in particu-lar, the of“cial discourse of Irish motherhood, refused to acknowledgeand therefore ignored the maltreatment of unmarried mothers and children. By preventing public debate, the political response legitthe stigmatization of illegitimacy and contributed to the perpetuationof oppressive conditions directly and disproportionately impinging onSMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material Three speci“c aspects of the womens testimony demonstrate force-fully the states failure. Many witnesses emphasized the need to edu-cate young Irish women about human sexuality.Apparently graspingthe need to bridge their concerns with the committees political agenda,they argued that female ignorance about reproductive biology inillegitimacy rates, the incidences of sexually transmitted diseases, and awide range of related social ills. Many of the witnesses distinguished be-tween young women in Ireland and in Britain. According to Dr. AngelaRussell, representing the Irish Women Citizens and Local GovernmentAssociation, Irish girls were physically more immature than thoseof equal age abroad and temperamentally they were more trusting andLikewise, Mrs. J.M. Kettle, representing the Dublin CountyUnion, argued that Irish Girls were less sophisticated than Englishgirls.ŽDrs. Delia Moclair Horne and Dorothy Stopford Price, repre-senting the Irish Women Doctors Committee, were more forthright incalling for enhanced instruction, pointing to young Irish womens re-markableŽ ignorance about physical facts. Both doctors cited personalknowledge of thirteen-year-old girls who had recently become moth-Mrs. Margaret Gavin Duffy and Dr. Ita Brady, visitors to the LockHospital in Dublin, claimed that such ignorance appeared to make girlsreleased from industrial schools an easy prey to designing menŽ andsuggested a direct correlation between the industrial school system andthe prostitutes they visited in the Lock.They concluded that femaledoctors attending such girls schools should impart sexual education.The Carrigan Reports evasion of this testimony suppressed theseprofessional womens call for education, particularly for members ofsociety marginalized by poverty or institutionalization. Such conceal-ment occurred repeatedly in subsequent Irish discussions of sexualimmoralityŽ„in the Catholic hierarchys resistance to pre- and postnatalcare in debates surrounding the Mother and ChildŽ scheme (1951) and,more recently, in attempts to thwart the Stay SafeŽ program (1993).The reports suppression of female testimony reveals how church andstate worked to ensure that neither school nor dispensary nor even homewould provide the necessary education to combat ignorance abouthuman sexuality. Moreover, this cultivated ignorance not only reinfa stereotype of the pure Irish woman; it also enabled state leaders toimagine an ignorance that may not have been that profound. The lega-cies of these political choices resonate in a series of sociosexual IrishINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material among others, Fr. Brendan Smyth and Fr. Sean Fortune, the KilkennyIncest Inquiry, and the West of Ireland FarmerŽ [a.k.a. Joseph McCol-gan] case) can the signi“cance of suppressing the Carrigan Committeetestimony and report be fully appreciated.The precedent establishedbetween 1930 and 1935, which legitimized secrecy and silence as a re-sponse to child abuse and pedophilia, reverberates for twentieth- andtwenty-“rst-century survivors of these crimes throughout the nation.Carrigans report only once alluded explicitly to participation inthe proceedings by women and then only to representatives from theIrish Women Doctors Committee who challenged of“cial statistics onillegitimacy as failing to re”ect the actual condition of the country.ŽSuch an underrepresentation is especially egregious given that eigh-teen of the twenty-nine witnesses were women. Although the reportacknowledged that these witnesses represented a range of charitablesocial welfare organizations protecting women, children, and unmar-ried mothers, treating sexual disease, and reforming offenders, it failedto incorporate the expertise the women brought to the committeesdeliberations.The recent reemergence of the minutes of evidence andthe various organizations memoranda help to redress this historicalThe womens testimony diverged signi“cantly from the prosecu-torial and regulatory emphasis of ODuffy and the clerics. As practic-ing social workers and doctors, these women dealt with womens andchildrens medical, educational, and social welfare needs. In their testi-mony they suggested a systematic provision of care and emphasizedprevention rather than punishment. Pointing to the practical conse-quence attending legislative and judicial proscriptions, they advocateda more charitable social environment for the vulnerable in society.Although their testimony anticipated issues that were to burden so-cial welfare provision for much of the twentieth century, these womenwere silenced in the of“cial discourse of the state, which established afurther precedent in the area of social provision as church and statecountered expertise with resistance and failed thereby to respond tosocial need. SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material dum included summary particulars for thirty-four sexual offenses dur-ing the year 1930 to date; during his testimony he addressed each casemore fully with the bene“t of the actual case “les„seven involvinggirls under ten years of age.Despite graphic anecdotal and irrefutable statistical evidence sug-gesting widespread sexual crime in Free State Ireland, the Carrigan Re-port attempted to rein in this damaging portrait of Irish society. Thereport edits out ODuffys most speci“c charges and textually minitroubling comparisons suggesting, for example, that children of thepoorer classesŽ in the Free State are less protected than in Great Brit-Nevertheless, the report could not avoid reproducing ODuffysmajor contention, that there was an alarming amount of sexual crimeincreasing yearly, a feature of which was the large number of casesof criminal interference with girls and children from 16 years down-wards, including many cases of children under 10 years.ŽEspeciallytroubling for the politicians and civil servants who were to decide thefate of the report was ODuffys assessment that less than 15 percent ofsuch cases were prosecuted in any given year. He attributed this lowrate chie”y to peculiarities in the judicial process that required corrobo-ration of a single witness or mandated that a judge warn the jury ofdanger of convicting the accused on uncorroborated evidence.Ironically, the Carrigan Report thus demonstrated how prevailing ju-dicial processes operated to mark young women and children as ac-complices to a crime rather than as victims of an outrage.Yet the De-partment of Justice memorandum considered precisely this aspect ofthe report unbalanced. It is understood that many competent authori-ties have grave doubts as to the value of childrens evidence,Ž it noted.A child with a vivid imagination may actually live in his mind thesituation as he invented it and will be quite unshaken by severe cross-Would the issue of child sexual abuse have been handled differentlyby the civil servants in the Department of Justice and by the male leg-islators in the Dáil and Seanád if the Carrigan Report or ODuffys testi-mony had entered into public debate? The refusal to acknowledgabuse as a concern and the elision of that issue in the political and jour-nalistic arenas guaranteed its invisibility (McAvoy 1999, 261). Only afterthe deluge of revelations in the 1990s regarding contemporary childsexual abuse (e.g., the various clerical pedophilia scandals involving,INTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material their censure on visible manifestations of sexual immorality. But singu-larly focused as they were, they failed to contain compromising reali-ties. For example, in their comments regarding bad housing accom-modationŽ and the appaling the appaling manner in which members of famare crowded on each other,Ž both Fr. Fitzpatrick and Fr. Flanagan wereaware that incest contributed to increased numbers of unmarried ers and illegitimate children.But, as J.J. Lee concludes, the obses-sion with sex permitted a blind eye to be turned towards the social that dis“gured the face of IrelandŽ: on this occasion the clerics obses-sion with the visibility of sex de”ected attention from the plight of in-dividuals occluded by sexual immorality: the unmarried mother, the il-legitimate child, and victims of rape, incest, and pedophilia (1989, 159;see also Finnane 2001, 530). In its uncritical emphasis on clerical con-cerns, the Carrigan Report replicates this unwillingness to consider thesocial conditions fostering incest and illegitimacy, including poverty, theabsence of birth control, and the need for education regarding sexuality and legal entitlements.In contrast to the clerics focus on extramarital sexual practice, Gen-eral ODuffy, commissioner of the Garda Síochána (the states policeforce), focused his testimony on prosecutions for sexual offenses,addressing the modern nations need to legislate against immorality,especially rape, incest, and pedophilia.ODuffy in”uenced the shape of the committees “nal report and theeventual legislation.Prior to his appearance he submitted a statisticalsurvey documenting sexual crimes between 1924 and 1930, including abreakdown by year for each county, capturing the De“lement, CarnalKnowledge, or RapeŽ of girls under ten, between ten and thirteen, be-tween thirteen and sixteen, between sixteen and eighteen, and over eigh-teen. This survey similarly details Indecent Assault on Girls,Ž Incest,ŽSodomy,Ž Indecent Assault on Boys regardless of Age,Ž and Besti-ality.ŽFor each offense it charts the numbers of prosecutions and ul-timate convictions. ODuffy also submitted a twenty-eight-page analy-sis of these statistics in which he provided signi“cant detail about thenature and quantity of sexual crime in Ireland. Like Devane, he urgedthe newly independent state to legislate against immorality accordingto Irish Catholic principles: The present state of the law is disgracefulin a Christian country, and the whole question of morality crimes be now dealt with from an Irish point of view.ŽODuffys memoran-SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material mittee. He articulated critical concerns that would remain prominentin sociological debates for decades, for example, the dual standard ofmorality accepted in this country, as in perhaps no other,where thewoman is always hounded down and the man dealt with leniently.Ž De-vane was especially alert to the implicit hypocrisy of the well-meaningin Free State society, suggesting that the citizen too often appearedinterested in the welfare of any others child or sister . . . rather thanones own.