Fact-checking yet another film about Ireland’s merciless nuns

James Bradshaw

November 04, 2024 16 Reactions

Political fiction 

In recent days, there has been some commentary about the fact that the Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry in New Ross did not even exist in 1985, having closed in 1967.

This is indicative of the complete ahistoricity of the film. The Small Things like These novel received the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2022. This film is certainly political, and certainly fiction.

“I think when people call this a historical drama it seems bizarre,” Murphy recently said, in a revealing comment. “But it really does feel like another country.”

Indeed, the film does depict another country - it is not remotely close to Ireland as it really was in the 1980s or at any point before that either.

Compared with extensive official reports into what occurred within Magdalene Laundries and other institutions, the film is revealed for the malicious propaganda it is.

At the heart of the narrative is the protagonist Bill’s gradual realisation of what is going on within the nearby facility.

Early on, he sees a young girl being physically dragged towards the door of the institution. After a drawn-out struggle with her mother, a nun emerges to give the final push.

When Bill first encounters some of the girls close up, it appears as if they have lost all contact with society. A terrified youngster immediately thrusts herself upon him and begs for assistance in making her escape.

Events soon grow more sinister with the discovery of a young pregnant girl locked inside a fuel shed at night.

All of this paints a picture of the Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry - and by extension all similar institutions in 20th century Ireland - as a place where physical and emotional abuse were common, and the moral equivalent of a concentration camp.

The reality is very much different. In 2013, an Inter-Departmental Committee of the Irish government published their report on the Irish state’s involvement with the Magdalene Laundries, which had seen 10,000 women passing through their doors since 1922.

What the report (published, it must be remembered, by a socially liberal government which closed the Embassy to the Vatican, legalised abortion and introduced same-sex marriage) outlined in no way resembles the story depicted in this film.

“A large majority of the women who shared their stories with the Committee said that they had neither experienced nor seen other girls or women suffer physical abuse in the Magdalen Laundries,” the authors wrote.

Family pressure on women who had become pregnant was certainly immense in that era.

What happened in Ireland and elsewhere as Victorian morality was imposed from the 19th century onwards is not defensible, and stemmed mainly from the refusal of people to treat their own family members with kindness. Institutions like the Magdalene Laundries came into being primarily because of this refusal.

Homes, not prisons 

Yet the deliberate analogy with prison life is untenable. Almost one in four women who were in Magdalene Laundries (23 percent) were recorded as having “left” or “left at own request.” The number recorded as having departed in this way was more than ten times greater than the number recorded as having run away.

In the first four decades after the New Ross laundry was set up to be a refuge for women in 1860, 22 percent of residents are reported as having “entered of own accord” while 39% are reported to have “left at own request.”

Laundries like the Good Shepherd did not make for desirable homes, but they were at least somewhere pregnant women and other vulnerable women could go when the family home was no longer hospitable.

Money is at the heart of the political message of Small Things like These. When Bill accidentally finds the girl in the coal shed, he is promptly offered hush money by the hideous Mother Superior (played by Emily Watson), who appears to be accustomed to holding large wads of notes.

When it becomes public knowledge that Bill has gently questioned the religious power within the town, a female friend warns him that “those nuns have a finger in every pie.”

In this telling, the nuns are presented as wealthy capitalists, profiting from the labour of the proletariat.

Here again, the Magdalene report expressly contradicts this completely. The 2013 report stated that “the Magdalen Laundries were operated on a subsistence or close to break-even basis rather than on a commercial or highly profitable basis.”

The Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was published almost a decade later, when perceptions of malevolence on the part of religious sisters had grown steadily.

On the topic of money, these authors also stated they had “not seen any evidence that the religious orders who ran the mother and baby homes made a profit from so doing.”

Yet the factual misrepresentations pale in comparison with how the nuns are depicted on screen.

Usually, even a cast of villains is allowed one redeeming character, if only to show that human goodness can exist in all groups.

A habit of villainy

Not here. None of the religious sisters are shown displaying anything except cruelty.

The Mother Superior is monstrously indifferent to human suffering, immediately seeking to pay off Bill and hinting that she could damage his daughters’ educational prospects if he causes trouble.

These nuns are utterly devoid of humanity. Significantly, they are also devoid of femininity.

When speaking to Bill, the Mother Superior tauntingly expresses sympathy that he only has daughters, but no sons.

