Keywords

1 Introduction

Irish reformatory institutions were established back in the eighteenth century to offer shelter to those in need. During the eighteenth century, and well into the nineteenth century, philanthropic workers sent women to refuges and Laundries at a time when prostitution became a great social problem. Once the Catholic Church got control of these institutions in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a more punitive and repressive attitude was adopted (Luddy 1995a, 47). At the turn of the twentieth century, the attitude towards “deviant women”—prostitutes and unmarried mothers—and the treatment these women received in Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes became harsher (Titley 2006, 9; Luddy 2011, 109–126; O’Sullivan and O’Donnell 2012, 17–20).

It is not only the coercive confinement of women, but also the cruel practices carried out inside Laundries that motivates us to consider Magdalene Laundries as instruments of power which victimised thousands of women in Ireland rendering them in a vulnerable and precarious condition. Many scholars have questioned the role of these reformatory institutions in the rehabilitation of “outcasts”. Common to all the scholars who have analysed Magdalene Laundries is the idea that they were tools of oppression rather than of reform (McCormick 2009, 50; Luddy 2007, 237; O’Sullivan and O’Donnell 2012, 2; Simpson et al. 2014, 261). The discourse of vulnerability and ethical demands towards those in need—prostitutes and unmarried mothers—adopted by humanitarian practices should be understood as a form of institutionalised violence (Fassin 2012, 1–8).

In his book, Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life Fassin refers to humanitarian intervention as biopolitics in so far as it manages and controls those named “vulnerable”, but also as politics of life since the victims are represented as powerless beings in need of protection. That division between the powerful and the weak is thus created by humanitarianism. Hence, this practice essentialises and objectifies the victim (Fassin 2007, 501–519). By naming them vulnerable, prostitutes and unmarried mothers were deprived of their agency and identity and therefore were better controlled and regulated. These humanitarian enterprises did contribute to the stigmatisation and precarisation of these women in Ireland claiming ethical demands on the witnesses of suffering without accounting for their role in contributing to their vulnerability: “By ignoring the role we all play in the differential distribution of vulnerability and its political character, humanitarianism does not really question the causes that produce this inequality” (Sabsay 2016, 180).

After the truth behind Magdalene Laundries gained public attention in the 1990s, thanks to the documentary “Sex in a Cold Climate”, many women started to raise their voices sharing their traumatic stories about a life of abuse. The unveiled corruption behind religious congregations challenged the position of the Church in Ireland, as well as of the State given its complicity in sending women to reformatory institutions. Due to this public persecution, the Church finally closed the last Magdalene Laundry in 1996. The economic and social transformation of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger period had also, as O’Sullivan and O’Donnell claim, “profound implications for the architecture of coercive confinement” (2012, 254). The progressive spread of secular mentality and the improvement of women’s conditions in society since the 1970s were translated into fewer women sent to Magdalene Homes (O’Sullivan and O’Donnell 2012, 254–275).

We should say, though, that the closure of the last Magdalene Laundry only represents the partial end of a coercive system which subjugated “deviant women”. Yet, the finalisation of this repressive system and the compensation to the victims were arduous tasks for the nation. According to Butler, there are two paths towards the derealisation of the “Other”, which are violence and omission of public recognition (Butler 2006, 34–36). In the case of Magdalene Laundries’ survivors, they suffered both types of violence. The concealing attitude of the Church, the State and of the whole society amounted to the silencing of these women since they were not provided with any support. Being offered no recognition or help, as we are about to see, these women were silenced and moved away from the public sphere in order to preserve the reputation and prestige of those in power, as well as the ideal image of the country fabricated in the Post-independence period.