Ž Most devastating, perhaps, he surmised that an exclusivelymale point of view in the administration as well as legislationŽ elidedany adequate appreciation of female psychology in matters involvingmorality.ŽThe Carrigan Report largely ignores Devanes signi“cant challenges.Instead, it disproportionately privileges those elements of the clericstestimony that were loudly echoed by his fellow priests, in particular, aseeming obsession with the dangers associated with popular amuse-ments, especially the dance hall. In contrast to Devanes sociologicalobservations, Fathers Fitzpatrick, Lee, Flanagan, Roughneen, and Gildeareported that they waged war against moral degeneration in their re-spective parishes. Such anecdotes conjure a level of authenticity morein tune with the committees predilections: boys and girls lay[ing] bythe roadsides near Limerick,Ž the dangers arising from the return late at night of young boys and girls from dance halls,Ž and 2 casesof domestic servants„both under 20 years of age„who had been se-Lobbying to eradicate sexual immoralityŽ at its point of origin,these clerics attributed the recent rise in illegitimacy almost entirely tothe viceŽ imported by popular entertainments. This con”ation of viceand immorality was not necessarily exclusive to the Catholic Church;indeed, the committees very name„Committee on the Criminal LawAmendment Acts (1880…85) and Juvenile Prostitution„and the of“cialreport of the same title similarly elide immorality and juvenile pros-titution. In effect, then, such discourse transformed every unmarriedmother into a potential prostitute. Devane also joined his colleagues inidentifying contemporary sources of immoralityŽ: the loss of parentalcontrol, the perversions of modern cinema, the illicit book, of supervision and the licensing of dance halls, and the opportunitiesafforded by the misuse of motor cars.ŽRather than directly confront the social consequences attending ex-tramarital sexual practice or sexual abuse, clerical witnesses focusedINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material general statementŽ summarizing witness testimony, was forwardedto the minister for justice. The Department of Justice immediately iden-ti“ed the impact of withholding the various witnesses memorandaand the committees of“cial minutes of meetings: The Committee ex-plains that it was considered necessary to take evidence in private andwhile dif“culty would probably have been encountered if any othercourse had been adopted, the fact remains that the reader of the reportis presented with the Committees conclusions without having accessto the evidence on which those conclusions were based. In these cir-cumstances, it is not easy to assess the value of the Report.Žlikely that the civil servants who authored the Department of Justicescritical evaluation ever had access to the evidence,Ž just as it is certainthat the politicians who constituted Geoghegans informal committeeThe witness testimony was never discussed in public either: at its “rstmeeting the committee decided to withhold evidence from the press.The following analysis, initially focusing on the clerical witnesses andGen. Eoin ODuffy, resituates the signi“cance of their testimony in lightof my argument that the church-state formulation of sexual immoralitybecame an enabling discursive distortion. The political responses tothese witnesses„“rst the report and then the legislation„foregroundhow perceptions of sexual practice (in the case of the clerics) and the re-ality of sexual abuse (in ODuffys testimony) were accommodated andtherefore contained by the discourse of sexual immorality. This accom-modation, I argue, buttressed even as it helped to constitute Irelandsnational imaginary.Of the twenty-nine witnesses, six were members of the Catholicclergy. The most prominent was Rev. R.S. Devane, S.J., author of socio-logical writings on illegitimacy, the unmarried mother, and (De-vane 1924a, 1924b, 1928, 1931a, 1931b).For much of the 1920s Devaneand like-minded social thinkers heralded the Free States opportunityto “x the legal standard of morality in true consonance with the idealsset before them by the teaching of the Catholic ChurchŽ (Devane 1924a,58; see also Glynn 1921, 461…67; MacInerney 1921, 140…56; MacIn-erney 1922, 246…61; An SagartŽ 1922, 145…53). In pointing to underly-ing problems determining immoralityŽ in the Free State, Devane wasunique among his religious brethren who appeared before the com-SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material watered-down version of what the Carrigan Report initially proposedbut one that substantially incorporated the hierarchys concerns. Thedraft headsŽ proposed that the age of consent would be seventeen,not eighteen, and that unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl between “f-teen and seventeen would remain a misdemeanor, not a felony, as wouldattempted unlawful carnal knowledge with a girl under the age of “f-teen. The committee resisted the reports suggestion both that the of-fense of solicitation be rede“ned and made applicable to men as wellas women and that whipping be reinstated and sex offenders namesbe published.At the meeting of the Executive Council on 17 November 1933 deValera and his cabinet accepted all but two of the informal committeessuggestions for what became the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, 1934.First, after extended deliberations, the cabinet replaced the general pro-hibition that allowed for exceptional circumstancesŽ based on reli-gious conviction or medical need with an absolute ban on the sale orimportation of contraceptive appliances and drugs.net excised the heads pertaining to licensing of dance halls and, afterminor revisions, created the separate Dance Halls Bill, 1934.These were considered and approved at the Executive Council meeting inJune 1934, followed by second stageŽ and committee stageŽ hearings inboth the Dáil and the Seanád. Throughout, the government maintainedthe secret and closed nature of deliberations leading to both pieces ofIn the end, both the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935)and the Dance Hall Act (1935) passed into law without any substantivedebate or public participation.RIESTSANDThe traditional history of the Carrigan Report and the CriminalLaw Amendment Act only partially captures the full signi“cance of thesemoments in the early Free State period. Archival material re1999, speci“cally, the minutes of evidence and the various memorandasubmitted by organizations and individuals presenting testimony, per-mit excised segments of this story to be reinserted.Public access tothis material is signi“cant for a number of reasons but especially be-cause in August 1931 only Carrigans “nal report, with its eight-pageINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material and Rev. M.J. Brown, agreed in large part with the Department of Jus-tices negative estimation of the report as too drastic, lacking in judg-ment, and unworkable.ŽThey recommended that the report form thebasis of new legislation, with Canavan speci“cally calling for a bill re-”ecting the committees “ndings to be passed intdiscussion in the Dáil.ŽNeither priest accepted the departments criti-cisms of Carrigans proposals to raise the age of consent as merely puni-tiveŽ and vindictive,Ž arguing instead that the object of this law is cer-tainly [a] deterrent.ŽCanavan maintained that the Government shouldseek, in the “rst place, to stop the earths, to remove, as far as possible,the occasions of offenceŽ; in particular, he asserted the need for rig-orous controlŽ of dance halls and motor cars used for immoral ends.Whereas Brown recognized the potential bene“t of shocking the FreeState population into greater awareness through public debate, in theend he joined his fellow cleric in advising against publication, admittingthat the reports “ndings will rejoice our enemies.ŽGeoghegans negotiations with members of the hierarchy requireddelicate handling, especially as he navigated between the governmentssecular and religious loyalties. In a meeting with Dr. David Keane,bishop of Limerick, and the bishops of Ossory and Thasos on 1 Decem-ber 1932, Geoghegan assured the bishops that he would like to see aBill go through which would bring the law into accord with the bestCatholic practice and teaching.ŽHowever, when the delegation of bish-ops sought greater in”uence over the informalŽ committee of Dáil depu-ties, Geoghegan informed Keane that it could best do its work privatelyand to avoid lobbying there should not be any announcement of namesfor the present.ŽThe minister did solicit a memorandum representingthe hierarchys views. Keanes reply amounted to a wish list of concernsthe Catholic Church sought to have addressed in any legislation.Spe-ci“cally, the hierarchy gave priority to four issues: a general prohibitionon the sale and importation of contraceptive appliances, raising the ageof consent to eighteen, effective licensing of public dance halls, and leg-islation dealing with moral abuse in motor cars.The informal committee met eight times between December 1932and May 1933, while, with the cabinets consent, Geoghegan organizedpreparation of legislation to amend the criminal law.the level of secrecy that members of the Dáil were not privy to thecommittee membership.Geoghegan and his cohort “nally arrived at aSMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material ing aspects of the contraception debate before the public eye.quently, although the Carrigan Report as well as a fourteen-page De-partment of Justice memorandum were shared with members of theExecutive Council on 2 December 1931, no action was taken.The memo-randum called into question the Carrigan Committees judicialŽ expe-rience, indeed its impartiality.Moreover, the Department of Justicesuggested that the witnesses testimony presented a narrowly de“nedand publicly endorsed version of the facts and that these were singu-larly consistent with Catholic teachings on morality.It characterizedthe report as overly anxious to increase prosecutions and convictionsfor sexual immorality but as insuf“ciently concerned with measuresto prevent crime. The memorandum concluded by stressing the unde-sirability of making its “ndings public: The obvious conclusion to bedrawn is that the ordinary feelings of decency and the in”uence of re-ligion have failed in this country and that the only remedy is by way ofpolice action. It is clearly undesirable that such a view of conditions inthe Saorstat should be given wide circulation.