Part One: How The Catholic Church Murdered Ireland's Babies

makes me want to either die or do violence. UM. And I don't like it. I don't prefer it. Um. And then the next thing she says is she's like blue lives matter, and then she definitely talking about white farmers in South Africa, And yeah, it gets like really weird, how blonde people are going extinct. It's it's bizarre. I don't understand why Zoom put all that in. She asked me if I knew how to spell eugenics the last

it seems out of place. Yeah, she actually poses the old s s racial heritage questions to make sure that you're legally allowed to be in a relationship with your significant other. Um. That's zoom that's the zoom Lady, actual Nazi, the zoom Lady, the urban legend of this, the biggest Karen of them all. We have to see Sophia, We have we have you. This is a podcast about bad people, the worst in all of history. Uh. And we have an especially dark episode today. Today we're gonna be talking

about one of the darkest chapters in Irish history. Now, if you know anything about the Irish you know that that's saying thing when you're like, this is one of the worst things that ever happened in Ireland. Like you're already, you're already, you're getting You're on the top of a mountain,

and maybe there's like two or three other mountains. There's like there's a indigenous American history, there's like Ukrainian history, you know, one or two other mountains that you can see peaks above you when you're on top of the Irish history mountain. Um, so this is gonna be a bad one today, gonna be a real bad one today. Um And I know that since I am here it is there's gonna be piles and yeah, siles of and piles of babies who are diseased. Yeah, that is my

calling card. The working title for this episode is how the Catholic Church killed all of Ireland's babies. Um, so yeah, we're we're, we're, We're gonna fucking zoom in on that, and obviously, as that probably keeps you in on the villain of today's episode is primarily the Catholic Church. Um, yeah, that's how the Catholic Church we got a deal with all these fucking kids. I am starting to think I'm misunderstanding who we're cheering for in this pos This is

a very pro killing babies podcast. This is Behind the Baby Killers, a podcast that celebrates reducing the surplus population. Look as I signed to get drunk at two in the afternoon, that's the behind the bastards here. Yeah, Sophie is getting drunk and I'm yelling about are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons? I'm Benezer Scrooge. That's the long frame of the show. Are you married to the zoom lady? I am, I am. You're very happy. We're having our

wedding at a plantation. Several plantations were plantation hopping for the wedding. May I ask the color of the skin of the people that will be attending your wedding. Well, I mean servers are attending, right, Yeah, that's what I meant, attend to your white guests. Yeah, Sophia, what do you what do you? What do you? What do you? What

do you know about Ireland? Well, um, I do consider them a sister country to my Eastern your because we do worship the potato as well worship and you also worship hardcore drinking, So hardcore drinking, and they very close to my heart. Ireland, and in both Ukraine and Ireland, the hardcore drinking is driven in part by the fact that you are the two most colonized countries within Europe. Both both Ukraine and Ireland were victims of colonization. Look,

oppression will drive you to drink, It absolutely does. And there's some you know, we had everything exploding in Gaza, in in in in Palestine recently, and some reminders that, like the Irish, are some of the most within sort of the Western world, probably the most consistent allies of the Palestinian cause, as they were consistent allies as a

nation of the you know, indigenous American cause. Um, because they've you know, they've been through some of the same ship and a story that's dropping that's just dropped this week is about the residential schools in Canada, which we covered. One of them was found to have a mass grave with two hundred and fifteen children in it. And we're talking about a very similar story today, but it's of

course within the context of Ireland. Um. Now, before we get into what exactly happened that led to the mass graves, we're gonna be talking about today mass baby graves. Good times. Um, we have to talk about about roughly thirteen hundred years of Irish history, um, which we're gonna do in like a page, which is I think responsible and good. Um.

So so strap in here's here's th hundred years of Ireland. So. Ireland's history of foreign domination started around the seven hundreds, when Scandinavian vikings started to raid monastery and towns for precious gold. Over the next two hundred years, they settled in several cities, including Dublin, and dominated the island until ten fourteen, when an Irish king named Brian Buru beat

a Viking army in battle. Now, this only brought the Irish about a century of independence, because in eleven sixties, six war between two Irish kings ended when the defeated king invited the Normans to invade. The Normans who had took it, taken over what is today like England. This Irish king who loses a war invites them to invade Ireland in eleven sixty nine, and his plan is like, this is gonna lead to me being in charge. Of

course it doesn't. It backfires and the Norman's takeover Ireland, and this begins seven hundred years of direct domination, uh of Ireland. Yeah, just a bunch of It's just Norm McDonald, thousands of Norm McDonald's with axes, just taking Ireland, of course. And I think Norm McDonald is probably Irish or Scottish, I don't know whatever. Fuck him, he's an assholes what he is. There's the mascot of Beverly Hills High School, That's what That's what I was picturing, which is also right,

which is very colonizer as ship. Yeah, I don't know what the origin is, but I'm assuming it's not great. It's not great. Um. Now, over the following centuries there were a bunch of different like subsequent English invasions of Ireland, and people will quibble that, like, oh, I shouldn't call them whatever. It's people who live in where the English. Fuck it, they're the English. I don't care. In even seventy one, King Henry the Second land of a huge army at Waterford to funk up some of his own

nobles who had taken over chunks of Ireland. And we're getting too rich oppressing oppressing the Irish without him, so like other English people are oppressing the Irish, and the King is like, but I'm not getting enough money from sucking up the Irish, so he and never want to be left out on other people. Know why why would you look like that? You're just leaving money and blodies on the table. I found out Sophie was oppressing you without me. You know, you you you, I know that's why.