However, these women found support in a non-profit organisation called “Justice for Magdalenes” (2003), which was created by Katherine O’Donnell, Claire McGettrick, Maeve O’Rourke, James Smith and Mari Steed. Their goal was to offer public recognition to Magdalene survivors and to promote research into Magdalene Laundries and similar institutions using the testimonies offered by former inmates. The dissemination of the facts and spread of the illegal detention and abuse of thousands of women in Ireland contributed to the public recognition of the victims. Their active role in defending this cause, ended up in the government’s recognition of its accountability and an apology. According to Fassin and Gray, in the process of bearing witnesses to others’ testimonies, the victims become objects of analysis and their account is shaped by the limitations of the genre—interviews—(Fassin 2007, 517; Gray 2003, 13). Yet, these life narratives are not conditioned by the presence of an interviewer who interprets the oral testimonies or focuses on those aspects he/she wants to emphasise. The interviewer gives these women the opportunity to speak and agency to do it, they are individualised against the homogenising discourse which objectified them, and they are empowered by providing them with spaces to speak. Others like Kathy O’Beirne found in literature a safe way to tell their stories. Her autobiography, published eight years before the Oral History Project started, offers an unofficial testimonial of events and gives voice to all those silenced challenging a secretive system by openly exposing the reality behind Irish reformatory institutions. At the end of the twentieth century, life writing started to disclose issues related to the family and sex, which used to be considered private matters. Hence, the private–public dichotomy was blurred granting women a space to talk (Grubgeld 2006, 233). Kathy O’Beirne’s autobiography can be read as a way of healing her wounds at the same time that she unveils a reality hidden for so long.

Previous research on Magdalene Laundries has focused on the historical analysis of these institutions by scholars like James Smith (2007), Maria Luddy (2007, 2011), Frances Finnegan (2004), Rebecca Lea McCarthy (2010), Brian Titley (2006), or Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell (2012). More specifically, previous research on the vulnerability and violence executed against unmarried mothers in Magdalene Laundries has focused on the analysis of Conlon-McKenna’s novel The Magdalen and films such as Peter Mullan’s The Magdalen Sisters, Stephen Frear’s Philomena, and Aisling Walsh’s Sinners by scholars such as James Smith (2007), Mª Auxiliadora Pérez-Vides (2013), Aida Rosende Pérez (2006) or Paula Murphy (2006).

However, in this chapter, I will focus on the testimonies offered by some survivors gathered in Justice for Magdalenes’ Oral History Project (2013) to analyse the different resistant/resilient techniques used by women inside and outside the Laundries to prove that their confinement was a repressive one and that vulnerability is not an innate characteristic of women as many have defended, but an ontological condition politically assigned by those in power. In the second part, I will analyse Katy O’Beirne’s autobiography Kathy’s Story: A Childhood Hell inside the Magdalen Laundries (2005) to see how the victims of Magdalene Laundries have tried to overcome the trauma of a life of abuse and incarceration and to analyse the help offered to them. As Edward Said says in his book The World, the Text and the Critic (1982), any theory travels in space and time and is adapted to the circumstances of the context. For that theory to exist, critical consciousness is a precondition which allows for the theory to take multiple forms and interpretations (Said 1982, 223, 241–242). In my case study, I will employ Butler’s theory of embodied resistance against vulnerability for the first part, adapting it to the context of twentieth-century Ireland. For the second part, I will use Herman and Laub’s stages of trauma recovery together with Yates and Pasteur’s concept of resilience to see how these women have tried to overcome their trauma. Considering resilience and resistance as complementary concepts, the aim of this chapter is to explore how these women resisted the vulnerable condition they were relegated to and to establish whether they were offered help in the aftermath of their release.

2 Resisting an Imposed Vulnerability Inside the Laundries: Justice for Magdalenes’ Oral History Project (2013)

According to Butler’s idea of the “geopolitical distribution of corporeal vulnerability” (2006, 29), some people are more vulnerable than others. In twentieth-century Ireland, Angelina Mayfield, Lucy, Bernadette, Kathleen R., Philomena, Evelyn, Mary, Kate O’Sullivan and Martha were some of the thousands of women who suffered the misfortune of being too vulnerable to live their own lives. Mary, Bernadette and Mary Currington were born out of wedlock, so they were sent to Industrial Schools where they were raised and moved to Magdalene Laundries later. Some of them, like Bernadette, were sent to Mother and Baby Homes1 to give birth to their offspring before being confined in a Magdalene Laundry and deprived of their illegitimate children. The rest were sent to Magdalene Laundries during adolescence. All of them were confined by a relative, the police, the social services or the priest in Magdalene Laundries established in Limerick, Dublin, Belfast, New Ross, Sunday Well, Waterford and High Park by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity and the Good Shepherd Sisters.