ŽAlmost immediately,therefore, the Carrigan Report became a de facto censored governmentdocument.February 1932 witnessed a general election and the “rst democraticchange of political power in the history of the Free State. Feelings ofanimosity and suspicion ran high.The Eucharistic Congress later thatyear probably eased partisan political tensions, for by the ensuing au-tumn, when the newly appointed minister for justice, James Geoghegan,again took up the issues raised by the Carrigan Report, political dis-cord had dissipated. At the 27 October meeting of the Executive Coun-cil, Eamon de Valera, leader of Fianna Fáil, and his cabinet decided toestablish a committee consisting of representatives of all partiesŽ toconsider on a strictly con“dentialŽ basis what course to follow in re-sponse to the Carrigan Report.There ensued a series of communica-tions between Geoghegan and Cosgrave, now leader of the opposition,to ensure that the eight-member committee be so representative as tobe likely to fully criticize the report . . . , with a view to avoiding as faras possible public discussion of a necessarily unsavoury nature.ŽTheprocess of closed-door deliberations, however, had only begun.Geoghegan sought counsel from two leading members of the Catho-licclergy and subsequently met a delegation representing the StandingCommittee of the Catholic hierarchy. Both clerics, Rev. J. Canavan, S.J.,INTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material William T. Cosgrave, president of the Executive Council, to de”ectpressure for legislation to ban contraceptives and to close theloophole in the Censorship of Publications Act (1929),which outlawedthe advertisement of contraceptives while not legally proscribing theirimportation or sale.The committees terms of reference were ambigu-ous; it sought recommendations to amend the 1880 and 1885 govern-ing statutes as well as legislative proposals to dealŽ with the problemof juvenile prostitutionŽ (Report1931, 3). William Carrigan, K.C., was ap-pointed chairman, and his name remains indelibly linked with mittee and its highly contentious report.On 20 August 1931, after seventeen sittings, the Carrigan Commit-tee submitted its “nal report to the minister for justice (Report 1931,43…44). The report recommended a combination of enlightened socialreforms together with a series of punitive legislative proposals, forexample, raising the age of consent to eighteen, abolishing the rea-sonable beliefŽ clause allowing male defendants to argue that they hadreason to believe their female partner was old enough to give informedconsent, extending to twelve months the period within which a pros-ecution could be initiated, revising judicial practice requiring corrobo-ration of a young persons testimony, allowing for courts to hear casesin camera, offering suggestions for the licensing of dance halls, and in-stigating a general prohibition on the sale of contraceptives, togetherwith recommendations for a series of strict “nes and custodial sentfor procurement, solicitation, and public indecency. Most controversially,the report recommended the reintroduction of ”ogging as punishmentfor those convicted of sexual crimes against young people and the black-listing of those found guilty of public indecency (Report1931, 40…41).AsMark Finnane argues, the reports “ndings proved profoundly unset-tling for the political and clerical elites governing Irish society (2001,525). They pointed to a general moral degeneration, evident both in ris-ing illegitimacy rates and in unassailable proof of sexual crimes againstvery young women and children. Such “ndings contradicted the pre-vailing language of national identity formation, which emphasized Ca-tholicism, moral purity, and rural ideals.The reception of the Carrigan Report reveals much about howpolitical decision making established a new Free State moral order. InAugust 1931, as Cumann na nGaedheal faced a looming general election,Cosgrave undoubtedly wanted to avoid placing the potentially polariz-SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material and unaware of their civic and legal rights. I demonstrate how the statesreliance on a discourse of sexual immorality narrowly focused on il-legitimacy stigmatized young women even as it exculpated their malepartners. Likewise, I underscore how political discourses legitimizedstate practices of institutionalizing many of its most vulnerable citi-zens in mother and baby homes, Magdalen asylums, and industrial andreformatory schools. Does the womens testimony represent a striking instance of poten-tial dissent from hegemonic practice or, as seems more likely, a respby women themselves unable to imagine an alternative to the regula-tion, prosecution, and incarceration of social behavior deemed aber-rant by both church and state? The female witnesses too offered an in-stitutional response to seemingly transgressive sexuality, arguing thatunmarried mothers be con“ned to state-funded mother and baby and juvenile prostitutes to religious-run Magdalen asylums. Operatingas they were within a prescribed social and political system, however,the female witnesses very participation obliquely contests the con-tainment culture that the Carrigan Report effects. In the “nal analysis,nobody„not a single committee member or witness, not a single pcian or member of the judiciary„argued against or offered an alterna-tive to institutionalization as the solution to sexual immorality. Simi-larly, nobody suggested that the problem of sexual abuse and pedophiliashould take precedence over the problemŽ of the unmarried mother.In the absence of any overt contestation, the report and subsequent leg-islation licensed the states abstract, secretive, and punitive responseto sexual immorality. The origins of Irelands containment culture, inshort, are rooted in the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amend-ment Act of 1935.ISTORYWhat was the Carrigan Committee, what did its report recom-mend, and how did it in”uence the Criminal Law Amendment Act?James Fitzgerald Kenney, minister for justice in the Cumann na nGaed-heal government, appointed the committee on 17 June 1930 (Reportof the Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts 1931, 3).torians generally consider the appointment a deliberate attempt byINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material Retelling the history of the Carrigan Report and the Criminal LawAmendment Act exposes the states willing abdication of responsibilityfor matters of sexuality and sexual education to the Catholic Church andchallenges the general avoidance of sociosexual issues in favor of thepolitical aspects of church-state relations in much Irish historiography(Whyte 1980, 24…61; Keogh 1986, 163…66, 205…8; Keogh 1995, 71…73;Lee 1989, 157…60). Recent scholarship allows for a fuller understand-ing based on the release in 1991 of the Department of Justices of“cial“les relating to the Carrigan Committee (Finnane 2001; Kennedy 2000).More recently still, in 1999 the National Archives made available theminutes of meetings and the “les relating to persons and organizationsgiving evidence before the committee.This introduction synthesizes this new archival material. it argues that the Carrigan Reports political reception„“rst the sup-pression of the report, then the legislative response„established aprecedent for church-state management of sociosexual controversies,proscribing visible manifestations of sexual immoralityŽ while failingto address, or choosing to ignore, the social realities attending them.This political response reveals how the discourse of sexual immoralitymarginalized the real-life sexual practice that resulted in single moth-erhood and illegitimacy while it simultaneously elided the pervasivereality of rape, incest, and pedophilia. Both the report and the ensu-legislation demonstrate a signi“cant discursive distortion, one thatwould enable Irelands church-state partnership effectively to crimi-nalize sexual relations outside of marriage and thereby inscribe moralpurity into the project of national identity formation. Thus, representa-tions of sexual immorality buttressed this collusive relationship. over, in concealing actual crimes against women and children, the dis-cursive distortion neatly collapsed sexual abuse into the disembodieddiscourse of sexual immorality. But by suppressing the compromisingrealities of sexual abuse within this broader discourse, the politics ofabstraction helped to constitute a “ction of Irish cultural purity on wthe national imaginary depended.Finally, this introduction explores the discursive claims of the Carri-gan Report and thereby reveals the distortions inherent instability. Byfocusing, in part, on women who presented testimony before the com-mittee, I reveal how Irelands political hegemony ensured that youngwomen would remain uneducated regarding their reproductive biologySMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material of post…civil war divisiveness. Finally, it helped to engineer widespreadpublic consent by way of the legislative agenda, even while the operativefunctions of the institutional response to sexual practice were shroudedin secrecy. An examination of the Carrigan Report and its political recep-tion in this context underscores how the discourse of sexual immoralityenabled, even as it was perceived to threaten, postindependent Irelandsnativist national imaginary.Recent feminist historiography has considered how the projectof national identity formation in the decades following independencemobilized Catholic notions of sexual morality in ways that were particu-larly oppressive for Irish women.Against the backdrop of partitionand fueled by the desire to create a new imagined community withinthe boundaries of the twenty-six-county state,Ž church and state fash-ioned a seamlessly homogeneous society (Gray and Ryan 1998, 126).Working in unison, these two institutions closed off internal chal-lenges and contradictions even as they represented society as pure anduntainted by external corruption (Clear 2000; OCallaghan 2002; Daly1995). In volume 4 of the , Marjorie Howes illu-minates this alliance, arguing that one method of de“ning and assert-ing the national character that enjoyed wide popular support, accordedwith the Free States now legendary social and economic conservatismand marked a clearly visible difference between Ireland and Englandwas the formal and informal enforcement of Catholic social teachings,particularly in the area of sexual moralityŽ (2002, 923…24). Catholicmorality became at once a hallmark of Irish identity, differentiating thenational community from its near neighbors, and an emblem of the un-contested political territory, enabling politicians to eschew party af“li-ation and seek unanimity through religious conformity.Maryann Vali-ulus outlines the consequences of this strategic allegiance of churchand state, arguing that political and ecclesiastical leaders in the IrishFree State constructed an identity for Irish women solely in domesticterms„women were mothers, women were wivesŽ (1995, 169).Thisidealization and objecti“cation