Starring Geraldine McEwan, Annie-Marie Duff, Dorothy Dufffy, Eileen Walsh, Nora-Jane Noone

When I was a child there was a certain street in our small town at the end of which stood a bleak, forbidding institution we knew as the Home for Wayward Girls. Its high stone walls were topped with broken glass that glittered evilly in the sun. We kids knew that if we were bad, we would be sent there, (at least we girls, we couldn’t imagine what would happen to the boys – there was no similar facility for boys that we knew about). On our way to tadpoling at our favourite creek our excited chatter would die away until we had passed the long blind wall hiding its punitive horrors. No matter that we never saw or heard anything of what went on inside. As far as we were concerned the place reeked of Bad Things. Bad Girls festered there, girls who had done unimaginable things that deserved to be punished with cruelty and deprivation. Worse, we suspected that we too were capable of such things by our very nature. Hence the need to be careful in case our innate badness somehow seeped out on its own, or was subtly enhanced by the Badness behind the walls. It was impossible to imagine a source of more shame. A Catholic schooling reinforced our distrust and loathing of our true inner (female) natures.

In much the same way the Magdalene Asylums, also called the Magdalen Laundries, were regarded by the general populace from the time they were set up in Ireland in the 19th century as a refuge for ‘fallen women’. By the 1960s they were being run by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy to house girls who had shamed their families with an unwed pregnancy or other behaviour deemed sinful or wayward. The girls were put to work without pay or respite in a laundry business run by the nuns. In this film we follow the stories of four girls who are institutionalised in a Magdalene Home at that time.

The movie begins with Margaret (Annie-Marie Duff). A provincial Irish wedding, a man’s voice is singing an Irish folksong “”Green grows the lily…oh!” with such passion that we can see its effects sparking in the eyes and bodies of the wedding guests. Ironically, or perhaps aptly, as it turns out, it‘s a priest singing. When he relentlessly pushes for the climax with a furious beating of his bodhrán drum it ignites the blood of young Kevin in the audience, who grabs his cousin Margaret and in an upstairs room, her screams drowned out by the priest’s music, he rapes her.

Kevin and Margaret return to the party where she shakily tells a friend and soon, though the music does not stop, the tale is spread among the guests. Kevin receives a reprimand, but early the next morning sees Margaret driven off without ceremony or farewells to the Magdalene Home to spare her family the disgrace of this stain on her character. Her bewildered younger brother watches her leave from an upstairs window.

At St Attracta’s Orphanage Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) becomes a candidate for the Magdalene Home because her extraordinary beauty is deemed a probable future temptation for local boys. Another candidate, Rose (Dorothy Duffy), sits in hospital with shining eyes cradling her new baby. After the priest has convinced her that a bastard child would have a better life if she signs it over for adoption, she changes her mind. Her stony-faced mother leaves without a word while her father silently blocks her from running tearfully after her infant.

The three, Margaret, Bernadette and Rose arrive at the Magdalene Home together, each carrying their belongings in a box as they follow a silent nun down cloisters where girls are mopping and scrubbing the floor. The only sounds are the nun’s beads clicking and their feet on the tiles as they are taken to meet Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan). Throughout the introductory lecture about atoning for their sins with a life of work and prayer and suffering, Sister Bridget never stops counting money. The lecture, we see, is automatic. The money is what matters to her. Rose is renamed Patricia as “there is already a Rose”, while Bernadette is branded a little temptress, and Margaret is told she is no longer wanted by her parents. Stripped of their freedom, clothes, possessions, their families, their future, even their identity, the institution will inevitably take their will and their individuality if they are not strong enough.

Throughout the horrors that follow, the girls learn that disobedience is punished brutally and neither friendships nor speaking to anyone outside are permitted. They undergo sexual humiliation at the hands of jovial nuns who appear to have no idea of the evil they are unconsciously perpetrating. Various escape attempts fail. The dubious bribe of a delivery-van boy turns to bitter disappointment. On discovering that the simple-minded Crispina (Eileen Walsh) is being abused beyond even the norm, Margaret strikes back with a cunning plan to expose (literally) the blemishes of the abuser. Unfortunately the consequences backfire and as usual, punishment falls on the innocent. But not before Crispina, at a mass for Corpus Christi, cries out to the priest over and over again, “You are not a man of God!” At the screening I attended, the audience were laughing and cheering at this much needed relief point in the movie.

Their treatment affects the girls in different ways. Margaret nurses a bitterness and hatred in her heart which may never heal, Rose suffers life-long for the loss of her son, while the spirited Bernadette becomes cruel and abusive then regains herself once more. And Crispina’s fate is the worst of all.

After the Corpus Christi incident the film comes quickly to a climax during which, in a brief struggle, Sr Bridget’s venality triumphs over her need to punish. The ending is bittersweet but satisfyingly sharp, given the sentimentality that could have clouded it. These girls will never have it easy.

This fictionalised true story deals with real people and real events. The last Magdalene Home was closed in 1996. Director Peter Mullan was inspired to write the film after seeing the Channel 4 documentary Love in a Cold Climate and used video footage in his research. An acclaimed actor himself, the movie’s strengths are in its characterisation: he is an actor’s director. The performances of the cast, and especially the four girls and Geraldine McEwan as Sr Bridget are all strongly convincing, original and powerful, without sentimentality. As a whole it is harrowing. It is not a movie for the faint-hearted nor for deluded believers, who do not want that belief challenged, of the sovereign rights of the Church to determine the destiny of its devotees.

As a revelation of the suffering perpetrated in the name of the Catholic Church this movie could not be more damning. Such places come to exist partly because of church doctrine condemning females for inherent sexuality – always threatening to a patriarchal and celibate priesthood. The perversion of desire created by enforced celibacy is demonstrated here and elsewhere over and over again in the notorious sexual predatoriness of the Catholic priesthood made all the stronger for its suppression. Here it is shown in the conscious injustice and cruelty of the teaching that innocence does not excuse original sin, that suffering and atonement are the only paths to salvation, and in the sexual vilification the girls experience from nuns inured by sanctimonious self-justification. Certainly suffering is meted out in exacting detail, justified by a moral right to punish the sinful. But what were the cardinal sins these girls – 30,000 of them by the late 1990s – had committed? They were unwed mothers, saucy temptresses and flirts, uncontrollable rebels. Many had been raped or were too disempowered or simple-minded to say no to sexual abuse by supposedly trustworthy males in their own families or the priesthood. It was in fact enough if the girl was deemed to be in moral danger, for her own protection.

We see men unable to control their sexual predations protected against temptation supposedly intrinsic in innocent young girls by the incarceration, punishment and debasement of females. We see good Catholic families abandoning their daughters to a system that will grind all the humanity and the sweet God-given loveliness out of them. We see brides of Christ whose notion of service to the divine involves the systematic humiliation and victimisation of those already irreparably damaged. We see a religious community corrupted by greed and a devout and fearful society which accepts all this in the name of a loving God who Himself forgave the harlot Magdalene and treated her with loving-kindness.

One could be forgiven, but not obviously by the Church (the Vatican has banned this film in Italy), for surmising, on the evidence, that the true head of the Catholic Church is not that loving God, but a subtle, subversive Evil which enjoys perpetuating suffering and debasement among its followers.

© Avril Carruthers               29th March 2003