These Magdalenes’ stories are linked by the fact that they contravened the Catholic teachings of the time which required women to be passive, chaste and pure (Luddy 1995b, 1). Rather than looking into the problems these women were enduring, the State and the Church condemned them as sinful women in need of restraint. Their confinement in reformatory institutions was intended for their moral improvement and for preventing the public contagion of this immorality. Therefore, their role was far from a social one, but one of oppression assuming these women were vulnerable and sinful by nature. During their confinement, strict disciplinary measures were adopted to reform them such as hard work, constant surveillance, fasting, prayers, physical and psychological punishment, and deprivation of their names and possessions (Smith; Finnegan; Luddy). All these practices carried out inside the Laundry made women vulnerable since their humanity and corporeal integrity were endangered. The public dimension of the Magdalenes’ bodies made them vulnerable by exposing them to the violence executed by the nuns. Following Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay, as political and social subjects our body is exposed to power and to vulnerability, but that does not imply we cannot grow resistant. These scholars disagree with those feminists who stigmatise gender division by considering women naturally vulnerable. On the contrary, they claim vulnerability is a general condition of any human being which can be resisted (Butler et al. 2016, 2). Recently, vulnerability and resistance have been rethought in connection with resilience in our present society attacked by terrorism or war. Most of the literature on resilience tackles vulnerable sectors of society exposed to natural risks and socio-economic changes. In recent years, a wider scope was adopted including women and marginalised sectors of society on the grounds of race, class, gender and ethnicity. Although resilience has always had positive connotations and vulnerability has implied negativity and powerlessness, scholars are claiming these concepts are complementary (Miller et al. 2010; Bracke 2016). In this part we use both resilience and resistance as complementary concepts referring to how Magdalenes combated their vulnerability inside the Laundries.

When asked about the survival technique they adopted inside the Laundries some of them admit that fear of the consequences discouraged them to take action (O’Donnell et al. 2013b, 63). Although some inmates adopted a resigned attitude inside the Laundry so as not to get into trouble, as it is the case of Bernadette, Kate O’Sullivan or Mary Currington (O’Donnell et al. 2013b, 63; 2013e, 26; 2013h, 88), some others tended to rebel against this coercive disciplinary system by adopting an rebellious attitude or by going on strikes for which they were expelled (O’Donnell et al. 2013d, 46–47; O’Beirne 2005, 132, 144). They put their lives at risk not only by going on hunger strike, but also by attempting suicide: “… And then I had to…I [Angelina Mayfield] to be continuously planning…either suicide or running away. Now my planning of suicide was to build up these yellow tablets that this nun was pushing at me and pretend I’d taken them and then…or run away, so I decided that the running away bit sounded better (laughs) I’m a bit of a coward, I didn’t want to commit suicide” (O’Donnell et al. 2013a, 58). As Butler claims, vulnerability is part of resistance, and it is through our speech and bodily acts that we can resist social norms and precarity (2016, 15). These women drew upon their vulnerability to grow resistant/resilient; what these practices reveal is the impossibility to bear their confinement and the desperation to be free. Attacking their own bodies as their only possession was the only alternative they had of being heard. Furthermore, committing suicide can be considered a resistance/resilient technique challenging the Catholic power since it implies committing a sin in the eyes of the nuns.

But the most common subversive technique the women talk about was escaping. Angelina Mayfield’s testimony perfectly narrates how difficult it was to escape from the Laundry:

But it took us a while to work that one out but we did (laughs) and then I don’t know where we used to get these ropes from, heaven knows where we would find these ropes and we would tie the rope on the tree and try and get out. But because it would take us so long, probably not realising that the nun would be watching us planning this...so by the time we got down that policeman was down there ready and then trying to make us get back up the same way! (Laughs) (O’Donnell et al. 2013a, 59)

What this testimony reveals is, on the one hand, the desperation of all these women who risked their lives in an attempt to be free, and on the other, the coercive attitude of the Church as well as the complicity of society and the State in the confinement of these women. Their vulnerability is firstly produced by a gossipy and judgemental society which constantly guarded those women and denounced their “immoral” behaviour, and secondly, by the nuns who monitored these women day and night once confined. In addition, these Magdalene women suffered the consequences of challenging the nuns’ power. Misbehaving, escaping or going on strikes were reasons for punishment. As a result of what the nuns considered to be lack of respect, these women were physically punished. In Evelyn’s words:

Well, if you can visualise a belt or a big cane, that’s how we were punished. You’d get grabbed by the hair, dragged into the office to see the Mother Superior, and you’d have to explain yourself–there again you weren’t always given a chance to explain yourself—and you’d get the cane across the backside, across the legs or the belt, depending on who...depending on who is in charge to give you... the whacking … (O’Donnell et al. 2013d, 7–29)

As we can see in these quotations, the Magdalenes’ bodies, exposed to the nuns’ power, became vulnerable to these reformatory techniques which aimed at imprinting purity on them through blows and humiliations. As Butler claims,

the body implies mortality, vulnerability, and agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others but also to touch and to violence… The body has its inevitably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, it bears the imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life … (Butler 2006, 26)

This physical violence exerted upon the Magdalene women can be considered an unjustified form of subjugation which rendered them in a precarious condition rather than contributed to their reformation. The resistant/resilient attitude adopted by these women was translated into more vulnerability. However, it is by admitting their vulnerable condition and resisting it that women grew resilient. In Butler’s words, “ … these bodies, in showing this precarity, are also resisting these very powers; they enact a form of resistance that presupposes vulnerability of a specific kind, and opposes precarity” (Butler 2016, 15). Even though these women were unable to change the system which subjugated them, the mere fact of resisting it gives them agency; as Butler claims, we cannot destroy the system since we are dependent on it, but we can change it through resistance by not citing the law (Butler 2016, 19).

These embodied protests analysed here are forms of demanding their agency and a way of resistance challenging the State’s and the Church’s sovereignty. Yet, the impossibility to change the system and the punishment they received if they tried to do so encouraged some of the women to accept it. The identities of these women were erased, and their corporealities endangered by the physical and psychological punishment the nuns exerted on them to be “rehabilitated”. However, the resilient attitude of some of these women shows their willingness to resist an unjust power which, far from offering them help, endangered their survival.

3 The Aftermath of Magdalene Laundries: Kathy O’Beirne’s Kathy’s Story: A Childhood Hell Inside the Magdalen Laundries (2005)

A common technique of survival adopted by the victims of the abuse suffered inside the Laundries after their release has been silence, recognised by scholars as a mechanism of defence (Laub 1992, 58). Most of the explanation for this silence should be found in the stigma attached to Magdalenes which continued chasing these women even after their release (Luddy 2011, 109). Fear and shame prevented these women from openly talking about their experience (Finnegan 2004, 103; Smith 2007, 66). However, in contrast with those women who kept silent, the majority found the courage to raise their voices. Psychologists like Laub (1995) believe that trauma can only be overcome when the repressed is released by sharing it with others. After many years of silence and suffering, Kathy O’Beirne found the strength to raise her voice revealing her truth and claiming justice and compensation in her autobiography. Claude Hurlbert defends the idea that writing is a technique of healing and sharing knowledge. According to him, writing is about putting forward our own thoughts, our own histories to be shared with others, and to challenge those normative powers that want to steal our voices (Hurlbert 2013, 24–25); he defends writing as a healing therapy that enables the silenced voices from all over the world to be listened to (Hurlbert 2013, 176). O’Beirne’s autobiography is not only a way of telling the truth and of seeking justice but also an attempt to heal her wounds. Overall, all these survivors who made their story public grew resilient against the silencing attitude of the Church, the state and society fighting to recuperate their voices and identities and to achieve justice and compensation.

Resilience is defined in Trauma Studies as the ability to adapt well in the face of adversity, trauma or threat using external and internal resources available (The American Psychological Association 1892). Yates et al. on the one hand and Pasteur on the other pinpoint the importance of the context—family, community, government—in the process of reducing vulnerability and of increasing resilience (2015). In my case study, the concealing attitude of the Church, the State and of the whole society amounted to the silencing of these women. These women were not provided with any support, so they concealed their past. As an example of this disengagement from the victims, when O’Beirne started tracking her past and those responsible for allowing this to happen she asked for her records in the Magdalene Laundry, but they said they had been damaged in a fire (O’Beirne 2005, 190). In 1993, the exhumation of 133 Magdalenes’ bodies from the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge’s Asylum received media attention, so she decided to continue with her project. She wrote to Mary Robinson—president of Ireland from 1990 to 1997—to meet her, but she refused. Since she, together with other Magdalenes, was helped neither by the State nor by the Church, she launched a campaign to help those who were still institutionalised. Furthermore, she decided to do something for those women who had died—she was determined to give them dignity by improving the conditions of Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery, by removing the headstones in which the word sinner or penitent was written and, by building a proper memorial for them (O’Beirne 2005, 193). In 2004 she managed to meet Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and the newspapers The Sunday Times and The Irish Independent covered the news (O’Beirne, 205). She was promised help in her petition and was referred to Phil Garland, the head of the Child Protection Service of the Archdiocese of Dublin. In the meantime, she received anonymous calls that threatened her and obliged her to be silent (O’Beirne 2005, 204–206). This last episode makes clear the conspiracy of silence that existed in Ireland at a time when revealing the truth about reformatory institutions would damage the whole country. Seeing that she was not achieving anything, she decided to go on a hunger strike ignoring her friends, her family and the Archbishop’s recommendations. It was only then that the media took interest in her (O’Beirne 2005, 207).