required a series of legislative vehicleswith which to constrain women so that they might visibly conform tothe prescribed national paradigm (McAvoy 1999; Luddy 2001). Theprocess also necessitated a series of punishments to negate and ren-der invisible those women unlucky enough to countermand socialconventions.INTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material The historically powerful Catholic Church and the ”edgling Irish State cooperated increasingly throughout the 1920s as the self-appointedguardians of the nations moral climate. Already by 1925 this partner-ship had provoked legislation establishing censorship of “lms and pro-scribing divorce, characteristic hallmarks of the socially repressive FreeState society. These initiatives were followed by a series of of“cial in-vestigations, for example, the Inquiry Regarding Venereal Disease (1926),the Committee on Evil Literature (1927), and the Commission on theRelief of the Sick and Destitute Poor Including the Insane Poor (1928).Such inquiries typically generated lengthy reports that resulted in legis-lation addressing social and moral issues, including the Censorship ofPublications Act (1929), the Illegitimate Children (Af“liation Orders)Act (1930), the Legitimacy Act (1931), the Registration of MaternityHomes Act (1934), and the Dance Halls Act (1935). This chapter exam-ines the historical contexts informing one “nal church-state initiativefrom the early Free State years, the Committee on the Criminal LawAmendment Acts (1880…85) and Juvenile Prostitution (hereafter re-ferred to as the Carrigan Committee), its ensuing report, and the subse-quent Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935). The Carrigan Report, I pro-pose, was a formative moment in establishing an of“cial state attitudetoward sexual immoralityŽ and the subsequent legislation in authoriz-ing the nations containment culture.In its concrete form Irelands architecture of containment encom-passed an array of interdependent institutions: industrial and reforma-tory schools, mother and baby homes, adoption agencies, and Magasylums, among others. In its more abstract form this architecture com-prised both the legislation that inscribed these issues and the numer-ous of“cial and public discourses that resisted admitting to the existand function of their af“liated institutions (Smith 1997, 2001). In arriv-ing at a hegemonic discourse that responded to perceived sexual im-morality, the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Actsanitized state policy with respect to institutional provision. They dis-embodied sexual practice by obscuring social realities, especially ille-gitimacy, in discursive abstractions. And they concealed sexual crime,especially rape, infanticide, and abuse, while simultaneously sexualiz-ing the women and children unfortunate enough to fall victim to so-cietys moral proscriptions.Moreover, this of“cial discourse helped toconstruct an illusion of political nonpartisanship against the backdropSMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material Introduction The Politics of Sexual KnowledgeThe Origins of Irelands Containment Cultureand 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 Gaelriting in the same year the Irish Free State was founded,James F. Cassidy, himself a Catholic priest, captured the inherent contra-ons informing contemporary Irish attitudes toward womens virtuelined the rami“cations for those women who violated the so-cial and moral ideal. Branded by the public as simultaneously a motherand a criminal, a family member and an outcast, the unmarried motherfaced shame, betrayal, and exile. With little or no social welfare systemto fall back on, her choices were limited to entering the county home,begging on the streets, or possibly resorting to prostitution. Cassidysscenario carefully avoided the unmarried mothers male partner, fatherto her illegitimate child. Similarly, he ignored the social powerbrokers„and state„that facilitated these communal responses. Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material Copyright © 2007 by University of Notre DameNotre Dame, Indiana 46556www.undpress.nd.eduAll Rights ReservedDesigned by Wendy McMillenSet in 10.3/13.6 Visage by Four Star BooksPrinted on 60# Williamsburg Recycled Paper by Versa PressLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataSmith, James M., 1966…Irelands Magdalen Laundries and the nations architecture of containment /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„History3. Church work with prostitutes„CatholicChurch.4. Unmarried mothers„Institutional care„Ireland„History.5. Reformatories for women„Ireland„History.I. Title.HV1448.I73S652007362.83'9„dc222007025510This book is printed on recycled paper. Smith000.FM 7/12/07 1:58 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material AGDALENAUNDRIESANDTHENATIONARCHITECTUREOF CONTAINMENTJAMES M.SMITHUniversity of Notre Dame PressNotre Dame, Indiana Smith000.FM 7/12/07 1:58 Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment James M. Smith University of Notre Dame Press Copyrighted Material ONCLUSIONSome six years after the Criminal Law Amendment Act becamelaw, the fate of one survivor of child sexual abuse was revealed beforeDublins Central Criminal Court. The judgment, delivered on 16 June 1941,demonstrates how Irelands containment culture operated.The courtdetermined that the girl, who had been raped repeatedly by her fatherwhen she was between the ages of eleven and fourtliving incircumstances calculated to cause or encourage . . . prostitution orseduction.Ž Under the terms of section 21 of the Children Act (1908),she was removed from her home and committed to High Park Convent,the location of one of the largest Magdalen asylums in the country. Ina letter to the county registrar, Elizabeth Carroll, the probation of“cerhandling the case, explained that Irelands industrial and reformatoryschool system refused to admit the girl, fearing that her mere presencewould contaminate her young peers. Moreover, Carroll admitted to beingsorryŽ that we could not “x the girl in a better HomeŽ and quicklymoved to explain, But you know our dif“culties, and in any event sheis better where she is than at home.ŽAlthough the young girl was the victim of a crime, the various au-thorities initially regarded her as a threatening embodiment of sexualdeviancy. In the absence of an acceptable alternative, she was aban-doned to High Park and its population of adult women and routine ofhard labor, incessant prayer, and submission to a religious rule focusedon cleansing the body of sexual impurity. Questions regarding her re-lease persist, as they do for all women who entered the Magdalen: thecommittal order stipulates a six-month stay, but it is not clear when orwhether she was eventually released.SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press nesses recommendations emerge. Yet these professional women in theearly years of the nation appeared to seek provision for rather thanprosecution or abandonment of those in Irish society marginalized bythe hegemonic discourse of sexual immorality. From their perspectivein the early 1930s, voluntary incarceration would enable rehabilitation,giving the unmarried mother or the victim of sexual abuse a chance to re-join society with her character intact. By contrast, the prevailing modesof con“nement„the county home, the Borstal, and the prison„offeredpermanent stigmatization or criminalization. Thus, the testimony ofthese women re”ects a particular moment in history; it re”ects boththeir class and professional backgrounds and the in”uence of Catholicsocial thinkers such as Devane, M. H. MacInerney, and Sir Joseph The institutional aspect of the womens testimony, like the proposals oftheir male counterparts, nonetheless facilitated the maintenance of Ire-lands national imaginary. By institutionalizing unmarried mothers andjuvenile prostitutes, if only to effect their rehabilitation, these womencontributed to the containment of embodied sexuality crucial to theproject of national identity formation.Whereas the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Actlargely ignored the womens suggestions regarding education and thestigma of illegitimacy, they silently incorporated institutional provisionas Irish societys preferred response to an undifferentiated sexual im-morality. They also ensured that incarceration would remain shroudedin a web of secrecy and denial, thereby reinscribing the institutionspunitive rather than rehabilitative function. Church and state embracedthe institutional impulse not only because it accorded with acceptedpractice„punishing women for sexual transgressions while avoidingculpability„but also because it sustained their collusive relation-ship with respect to moral purity and the project of national identity for-mation. This solution to sexual immorality proved mutually bene“cial toIrelands powerbrokers, which explains the states abdication of respon-sibility for the women and children placed under church control. Womenwere promised secrecy and rehabilitation. In return, church and statenegated the comprising realities of embodied sexual practice. Contain-ing sexual immorality, speci“cally, illegitimacy and prostitution, behindthe walls of Irelands mother and baby homes and Magdalen asylumshelped to constitute and to perpetuate the “ction of Irish cultural purity.INTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press and their children to accommodate the large volume of cases currentlydependent on county homes, former Irish workhouses long evoking so-cial stigma. After noting that county homes„funded by state and localgovernment„provided for 2,105 unmarried mothers in 1928, Carrigansreport tellingly points to the objectionable fact that unmarried moth-ers cannot be maintained apart from the other inmates (the decent poorIn contrast to such class and moral prejudice, the femalewitnesses sought to rehabilitate “rst-time unmarried mothers: they rec-ommended that so-called “rst-fall offenders be protected from bothpublic ostracism and the contaminating in”uence of more hardenedprostitutes also residing among the county homes population.As a solution, the state should establish and subsidize homes for un-married mothers, according to the representatives of the Irish WomenWorkers Union, Helena Moloney and Helen Chenevix.These motherand baby homes, to be operated by female religious, would train andprepare inmates for their return to ordinary life.K.M. Sullivan, rep-resenting the Probation Of“ce, as well as Cruice, Russell, and Dodd, alsoargued vehemently against imprisoning young girls convicted of pros-titution in Borstal-type institutions; they claimed that a short periodof imprisonment would be less detrimental to such offenders than along period of detention in an InstitutionŽ and recommended a systemof suspended sentences for women agreeing voluntarily to enter a re-ligious Home or Refuge.