That's why you both have access to the to the online trigger for the shot caller that I wear constantly in order to stop me from doing bad things. Um, that's only partly a joke, because Twitter is kind of a shot caller now in the fifteen thirties, King Henry the Eighth, you know this guy? Have you heard of this guy? Hey? Hey, Mark Marin boys, who are your guy? So?

King Henry the eighth real piece of ship. He's the guy who invented the Church of England and like made his country leave the Catholic Church because he wanted to funck more ladies. But that meant divorcing and marrying more ladies. It was a whole thing. There's a song about it, um anyway. Uh, well, it's not about that, but it has the named Henry the Eighth. Anyway, it's very funny. So he decides the Church England is going to be a thing now because I want to be able to

get divorced and marry new women. The Irish were committed Catholics, um, and some of their commitment to Catholicism came from the fact that the English, who they hated, were like, we're not Catholics anymore. This led to a series of what you might call um race kerfuffles with the English that ended with the Irish population population devastated and the mass confiscation of Irish land by English colonists. Um. Now in

the sixteenth century, the Spanish. Near the end of the sixteenth century, the Spanish briefly show up to help the Irish rebel against their masters, but that ended disastrously. This happens a couple of times in history. The Spanish and the Germans on a number of occasions try to help the Irish for their own purposes, and it never really works out for the Irish. Um. In sixteen forty nine, noted piece of ship Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland yet again

to destroy Catholic Irish power. By sixteen fifty two, he held most of the country and he launched a vicious counterinsurgency to wipe out the remaining guerilla resistance to his reign. Cromwell's campaign in Ireland was absolutely an act of genocide. He may have wiped out fully fifty percent of the population um, which is again the Holocaust and Europe kills

about fifty percent of the Jewish population. That's a pretty pretty pretty genocidey genocide, right, Like when we talk about the Irish is genocide victims, we're not we're not exaggerating here, um. And around fifty thousand Irish laborers were also deported as indentured laborers to the Caribbean, which was a step up from slavery, but not as not a giant step. It's bad, um. So we could do a whole podcast on the Mountains of Ship the Irish have had to endure over the

last three quarters of millennia um. In particular, probably the best known chapter in the ship history was the Irish Potato Famine, or the Great Hunger. This kicked off in ety five when a fungus killed half the year's potato crop, and then three quarters of the crop over the next seven years. Because the Irish were a colony of England, the whole population were tenant farmers. All power on the

island came from English landowners. Catholics were prohibited from owning or leasing land, voting or holding elected office until eighteen twenty nine, so this is an apartheid state as well. So by the time the famine started, the island's politics were still dominated by absentee British Church of England landlords.

Tenant farmers owed food as rent to their landlords, and potatoes were supposed to help them subsist, but when the crops started failing, they didn't have enough food to pay their debts to their landlords, who again didn't live in Ireland generally, and to also eat. Roughly one million Irish people starved to death during the famine. Another million were forced to flee their homeland, often leaving for the United States.

This was out of a population of a little over eight millions, so between death so they lose half their population the six hundreds of their Cromwell and then in the eighteen hundreds um a quarter of the population either is killed or forced out of the country by famine. UM. Pretty rough millennia for the Irish all things told. So given all this, it's not hard to understand why the Irish wanted independence from Great Britain. In nineteen sixteen, with World War One and media rez a group of Irish

revolutionaries tried to overthrow their colonial oppressor. They succeeded in taking over a chunk of Dublin and declaring an Irish Republic for like a couple of days before the British sailed in a battleship and pounded the city with naval guns from the sea. As tragic as the Easter Rising was, it played a key role in leading to the Treaty Settlement in nineteen twenty one that brought the Irish some

manner of independence. Basically, it's carved into you got your Northern Ireland, which is still a part of the UK, but you've got your Republic of Ireland now, which is you know, the capitals in Dublin, and it's like the bulk of the island, which is not Again, still a lot of people angry about the partitioning of Ireland, but it's a better situation than had existed before. Um So the modern Republic of Ireland comes about as a result of this process, and in nineteen thirties seven, the Irish

government drafts a constitution. Now, if you've been paying attention through this very reef overview of Irish history, you'll note that the Catholic Church pretty important to the Irish who want independence, right, kind of a big, big deal for them, and for most of the his the history of like the Irish independence movement, the Catholic Church has been kind of a countercultural and liberatory force. Being Catholic was a

