This chapter looks at the cultural, social and political contexts of Ireland’s carceral Magdalene Laundry institutions and the consolidation of their power in nineteenth-century Ireland to argue that the colonial framework in which it developed had a decisive ‘neo-colonial’ imprint that continued throughout the twentieth century. The ten Magdalene institutions which flourished in the south of the partitioned island of Ireland were founded during a period of an intense revival by the Irish Catholic church, serving as the cultural wing of a political movement that protested the oppression of Irish Catholics under the British Empire. The race science of the period proved that the morphology of the native Irish had exceedingly high rates of ‘Nigrescence’. This scientific racial categorisation of the Irish, poor people and the ‘criminal class’ more generally was understood to explain the immorality of these people: their laziness, violence and stupidity. Catholic religious orders such as those that ran Magdalene institutions were in the vanguard of a post-Famine era when they were eager to demonstrate, contra the race scientists, that the rising Irish Catholic middle class was responsible and respectable enough to have at least some powers of self-governance devolved to them from the Westminster Parliament. The British colonial establishment, in turn, was willing to fund large religious-run institutions, which contained the children of the Irish poor in industrial and reformatory schools. These same orders provided education and health services to an Irish Catholic middle class that was steadily consolidating its position in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. This policy received a fillip in the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum published in 1891, which advocated a middle course between the rampages of unregulated capitalism and the perils of socialism. The Pope argued that the State should support private subsidiary organisations that would provide a bulwark against socialism yet moderate the worst excesses of capitalism, and this is still the social doctrine of Catholicism. The doctrine provided a rationale for the Church’s practice of establishing voluntary bodies to run educational, health, social welfare and carceral institutions where the mores of the former coloniser or ‘coloniality’ continue to prevail after the official end of imperial rule evident in the ideology of a recently dominated population intent to prove themselves respectable and responsible according to the dominant mores of the (former) coloniser.

Home Rule, Rome Rule and Ireland’s Neocolonial Magdalenes

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2025年

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Katherine O’Donnell

摘要

This chapter looks at the cultural, social and political contexts of Ireland’s carceral Magdalene Laundry institutions and the consolidation of their power in nineteenth-century Ireland to argue that the colonial framework in which it developed had a decisive ‘neo-colonial’ imprint that continued throughout the twentieth century. The ten Magdalene institutions which flourished in the south of the partitioned island of Ireland were founded during a period of an intense revival by the Irish Catholic church, serving as the cultural wing of a political movement that protested the oppression of Irish Catholics under the British Empire. The race science of the period proved that the morphology of the native Irish had exceedingly high rates of ‘Nigrescence’. This scientific racial categorisation of the Irish, poor people and the ‘criminal class’ more generally was understood to explain the immorality of these people: their laziness, violence and stupidity. Catholic religious orders such as those that ran Magdalene institutions were in the vanguard of a post-Famine era when they were eager to demonstrate, contra the race scientists, that the rising Irish Catholic middle class was responsible and respectable enough to have at least some powers of self-governance devolved to them from the Westminster Parliament. The British colonial establishment, in turn, was willing to fund large religious-run institutions, which contained the children of the Irish poor in industrial and reformatory schools. These same orders provided education and health services to an Irish Catholic middle class that was steadily consolidating its position in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. This policy received a fillip in the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum published in 1891, which advocated a middle course between the rampages of unregulated capitalism and the perils of socialism. The Pope argued that the State should support private subsidiary organisations that would provide a bulwark against socialism yet moderate the worst excesses of capitalism, and this is still the social doctrine of Catholicism. The doctrine provided a rationale for the Church’s practice of establishing voluntary bodies to run educational, health, social welfare and carceral institutions where the mores of the former coloniser or ‘coloniality’ continue to prevail after the official end of imperial rule evident in the ideology of a recently dominated population intent to prove themselves respectable and responsible according to the dominant mores of the (former) coloniser.