ŽA representative from one such home, EmilyBuchanan, of the Protestant-run Magdalen asylum on Dublins LeesonStreet, praised her institutions success in bringing religious in”uenceto juvenile prostitutes.Gavan Duffy and Brady called for similar pro-vision for juvenile prostitutes in Catholic-run Magdalen institutions.Given what is now known about the appalling conditions of motherand baby homes such as Bessboro and Castlepollard or Magdalen asy-lums such as Gloucester Street and Sundays Well, the female witnessesrecommendations for institutionalization complicates the subversivenature of their testimony.Only with the bene“t of recent representa-tions of these institutions„June Gouldings disturbing memoir of lifein one of Irelands mother and baby homes (1998), Patricia Burke Bro-gans play (1994), Peter Mullans movie The Magdalene Sis-ters(2002), and documentaries such as Sex in a Cold Climate(1998)Washing Away the Stain(1993)„do the consequences of the wit-SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press women and eliding male culpability. Perhaps anticipating this formof political resistance, the female witnesses had petitioned to increasethe age of consent to at least eighteen for the general population andtwenty-one for female employees, claiming that the current age of con-sent was related directly to increasing illegitimacy rates. The CriminalLaw Amendment Act diluted such suggested measures, and legislativeproscriptions did little to alleviate the underlying social and culturalprejudice. Because the nation-state effectively criminalized morality, in both the legislative response and societal disnalized single mothers and their children as well as the victims of rape,incest, and pedophilia; they were indiscriminately marked as aber-rant and deemed deserving of scorn and punishment. Irish society con-tinued to stigmatize single mothers and their illegitimate offspring formuch of the twentieth century, driving the lucky ones abroad in searchof new lives and condemning the most unfortunate to incarcerationand forced separation at home (Milotte 1997; Batts 1994).This too ispart of the Carrigan Reports legacy.The female witnesses most controversial goal, perhaps, was to under-mine the easy con”ation of viceŽ and sexual immoralityŽ that wasso unproblematically presented by their male colleagues. Speaking onbehalf of the Irish Women Citizens and Local Government AssoDr. Angela Russell and Ms. I. Dodd warned that prostitutionŽ accountedfor only 20% of the . . . immoralityŽ in contemporary Ireland.lishing a distinction between prostitution and extramarital sexual prac-tice and sexual abuse would rescue women from prosecution and im-prisonment and simultaneously rehabilitate the unmarried mother intosociety. These witnesses also sought to decriminalize juvenile prostitu-tion and provide opportunities for reform, education, and rehabilitationto so-called young offenders.Institutional provision, however, remained central to the womensproposals. Their attention to rehabilitation, education, and spiritual re-form on the one hand and alternative forms of institutional con“ne-ment on the other signals a transitional moment in sociological thinking:assumptions of late-nineteenth-century Victorian philanthropy weregiving way to emerging trends in professional social work (Luddy 2001,805…6; Luddy 1995a; Clear 1987; Finnegan 2001). Numerous witnesses,including Cruice, Gavan Duffy, Brady, Dodd, and Russell, called for theestablishment of separate voluntary institutions for unmarried mothersINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press controversies since the early 1980s: the Ann Lovett case, the Kerry ba-bies inquiry, and the various industrial schools scandals (Maguire 2001,3…35; Inglis 2003; Hug 1999; Raftery and OSullivan 1999).Another focus of the womens testimony concerned Irish societysintolerance of sexual immorality in general and unmarried mothers andtheir children in particular. Many witnesses suggested that an inhos-pitable social environment stigmatizing illegitimacy contributed dito prostitution, infanticide, and emigration among young women.M.J.Cruice, secretary of St. Patricks Guild, maintained that the majority ofunmarried mothers arriving in Dublin from the provinces sought to es-cape their shame and conceal their children.Horne and Stopford related this issue of secrecy to the underreporting of sexual crimesagainst women and children. Both witnesses argued that in their ex-perience young girls admitted to rape or assault only if and when theybecame pregnant.Representatives from Dublins Lock Hospital cor-roborated this testimony, describing the young womans reluctance todisclose the name of her betrayerŽ or to seek recourse through the re-cently passed Illegitimate Children (Af“liation Orders) Act.Carrigans“nal report echoes these recurring observations: it acknowledges theimpossibility of knowing the annual number of illegitimate births thatunmarried girls„in their distressful plight and shameŽ„sought to con-The report notes the number of unmarried Irish mothers sup-ported by various charitable societies in Ireland that were not includedin the Department of Local Government and Public Healths of“cialIt also documents information from Catholic rescue homesin Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and London caring for The report not only portrays the relation-ship between stigmatization and underreporting of sexual immoralitybut also reveals that incarceration and emigration were the acceptedsocietal responses to manifestations of embodied sexual practice.Political responses to the edited report thus easily sidestepped theunpleasant contradictions highlighted by the suppressed female testi-mony. A developing rhetoric of national identity formation, in particu-lar, the of“cial discourse of Irish motherhood, refused to acknowledgeand therefore ignored the maltreatment of unmarried mothers and children. By preventing public debate, the political response legitthe stigmatization of illegitimacy and contributed to the perpetuationof oppressive conditions directly and disproportionately impinging onSMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press Three speci“c aspects of the womens testimony demonstrate force-fully the states failure. Many witnesses emphasized the need to edu-cate young Irish women about human sexuality.Apparently graspingthe need to bridge their concerns with the committees political agenda,they argued that female ignorance about reproductive biology inillegitimacy rates, the incidences of sexually transmitted diseases, and awide range of related social ills. Many of the witnesses distinguished be-tween young women in Ireland and in Britain. According to Dr. AngelaRussell, representing the Irish Women Citizens and Local GovernmentAssociation, Irish girls were physically more immature than thoseof equal age abroad and temperamentally they were more trusting andLikewise, Mrs. J.M. Kettle, representing the Dublin CountyUnion, argued that Irish Girls were less sophisticated than Englishgirls.ŽDrs. Delia Moclair Horne and Dorothy Stopford Price, repre-senting the Irish Women Doctors Committee, were more forthright incalling for enhanced instruction, pointing to young Irish womens re-markableŽ ignorance about physical facts. Both doctors cited personalknowledge of thirteen-year-old girls who had recently become moth-Mrs. Margaret Gavin Duffy and Dr. Ita Brady, visitors to the LockHospital in Dublin, claimed that such ignorance appeared to make girlsreleased from industrial schools an easy prey to designing menŽ andsuggested a direct correlation between the industrial school system andthe prostitutes they visited in the Lock.They concluded that femaledoctors attending such girls schools should impart sexual education.The Carrigan Reports evasion of this testimony suppressed theseprofessional womens call for education, particularly for members ofsociety marginalized by poverty or institutionalization. Such conceal-ment occurred repeatedly in subsequent Irish discussions of sexualimmoralityŽ„in the Catholic hierarchys resistance to pre- and postnatalcare in debates surrounding the Mother and ChildŽ scheme (1951) and,more recently, in attempts to thwart the Stay SafeŽ program (1993).The reports suppression of female testimony reveals how church andstate worked to ensure that neither school nor dispensary nor even homewould provide the necessary education to combat ignorance abouthuman sexuality. Moreover, this cultivated ignorance not only reinfa stereotype of the pure Irish woman; it also enabled state leaders toimagine an ignorance that may not have been that profound. The lega-cies of these political choices resonate in a series of sociosexual IrishINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press among others, Fr. Brendan Smyth and Fr. Sean Fortune, the KilkennyIncest Inquiry, and the West of Ireland FarmerŽ [a.k.a. Joseph McCol-gan] case) can the signi“cance of suppressing the Carrigan Committeetestimony and report be fully appreciated.The precedent establishedbetween 1930 and 1935, which legitimized secrecy and silence as a re-sponse to child abuse and pedophilia, reverberates for twentieth- andtwenty-“rst-century survivors of these crimes throughout the nation.Carrigans report only once alluded explicitly to participation inthe proceedings by women and then only to representatives from theIrish Women Doctors Committee who challenged of“cial statistics onillegitimacy as failing to re”ect the actual condition of the country.ŽSuch an underrepresentation is especially egregious given that eigh-teen of the twenty-nine witnesses were women. Although the reportacknowledged that these witnesses represented a range of charitablesocial welfare organizations protecting women, children, and unmar-ried mothers, treating sexual disease, and reforming offenders, it failedto incorporate the expertise the women brought to the committeesdeliberations.The recent reemergence of the minutes of evidence andthe various organizations memoranda help to redress this historicalThe womens testimony diverged signi“cantly from the prosecu-torial and regulatory emphasis of ODuffy and the clerics. As practic-ing social workers and doctors, these women dealt with womens andchildrens medical, educational, and social welfare needs. In their testi-mony they suggested a systematic provision of care and emphasizedprevention rather than punishment. Pointing to the practical conse-quence attending legislative and judicial proscriptions, they advocateda more charitable social environment for the vulnerable in society.Although their testimony anticipated issues that were to burden so-cial welfare provision for much of the twentieth century, these womenwere silenced in the of“cial discourse of the state, which established afurther precedent in the area of social provision as church and statecountered expertise with resistance and failed thereby to respond tosocial need. SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press dum included summary particulars for thirty-four sexual offenses dur-ing the year 1930 to date; during his testimony he addressed each casemore fully with the bene“t of the actual case “les„seven involvinggirls under ten years of age.Despite graphic anecdotal and irrefutable statistical evidence sug-gesting widespread sexual crime in Free State Ireland, the Carrigan Re-port attempted to rein in this damaging portrait of Irish society. Thereport edits out ODuffys most speci“c charges and textually minitroubling comparisons suggesting, for example, that children of thepoorer classesŽ in the Free State are less protected than in Great Brit-Nevertheless, the report could not avoid reproducing ODuffysmajor contention, that there was an alarming amount of sexual crimeincreasing yearly, a feature of which was the large number of casesof criminal interference with girls and children from 16 years down-wards, including many cases of children under 10 years.