According to Butler, “those who gain representation, especially self-representation, have a better chance of being humanised, and those who have no chance to represent themselves run a greater risk of being treated as less than human, regarded as less than human, or indeed, not regarded at all” (Butler 2006, 141). Some Magdalene survivors like O’Beirne found that representation and humanisation thanks to the media. Her appearance in the public sphere implied her recognition in society and the restoration of her dismissed voice. Contrary to Ahiska’s idea that media representation of women’s vulnerability and violence against them produces anonymity, fixation of vulnerability, homogenisation and normalisation, I believe the media representation of Magdalene women and what they suffered contributed to the recognition of these women’s individual identities and stories (2016, 213). Even though a complete healing of O’Beirne’s wounds will probably never be achieved, as she herself claims, a partial restoration has been granted thanks to the recognition of her identity.

Despite the mental and physical difficulties O’Beirne found after her confinement, such as health problems, learning difficulties and in showing emotions for her children, difficulty in trusting others—specially men—panic attacks, anxiety and so on, she grew resilient and developed different techniques to overcome the trauma and live a normal life. The mere fact of speaking up and pointing out the perpetrators should be considered an act of resilience against all the damage she has suffered and against all those who intend to silence her. By speaking up and tracking her past, she fights against the derealisation and dehumanisation she has been suffering throughout her life. The survivors’ recognition of their own vulnerability has been the first step towards their restitution. Thanks to the public recognition of survivors like O’Beirne another step has been taken in the process towards overcoming their trauma.

The next step in the unveiling of this historical event has been the prosecution of the perpetrators thanks to the victims’ public accusation. Throughout her narrative O’Beirne accuses the Church, society and the State as those responsible for her misfortune. According to psychoanalysts, different responses to trauma (taking revenge, forgetting, crying, or keeping silent) are common to any traumatised person. Once the government, Church and society are identified as the perpetrators, they are also made responsible for these women’s restoration. These groups became witnesses of these women’s traumas and an ethical demand on the witnesses is made by the Magdalene survivor to help her (Laub 1995, 69). In this process towards healing, Herman claims that the attitude of the community is of paramount importance in the restitution of the victims of trauma (1998, 70).

Irish society seems to have been involved, offering the traumatised recognition and restitution and taking part in several demonstrations organised by the victims. The State initially turned its back on these women by negating their collaboration with the Church as the McAleese Report states (2013). Yet, the State finally offered an apology and a compensation scheme to victims in 2013. Mentioning the State’s apology, some survivors appreciate it and consider it an act of recognition. However, others like Kathy O’Beirne believe it changed nothing: “… Money will never heal the scars that I have inside or make me feel clean. I don’t think it’s possible to put a price on what was done to me during my childhood, and so receiving a pay-out will never be an answer, but at the time it felt like this was the only way forward” (2005, 198–199).