Generations of Irish women have been taught by nuns, and it is common for even irreligious women to express their admiration for the strong female role models they knew in their formative years. Of all the lines put into characters’ mouths, this line from the Mother Superior is surely the worst.

Both the Magdalene and Mother and Baby Homes reports were savaged after their publication, on the unstated grounds that they were not harsh enough in their indictments of the Church.

This has created a deeply sinister dynamic within Ireland which Cillian Murphy exemplified when he said his film was “easier to absorb than an academic report, or a political report.”

A large portion of the Irish population has learned about the recent history of Irish Catholicism through films such as the 2002 drama, The Magdalene Sisters, in which sadistic nuns abused and brutalised women.

Many have come to believe without question that all of these cinematic events took place in real life and that Catholic Ireland was uniquely horrible.

When the Mother and Baby Home report of 2021 contradicted many such beliefs (by stating that such institutions existed elsewhere, that there “is no evidence that women were forced to enter…by the Church or State authorities,” that there is “no evidence of the sort of gross abuse that occurred in industrial schools,” that there is “no evidence that the Catholic hierarchy played a role in the day-to-day running” of such institutions, etc) it generated genuine anger from people who had wanted to read about how bad Ireland was before it discarded faith and became joyously liberated.

Fiction has become fact, sometimes under the rhetorical guise of “lived experience,” presented as being a more appropriate frame of reference than cold, empathy-free facts.

A vicious cycle now exists. Ever-more pernicious caricatures of the Church’s role bring with them new demands for further historic investigations.

The ensuing report never satisfies the demand for a simple narrative in which evil men in cassocks and even more evil women in habits contaminated Irish society.

The gross distortion of Ireland’s past is now a major barrier to the re-evangelisation of the country, and this is why the Irish Church desperately needs to focus more attention on telling its own story through the active promotion of Irish Catholic history. 

Confronting dark truths 

Small Things like These deserves harsh criticism, but it contains much truth about the central topic at hand.

As the Mother and Baby Home report made clear, Catholic Ireland sent a higher proportion of unmarried mothers into these institutions than perhaps any country on earth. Why was this?

Even though abuse was rare, these places were mostly loveless, and the “illegitimate” children who were born in them were endangered by the abnormally high mortality rates within their walls. The mortality rates were public knowledge at the time, and yet were ignored by society’s leaders, including those who wore clerical garb.

Context is of course needed. Contrary to the opinions of many modern Irish progressives, there is nothing remotely unusual about there being a stigma against out-of-wedlock births.

Gradually evolving human societies have long come to recognise the benefits to children of being born to two parents who have made a public commitment to one another.

Around 85 percent of the world’s babies are born to married couples - it is the post-Christian West which is the aberration - and both traditionally religious societies and irreligious societies like China continue to promote family norms by expressing stern disapproval of those few unfortunates who are caught violating them.

Sadly, this is mostly done by publicly shaming women, and letting the transgressions of men go unchecked. This was certainly the case in Ireland.

And for what good? Post-independence Ireland was already a very religious society where the vast majority of children were born to married parents who stayed together until death.

There was no need for the escalation of harsh puritanism: so harsh that it has made the public expression of even mildly socially conservative views difficult in today’s environment, thereby copper-fastening the stranglehold which mindless social liberalism now enjoys.

For all its distortions, there is enough in Small Things like These to make the viewer think deeply about how they would have acted.

In one of his more perceptive comments about the film, the Academy Award winning lead described his character as a “Christian man trying to act Christian in a dysfunctional Christian society.”

Murphy’s character is indeed a hero and deserves the admiration of the audience.

His ordinary nobility is shown in his love for his family and care for his employees. His extraordinary nobility is demonstrated by his compassion for all of the town’s residents, including the impoverished child of the local drunk, and the girls in the laundry who seek his help.

Bill’s materialistic wife advises him to look away - saying that the laundry’s inhabitants are “not our girls” - but his code of ethics is not particularist but universal: “Do unto others…”

Repeatedly, the coal supplier is shown washing his hands in his home while reflecting on the events around him, but he rejects the example of Pilate. When a suffering outcast appears before him, he knows he must help her, social consequences be damned.

Ireland did not have enough men like him then; there are never enough men like him in any era.  

Does the reviewer take too optimistic a view of the Catholic Church in 20th century Ireland?  

James Bradshaw writes from Ireland on topics including politics, history, culture, film and literature.

Image credit:  'Small Things like These' website