ŽEspeciallytroubling for the politicians and civil servants who were to decide thefate of the report was ODuffys assessment that less than 15 percent ofsuch cases were prosecuted in any given year. He attributed this lowrate chie”y to peculiarities in the judicial process that required corrobo-ration of a single witness or mandated that a judge warn the jury ofdanger of convicting the accused on uncorroborated evidence.Ironically, the Carrigan Report thus demonstrated how prevailing ju-dicial processes operated to mark young women and children as ac-complices to a crime rather than as victims of an outrage.Yet the De-partment of Justice memorandum considered precisely this aspect ofthe report unbalanced. It is understood that many competent authori-ties have grave doubts as to the value of childrens evidence,Ž it noted.A child with a vivid imagination may actually live in his mind thesituation as he invented it and will be quite unshaken by severe cross-Would the issue of child sexual abuse have been handled differentlyby the civil servants in the Department of Justice and by the male leg-islators in the Dáil and Seanád if the Carrigan Report or ODuffys testi-mony had entered into public debate? The refusal to acknowledgabuse as a concern and the elision of that issue in the political and jour-nalistic arenas guaranteed its invisibility (McAvoy 1999, 261). Only afterthe deluge of revelations in the 1990s regarding contemporary childsexual abuse (e.g., the various clerical pedophilia scandals involving,INTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press their censure on visible manifestations of sexual immorality. But singu-larly focused as they were, they failed to contain compromising reali-ties. For example, in their comments regarding bad housing accom-modationŽ and the appaling the appaling manner in which members of famare crowded on each other,Ž both Fr. Fitzpatrick and Fr. Flanagan wereaware that incest contributed to increased numbers of unmarried ers and illegitimate children.But, as J.J. Lee concludes, the obses-sion with sex permitted a blind eye to be turned towards the social that dis“gured the face of IrelandŽ: on this occasion the clerics obses-sion with the visibility of sex de”ected attention from the plight of in-dividuals occluded by sexual immorality: the unmarried mother, the il-legitimate child, and victims of rape, incest, and pedophilia (1989, 159;see also Finnane 2001, 530). In its uncritical emphasis on clerical con-cerns, the Carrigan Report replicates this unwillingness to consider thesocial conditions fostering incest and illegitimacy, including poverty, theabsence of birth control, and the need for education regarding sexuality and legal entitlements.In contrast to the clerics focus on extramarital sexual practice, Gen-eral ODuffy, commissioner of the Garda Síochána (the states policeforce), focused his testimony on prosecutions for sexual offenses,addressing the modern nations need to legislate against immorality,especially rape, incest, and pedophilia.ODuffy in”uenced the shape of the committees “nal report and theeventual legislation.Prior to his appearance he submitted a statisticalsurvey documenting sexual crimes between 1924 and 1930, including abreakdown by year for each county, capturing the De“lement, CarnalKnowledge, or RapeŽ of girls under ten, between ten and thirteen, be-tween thirteen and sixteen, between sixteen and eighteen, and over eigh-teen. This survey similarly details Indecent Assault on Girls,Ž Incest,ŽSodomy,Ž Indecent Assault on Boys regardless of Age,Ž and Besti-ality.ŽFor each offense it charts the numbers of prosecutions and ul-timate convictions. ODuffy also submitted a twenty-eight-page analy-sis of these statistics in which he provided signi“cant detail about thenature and quantity of sexual crime in Ireland. Like Devane, he urgedthe newly independent state to legislate against immorality accordingto Irish Catholic principles: The present state of the law is disgracefulin a Christian country, and the whole question of morality crimes be now dealt with from an Irish point of view.ŽODuffys memoran-SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press mittee. He articulated critical concerns that would remain prominentin sociological debates for decades, for example, the dual standard ofmorality accepted in this country, as in perhaps no other,where thewoman is always hounded down and the man dealt with leniently.Ž De-vane was especially alert to the implicit hypocrisy of the well-meaningin Free State society, suggesting that the citizen too often appearedinterested in the welfare of any others child or sister . . . rather thanones own.Ž Most devastating, perhaps, he surmised that an exclusivelymale point of view in the administration as well as legislationŽ elidedany adequate appreciation of female psychology in matters involvingmorality.ŽThe Carrigan Report largely ignores Devanes signi“cant challenges.Instead, it disproportionately privileges those elements of the clericstestimony that were loudly echoed by his fellow priests, in particular, aseeming obsession with the dangers associated with popular amuse-ments, especially the dance hall. In contrast to Devanes sociologicalobservations, Fathers Fitzpatrick, Lee, Flanagan, Roughneen, and Gildeareported that they waged war against moral degeneration in their re-spective parishes. Such anecdotes conjure a level of authenticity morein tune with the committees predilections: boys and girls lay[ing] bythe roadsides near Limerick,Ž the dangers arising from the return late at night of young boys and girls from dance halls,Ž and 2 casesof domestic servants„both under 20 years of age„who had been se-Lobbying to eradicate sexual immoralityŽ at its point of origin,these clerics attributed the recent rise in illegitimacy almost entirely tothe viceŽ imported by popular entertainments. This con”ation of viceand immorality was not necessarily exclusive to the Catholic Church;indeed, the committees very name„Committee on the Criminal LawAmendment Acts (1880…85) and Juvenile Prostitution„and the of“cialreport of the same title similarly elide immorality and juvenile pros-titution. In effect, then, such discourse transformed every unmarriedmother into a potential prostitute. Devane also joined his colleagues inidentifying contemporary sources of immoralityŽ: the loss of parentalcontrol, the perversions of modern cinema, the illicit book, of supervision and the licensing of dance halls, and the opportunitiesafforded by the misuse of motor cars.ŽRather than directly confront the social consequences attending ex-tramarital sexual practice or sexual abuse, clerical witnesses focusedINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press general statementŽ summarizing witness testimony, was forwardedto the minister for justice. The Department of Justice immediately iden-ti“ed the impact of withholding the various witnesses memorandaand the committees of“cial minutes of meetings: The Committee ex-plains that it was considered necessary to take evidence in private andwhile dif“culty would probably have been encountered if any othercourse had been adopted, the fact remains that the reader of the reportis presented with the Committees conclusions without having accessto the evidence on which those conclusions were based. In these cir-cumstances, it is not easy to assess the value of the Report.Žlikely that the civil servants who authored the Department of Justicescritical evaluation ever had access to the evidence,Ž just as it is certainthat the politicians who constituted Geoghegans informal committeeThe witness testimony was never discussed in public either: at its “rstmeeting the committee decided to withhold evidence from the press.The following analysis, initially focusing on the clerical witnesses andGen. Eoin ODuffy, resituates the signi“cance of their testimony in lightof my argument that the church-state formulation of sexual immoralitybecame an enabling discursive distortion. The political responses tothese witnesses„“rst the report and then the legislation„foregroundhow perceptions of sexual practice (in the case of the clerics) and the re-ality of sexual abuse (in ODuffys testimony) were accommodated andtherefore contained by the discourse of sexual immorality. This accom-modation, I argue, buttressed even as it helped to constitute Irelandsnational imaginary.Of the twenty-nine witnesses, six were members of the Catholicclergy. The most prominent was Rev. R.S. Devane, S.J., author of socio-logical writings on illegitimacy, the unmarried mother, and (De-vane 1924a, 1924b, 1928, 1931a, 1931b).For much of the 1920s Devaneand like-minded social thinkers heralded the Free States opportunityto “x the legal standard of morality in true consonance with the idealsset before them by the teaching of the Catholic ChurchŽ (Devane 1924a,58; see also Glynn 1921, 461…67; MacInerney 1921, 140…56; MacIn-erney 1922, 246…61; An SagartŽ 1922, 145…53). In pointing to underly-ing problems determining immoralityŽ in the Free State, Devane wasunique among his religious brethren who appeared before the com-SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press watered-down version of what the Carrigan Report initially proposedbut one that substantially incorporated the hierarchys concerns. Thedraft headsŽ proposed that the age of consent would be seventeen,not eighteen, and that unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl between “f-teen and seventeen would remain a misdemeanor, not a felony, as wouldattempted unlawful carnal knowledge with a girl under the age of “f-teen. The committee resisted