Finally, the Church still seems to be reluctant to accept their blame and to offer these women help. Some newspapers like BBC News sought some members of the Church to claim accountability, but their response was clear; they still deny their involvement in Magdalene Laundries and refuse to compensate the victims (Roberts). In 2017, the Archbishop Michael Neary of the Tuam Diocese declared to The Irish Daily Mirror: “as we did not have any involvement in the running of the home, I have no specific information on the manner of interments” (Fogarty 2017). Before that, We.News made an appointment in 2013 with some nuns2 who refused their involvement in this issue and even found it unnecessary to apologise for it (McCormack 2013). According to Herman, the main stages of recovery from trauma are “establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and restoring the connection between survivor and the community” (Herman 1998, 3). Restoration and restitution of the victim are only possible by the acknowledgement of the damage caused to them and by acting (Herman 1998, 70). Applying this theory to Magdalene survivors, these women were unable to overcome their trauma since they did not receive that. Eleven years later, when O’Beirne still has not achieved her goal as stated in the prologue, this book is a call for action to all those who may bear witness to her testimony:

So please, Lord. Help all those busy people who only think of themselves to stop, look, listen and think. Five minutes of kindness can mean one day of happiness for someone who is suffering great pain and sadness or even save a life. If someone had given me the time and attention I needed then I could have been saved from the abuse and torment I suffered for years. And so many others could have been saved as well. (O’Beirne 2005, 189–190)

And to the State: “Perhaps if any of those mentioned read this book, they will think again and answer my letters. Perhaps someone will take an interest and try to help me. Perhaps the Government will do something to honour that apology they made six years ago” (O’Beirne 2005, 217). Speaking up about such a traumatic experience and challenging power institutions as O’Beirne does here is a courageous act not all victims have been capable of. In the testimonies discussed above we have seen how the community fostered among survivors encouraged them to speak; however, O’Beirne was alone along the way. As we can gather from this quotation, this autobiography enables her to heal her wounds and claim justice. Overall, this autobiography is the testimony of a survivor who is claiming not only justice but also her own identity to be restored.

4 Conclusions

From the eighteenth century to the last decades of the twentieth century, a culture of purity denied the existence of thousands of women in Ireland who did not follow the moral prescriptions of the Catholic Church. The derealisation of the “Other”, in this case based on moral and gender demands, caused the vulnerability of anyone who challenged the norm. The confinement of “deviant women” in Magdalene Laundries for their reform has been unveiled as a coercive system which subjugated “vulnerable” women. The testimonies of hundreds of survivors have revealed the corruption and abuse the Catholic Church, in conjunction with the State, carried out. According to Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay, the vulnerability of any human being is granted at his/her birth (Butler et al. 2016). Yet, Irish women became more vulnerable under this system of control and correction led by the Church. Employed as instruments of power, Magdalene Laundries rendered thousands of women in a vulnerable and precarious condition which they are still fighting to overcome.

These women’s resilient/resistant attitude during their confinement analysed in these testimonies proves the previous statement that their confinement was a repressive one rather than one of reform, as the clergy defended. Moreover, their resilient/resistant attitude challenging the nuns’ power after their detention seen in O’Beirne’s autobiography should prove their willingness to recover their lives even if it implies becoming more vulnerable. After their release, their resilient attitude speaking up and identifying the perpetrators led to more vulnerability by being in the public eye. Nevertheless, the recognition of their vulnerability has had the power to change the meaning of this word. That vulnerability they were relegated to has become a mobilising force for all those women who suffered the misfortune of resisting the Catholic Church. As Butler claims, we cannot destroy power, but we can resist it (2016, 14).

Nevertheless, the victims’ healing process is being hindered by the lack of recognition and action by the perpetrators as they have demanded. It was the organisation Justice for Magdalenes, together with other platforms such as Magdalene Survivors Together, and various kinds of narratives which have granted the victims a safe space to talk about their traumatic experience in Magdalene Laundries. These two platforms I have analysed here—the Oral History Project and O’Beirne’s autobiography—have enabled the victims to recuperate their identities and voices at the same time they have encouraged them to grow resilient against the silence surrounding reformatory institutions. Through the analysis of these testimonies, I have proved that vulnerability is an ontological condition, as Butler claims, assigned by those who subjugated women through strict disciplinary measures. Moreover, I have confirmed that vulnerability can be resisted in that path towards healing the wounds caused by trauma when restitution and recognition are granted to the victims.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Mother and Baby Homes were institutions founded to assist pregnant women in giving birth. After they got their babies, unmarried mothers were sent to Magdalene Asylums where pregnant women were not admitted (Finnegan 2004, 27).

  2. 2.

    Neither the nuns’ names nor the Laundry’s name was provided due to confidential reasons. What we know from the interview is that they used to work in a Laundry in Dublin.