Ena Ronayne

On this day in 1996, the last Irish Magdalene Laundry closed its slave labour prison doors. Originally called the Gloucester Street Laundry, located on Sean MacDermott Street it was owned and exploited by the nuns of the ironically titled "Sisters of Our Lady of Charity". When it closed it was home to 40 inmates, its average capacity during its heyday was 150 women working and living there. A little-known fact is that the first laundry for "fallen women" was actually founded by the Protestant Church of Ireland in 1765. However it didn't take long for the Catholic church to combine power and penitence with profit, and they created a veritable gulag network for incarcerating and torturing vulnerable or nonconformist girls and women. Over 30,000 souls suffered in these institutions in Ireland. In 1993 land owned in Drumcondra by the aforementioned Sisters of Our Lady of Charity was bought by a property developer. Whilst it was being redeveloped the bodies of 155 women were uncovered in a mass grave. Of these victims, only 133 were identified by name in an exhumation license granted to the Sisters. And of those only 75 had a death certificate. These girls and women, and whatever babies they produced, didn't matter. They had no intrinsic value to the nuns, priests, and bishops beyond the profit they could make by their sweat and the sale of their children. Magdalene Laundries are a warning from Irish history. When you grant blind obedience and immune status to an organisation, whether it be religious, political, or economic, that power will be exploited and those most powerless will suffer most.