the reports suggestion both that the of-fense of solicitation be rede“ned and made applicable to men as wellas women and that whipping be reinstated and sex offenders namesbe published.At the meeting of the Executive Council on 17 November 1933 deValera and his cabinet accepted all but two of the informal committeessuggestions for what became the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, 1934.First, after extended deliberations, the cabinet replaced the general pro-hibition that allowed for exceptional circumstancesŽ based on reli-gious conviction or medical need with an absolute ban on the sale orimportation of contraceptive appliances and drugs.net excised the heads pertaining to licensing of dance halls and, afterminor revisions, created the separate Dance Halls Bill, 1934.These were considered and approved at the Executive Council meeting inJune 1934, followed by second stageŽ and committee stageŽ hearings inboth the Dáil and the Seanád. Throughout, the government maintainedthe secret and closed nature of deliberations leading to both pieces ofIn the end, both the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935)and the Dance Hall Act (1935) passed into law without any substantivedebate or public participation.RIESTSANDThe traditional history of the Carrigan Report and the CriminalLaw Amendment Act only partially captures the full signi“cance of thesemoments in the early Free State period. Archival material re1999, speci“cally, the minutes of evidence and the various memorandasubmitted by organizations and individuals presenting testimony, per-mit excised segments of this story to be reinserted.Public access tothis material is signi“cant for a number of reasons but especially be-cause in August 1931 only Carrigans “nal report, with its eight-pageINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press and Rev. M.J. Brown, agreed in large part with the Department of Jus-tices negative estimation of the report as too drastic, lacking in judg-ment, and unworkable.ŽThey recommended that the report form thebasis of new legislation, with Canavan speci“cally calling for a bill re-”ecting the committees “ndings to be passed intdiscussion in the Dáil.ŽNeither priest accepted the departments criti-cisms of Carrigans proposals to raise the age of consent as merely puni-tiveŽ and vindictive,Ž arguing instead that the object of this law is cer-tainly [a] deterrent.ŽCanavan maintained that the Government shouldseek, in the “rst place, to stop the earths, to remove, as far as possible,the occasions of offenceŽ; in particular, he asserted the need for rig-orous controlŽ of dance halls and motor cars used for immoral ends.Whereas Brown recognized the potential bene“t of shocking the FreeState population into greater awareness through public debate, in theend he joined his fellow cleric in advising against publication, admittingthat the reports “ndings will rejoice our enemies.ŽGeoghegans negotiations with members of the hierarchy requireddelicate handling, especially as he navigated between the governmentssecular and religious loyalties. In a meeting with Dr. David Keane,bishop of Limerick, and the bishops of Ossory and Thasos on 1 Decem-ber 1932, Geoghegan assured the bishops that he would like to see aBill go through which would bring the law into accord with the bestCatholic practice and teaching.ŽHowever, when the delegation of bish-ops sought greater in”uence over the informalŽ committee of Dáil depu-ties, Geoghegan informed Keane that it could best do its work privatelyand to avoid lobbying there should not be any announcement of namesfor the present.ŽThe minister did solicit a memorandum representingthe hierarchys views. Keanes reply amounted to a wish list of concernsthe Catholic Church sought to have addressed in any legislation.Spe-ci“cally, the hierarchy gave priority to four issues: a general prohibitionon the sale and importation of contraceptive appliances, raising the ageof consent to eighteen, effective licensing of public dance halls, and leg-islation dealing with moral abuse in motor cars.The informal committee met eight times between December 1932and May 1933, while, with the cabinets consent, Geoghegan organizedpreparation of legislation to amend the criminal law.the level of secrecy that members of the Dáil were not privy to thecommittee membership.Geoghegan and his cohort “nally arrived at aSMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press ing aspects of the contraception debate before the public eye.quently, although the Carrigan Report as well as a fourteen-page De-partment of Justice memorandum were shared with members of theExecutive Council on 2 December 1931, no action was taken.The memo-randum called into question the Carrigan Committees judicialŽ expe-rience, indeed its impartiality.Moreover, the Department of Justicesuggested that the witnesses testimony presented a narrowly de“nedand publicly endorsed version of the facts and that these were singu-larly consistent with Catholic teachings on morality.It characterizedthe report as overly anxious to increase prosecutions and convictionsfor sexual immorality but as insuf“ciently concerned with measuresto prevent crime. The memorandum concluded by stressing the unde-sirability of making its “ndings public: The obvious conclusion to bedrawn is that the ordinary feelings of decency and the in”uence of re-ligion have failed in this country and that the only remedy is by way ofpolice action. It is clearly undesirable that such a view of conditions inthe Saorstat should be given wide circulation.ŽAlmost immediately,therefore, the Carrigan Report became a de facto censored governmentdocument.February 1932 witnessed a general election and the “rst democraticchange of political power in the history of the Free State. Feelings ofanimosity and suspicion ran high.The Eucharistic Congress later thatyear probably eased partisan political tensions, for by the ensuing au-tumn, when the newly appointed minister for justice, James Geoghegan,again took up the issues raised by the Carrigan Report, political dis-cord had dissipated. At the 27 October meeting of the Executive Coun-cil, Eamon de Valera, leader of Fianna Fáil, and his cabinet decided toestablish a committee consisting of representatives of all partiesŽ toconsider on a strictly con“dentialŽ basis what course to follow in re-sponse to the Carrigan Report.There ensued a series of communica-tions between Geoghegan and Cosgrave, now leader of the opposition,to ensure that the eight-member committee be so representative as tobe likely to fully criticize the report . . . , with a view to avoiding as faras possible public discussion of a necessarily unsavoury nature.ŽTheprocess of closed-door deliberations, however, had only begun.Geoghegan sought counsel from two leading members of the Catho-licclergy and subsequently met a delegation representing the StandingCommittee of the Catholic hierarchy. Both clerics, Rev. J. Canavan, S.J.,INTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press William T. Cosgrave, president of the Executive Council, to de”ectpressure for legislation to ban contraceptives and to close theloophole in the Censorship of Publications Act (1929),which outlawedthe advertisement of contraceptives while not legally proscribing theirimportation or sale.The committees terms of reference were ambigu-ous; it sought recommendations to amend the 1880 and 1885 govern-ing statutes as well as legislative proposals to dealŽ with the problemof juvenile prostitutionŽ (Report1931, 3). William Carrigan, K.C., was ap-pointed chairman, and his name remains indelibly linked with mittee and its highly contentious report.On 20 August 1931, after seventeen sittings, the Carrigan Commit-tee submitted its “nal report to the minister for justice (Report 1931,43…44). The report recommended a combination of enlightened socialreforms together with a series of punitive legislative proposals, forexample, raising the age of consent to eighteen, abolishing the rea-sonable beliefŽ clause allowing male defendants to argue that they hadreason to believe their female partner was old enough to give informedconsent, extending to twelve months the period within which a pros-ecution could be initiated, revising judicial practice requiring corrobo-ration of a young persons testimony, allowing for courts to hear casesin camera, offering suggestions for the licensing of dance halls, and in-stigating a general prohibition on the sale of contraceptives, togetherwith recommendations for a series of strict “nes and custodial sentfor procurement, solicitation, and public indecency. Most controversially,the report recommended the reintroduction of ”ogging as punishmentfor those convicted of sexual crimes against young people and the black-listing of those found guilty of public indecency (Report1931, 40…41).AsMark Finnane argues, the reports “ndings proved profoundly unset-tling for the political and clerical elites governing Irish society (2001,525). They pointed to a general moral degeneration, evident both in ris-ing illegitimacy rates and in unassailable proof of sexual crimes againstvery young women and children. Such “ndings contradicted the pre-vailing language of national identity formation, which emphasized Ca-tholicism, moral purity, and rural ideals.The reception of the Carrigan Report reveals much about howpolitical decision making established a new Free State moral order. InAugust 1931, as Cumann na nGaedheal faced a looming general election,Cosgrave undoubtedly wanted to avoid placing the potentially polariz-SMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press and unaware of their civic and legal rights. I demonstrate how the statesreliance on a discourse of sexual immorality narrowly focused on il-legitimacy stigmatized young women even as it exculpated their malepartners. Likewise, I underscore how political discourses legitimizedstate practices of institutionalizing many of its most vulnerable citi-zens in mother and baby homes, Magdalen asylums, and industrial andreformatory schools. Does the womens testimony represent a striking instance of poten-tial dissent from hegemonic practice or, as seems more likely, a respby women themselves unable to imagine an alternative to the regula-tion, prosecution, and incarceration of social behavior deemed aber-rant by both church and state? The female witnesses too offered an in-stitutional response to seemingly transgressive sexuality, arguing thatunmarried mothers be con“ned to state-funded mother and baby and juvenile prostitutes to religious-run Magdalen asylums. Operatingas they were within a prescribed social and political system, however,the female witnesses very participation obliquely contests the con-tainment culture that the Carrigan Report effects. In the “nal analysis,nobody„not a single committee member or witness, not a single pcian or member of the judiciary„argued against or offered an alterna-tive to institutionalization as the solution to sexual immorality. Simi-larly, nobody suggested that the problem of sexual abuse and pedophiliashould take precedence over the problemŽ of the unmarried mother.In the absence of any overt contestation, the report and subsequent leg-islation licensed the states abstract, secretive, and punitive responseto sexual immorality. The origins of Irelands containment culture, inshort, are rooted in the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amend-ment Act of 1935.ISTORYWhat was the Carrigan Committee, what did its report recom-mend, and how did it in”uence the Criminal Law Amendment Act?James Fitzgerald Kenney, minister for justice in the Cumann na nGaed-heal government, appointed the committee on 17 June 1930 (Reportof the Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts 1931, 3).torians generally consider the appointment a deliberate attempt byINTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press Retelling the history of the Carrigan Report and the Criminal LawAmendment Act exposes the states willing abdication of responsibilityfor matters of sexuality and sexual education to the Catholic Church andchallenges the general avoidance of sociosexual issues in favor of thepolitical aspects of church-state relations in much Irish historiography(Whyte 1980, 24…61; Keogh 1986, 163…66, 205…8; Keogh 1995, 71…73;Lee 1989, 157…60). Recent scholarship allows for a fuller understand-ing based on the release in 1991 of the Department of Justices of“cial“les relating to the Carrigan Committee (Finnane 2001; Kennedy 2000).More recently still, in 1999 the National Archives made available theminutes of meetings and the “les relating to persons and organizationsgiving evidence before the committee.This introduction synthesizes this new archival material. it argues that the Carrigan Reports political reception„“rst the sup-pression of the report, then the legislative response„established aprecedent for church-state management of sociosexual controversies,proscribing visible manifestations of sexual immoralityŽ while failingto address, or choosing to ignore, the social realities attending them.This political response reveals how the discourse of sexual immoralitymarginalized the real-life sexual practice that resulted in single moth-erhood and illegitimacy while it simultaneously elided the pervasivereality of rape, incest, and pedophilia. Both the report and the ensu-legislation demonstrate a signi“cant discursive distortion, one thatwould enable Irelands church-state partnership effectively to crimi-nalize sexual relations outside of marriage and thereby inscribe moralpurity into the project of national identity formation. Thus, representa-tions of sexual immorality buttressed this collusive relationship. over, in concealing actual crimes against women and children, the dis-cursive distortion neatly collapsed sexual abuse into the disembodieddiscourse of sexual immorality. But by suppressing the compromisingrealities of sexual abuse within this broader discourse, the politics ofabstraction helped to constitute a “ction of Irish cultural purity on wthe national imaginary depended.Finally, this introduction explores the discursive claims of the Carri-gan Report and thereby reveals the distortions inherent instability. Byfocusing, in part, on women who presented testimony before the com-mittee, I reveal how Irelands political hegemony ensured that youngwomen would remain uneducated regarding their reproductive biologySMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press of post…civil war divisiveness. Finally, it helped to engineer widespreadpublic consent by way of the legislative agenda, even while the operativefunctions of the institutional response to sexual practice were shroudedin secrecy. An examination of the Carrigan Report and its political recep-tion in this context underscores how the discourse of sexual immoralityenabled, even as it was perceived to threaten, postindependent Irelandsnativist national imaginary.Recent feminist historiography has considered how the projectof national identity formation in the decades following independencemobilized Catholic notions of sexual morality in ways that were particu-larly oppressive for Irish women.Against the backdrop of partitionand fueled by the desire to create a new imagined community withinthe boundaries of the twenty-six-county state,Ž church and state fash-ioned a seamlessly homogeneous society (Gray and Ryan 1998, 126).Working in unison, these two institutions closed off internal chal-lenges and contradictions even as they represented society as pure anduntainted by external corruption (Clear 2000; OCallaghan 2002; Daly1995). In volume 4 of the , Marjorie Howes illu-minates this alliance, arguing that one method of de“ning and assert-ing the national character that enjoyed wide popular support, accordedwith the Free States now legendary social and economic conservatismand marked a clearly visible difference between Ireland and Englandwas the formal and informal enforcement of Catholic social teachings,particularly in the area of sexual moralityŽ (2002, 923…24). Catholicmorality became at once a hallmark of Irish identity, differentiating thenational community from its near neighbors, and an emblem of the un-contested political territory, enabling politicians to eschew party af“li-ation and seek unanimity through religious conformity.Maryann Vali-ulus outlines the consequences of this strategic allegiance of churchand state, arguing that political and ecclesiastical leaders in the IrishFree State constructed an identity for Irish women solely in domesticterms„women were mothers, women were wivesŽ (1995, 169).Thisidealization and objecti“cation required a series of legislative vehicleswith which to constrain women so that they might visibly conform tothe prescribed national paradigm (McAvoy 1999; Luddy 2001). Theprocess also necessitated a series of punishments to negate and ren-der invisible those women unlucky enough to countermand socialconventions.INTRODUCTION Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press The historically powerful Catholic Church and the ”edgling Irish State cooperated increasingly throughout the 1920s as the self-appointedguardians of the nations moral climate. Already by 1925 this partner-ship had provoked legislation establishing censorship of “lms and pro-scribing divorce, characteristic hallmarks of the socially repressive FreeState society. These initiatives were followed by a series of of“cial in-vestigations, for example, the Inquiry Regarding Venereal Disease (1926),the Committee on Evil Literature (1927), and the Commission on theRelief of the Sick and Destitute Poor Including the Insane Poor (1928).Such inquiries typically generated lengthy reports that resulted in legis-lation addressing social and moral issues, including the Censorship ofPublications Act (1929), the Illegitimate Children (Af“liation Orders)Act (1930), the Legitimacy Act (1931), the Registration of MaternityHomes Act (1934), and the Dance Halls Act (1935). This chapter exam-ines the historical contexts informing one “nal church-state initiativefrom the early Free State years, the Committee on the Criminal LawAmendment Acts (1880…85) and Juvenile Prostitution (hereafter re-ferred to as the Carrigan Committee), its ensuing report, and the subse-quent Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935). The Carrigan Report, I pro-pose, was a formative moment in establishing an of“cial state attitudetoward sexual immoralityŽ and the subsequent legislation in authoriz-ing the nations containment culture.In its concrete form Irelands architecture of containment encom-passed an array of interdependent institutions: industrial and reforma-tory schools, mother and baby homes, adoption agencies, and Magasylums, among others. In its more abstract form this architecture com-prised both the legislation that inscribed these issues and the numer-ous of“cial and public discourses that resisted admitting to the existand function of their af“liated institutions (Smith 1997, 2001). In arriv-ing at a hegemonic discourse that responded to perceived sexual im-morality, the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Actsanitized state policy with respect to institutional provision. They dis-embodied sexual practice by obscuring social realities, especially ille-gitimacy, in discursive abstractions. And they concealed sexual crime,especially rape, infanticide, and abuse, while simultaneously sexualiz-ing the women and children unfortunate enough to fall victim to so-cietys moral proscriptions.Moreover, this of“cial discourse helped toconstruct an illusion of political nonpartisanship against the backdropSMAGDALENLAUNDRIES Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press Introduction The Politics of Sexual KnowledgeThe Origins of Irelands Containment Cultureand 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 Gaelriting in the same year the Irish Free State was founded,James F. Cassidy, himself a Catholic priest, captured the inherent contra-ons informing contemporary Irish attitudes toward womens virtuelined the rami“cations for those women who violated the so-cial and moral ideal. Branded by the public as simultaneously a motherand a criminal, a family member and an outcast, the unmarried motherfaced shame, betrayal, and exile. With little or no social welfare systemto fall back on, her choices were limited to entering the county home,begging on the streets, or possibly resorting to prostitution. Cassidysscenario carefully avoided the unmarried mothers male partner, fatherto her illegitimate child. Similarly, he ignored the social powerbrokers„and state„that facilitated these communal responses. Smith00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press Copyright © 2007 by University of Notre DameNotre Dame, Indiana 46556www.undpress.nd.eduAll Rights ReservedDesigned by Wendy McMillenSet in 10.3/13.6 Visage by Four Star BooksPrinted on 60# Williamsburg Recycled Paper by Versa PressLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataSmith, James M., 1966…Irelands Magdalen Laundries and the nations architecture of containment /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„History3. Church work with prostitutes„CatholicChurch.4. Unmarried mothers„Institutional care„Ireland„History.5. Reformatories for women„Ireland„History.I. Title.HV1448.I73S652007362.83'9„dc222007025510This book is printed on recycled paper. Smith000.FM 7/12/07 1:58 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press AGDALENAUNDRIESANDTHENATIONARCHITECTUREOF CONTAINMENTJAMES M.SMITHUniversity of Notre Dame PressNotre Dame, Indiana Smith000.FM 7/12/07 1:58 © 2007 University of Notre Dame Press