symbol of resistance to the Crown. Now in nineteen you know, thirty seven, when they're making this new constitution, the Republic of Ireland is completely fucking broke. They've got no goddamn money because the English had spent seven hundred years or so robbing them blind, uh, and they especially did not have money for social services. What they had was the goodwill of the Catholic Church, who they wrote into their first Constitution as the primary provider of social services, particularly

education for children. Now, that constitution did note that the rights of children were quote inalienable and imprescribable. But the rights of children were also subsumed within the rights of the family, which is not necessarily the best thing because it means kids don't have independent rights on their own. That's generally how this was was translated. So I'm gonna quote from a write up in the Child Abuse Review

by Claire mcluon Richards quote it. It being the Catholic Church's major role in the education of children was accepted, and the acknowledgement of the good works of the religious orders in the care of the sick, poor and needy was considered to be of benefit to wider Catholic society, which was the dominant sector of the population. The opportunity to formalize and secure the power of the Catholic Church over its people without the impediment of British rule was critical.

The Church is the true religion of the people, would exercise its authority and status and negotiations in agreements with the state. Um the expectations of the state were to quote, safeguard and uphold religious interests. It is bound to extend protection and all reasonable assistance to the Catholic Church in the exercise of her own proper functions. So you see the budding issue here, right, Ireland is finally a free state.

Uh And since Catholic Catholicism has been punished for so long, it was seen as inextricable from Irishness, which leads to the enshrining and law of the Catholic Church dominance in social services, particularly childcare. It was believed that Ireland, as an independent nation, should be a holy and pure state, and part of ensuring that purity was punishing people who violated Catholic morality. You see, we're gonna have a problem here. I don't know what you mean, because I feel like

deciding who's moral or not it's always great. It's always great. I really think it ever leads to any problem. Absolutely think I have the right to decide whether you're moral or not. I I agree, and I think even better than you, Sophia is a completely unaccountable group of old Richmond who never fuck. That's who I want deciding how how we get to live our lives is a bunch of weirdos in Italy who don't fuck. But that's also essentially uh, you know, our government to you, don't they fuck?

Look at Matt Gates, it's not consensual. Well well, I guess you know. You know that that image Macro of the two hands clasping in the middle, it's like Matt dates the Catholic Church fucking children right in the middle. Look at Mac's yeah, and I think there's I'm not enough. I'm an expert. I'm not an expert at all in

Irish history. I wonder how much of kind of the Catholic Church's dominance after has to do with the fact that so a lot of these Irish revolutionaries in nineteen sixteen, these guys are socialists, these guys are anti colonial, their left wing, they have a their idea for how the government should be as kind of a radical and socialist one for the time they'll get massacred by the British um.

I wonder how much that had to do with kind of the fact that that, I mean, honestly just based on sort of culturally where the Church was probably still would have owned up dominant I don't know. Um, it's it's probably something someone with more knowledge of the history than I could could could weigh in on. The easter Rye thing is an interesting bit of history. Those guys were fucking rad for the most part. Um So anyway, the Catholic Church gets the gig in the Constitution basically

of legislating morality, particularly when it involves children. Now, when Ireland was founded, the age of criminal responsibility was seven years old. So that's when you're capable of being so you can get the chair. Well I don't. I don't think they're doing the chair, but you can you can go to prison. Yeah, you can go to prison for crimes. And it's actually much worse than that, Sophia, much worse than than a normal prison system. Well, we're about to detail.

I feel like the normal prison system is already inappropriate for people, so for children, when I say this is worse than our prison system in a lot of ways, um, I mean it. Um, it's bad not not to minimize ours. But so at the start of the Irish Republic, age of criminal responsibility is seven. It eventually rose to twelve. You want to guess what year they increased the age of criminal responsibility to twelve. No two thousand six, oh my god, which I think is also when Ireland legalized

the blow job. Like, I'm not joking about that. It was illegal to give blow jobs in Ireland until more recently than you'd expect. Hey, everybody, I actually got this wrong. It was not two thousand six. It was ninete three when Ireland made sodomy, which included like oral sex and stuff that wasn't you know procreative heterosexual sex was made legal. Uh so Ireland nineteen three, not two thousand six. Apologies

for slandering the Emerald Isle. So children convicted of crimes in this period became the responsibility of the Catholic Church. So the good thing is they're not putting them in adult prisons. They're not trying them as adults. There if you're a seven, an eight, or a nine or a tin or whatever. If you're a child who commits a crime, you're handed over to the Catholic Church in a lot of cases. Judge how hot children are? Okay, Well, yeah, so this is important for for the science now the

average No, I'm not that's not a joke. That's not a choke lane. We should go down. We're in a Matt Gates territory here. Um, we're into average Catholic priest territory. Here, We're into Dennis Haster, longest serving Republican Speaker of the House territory. Here, we're into probably Bill Clinton territory here. Um, anyway,

that's Keith. Yeah, we're definitely in Raneer reneeratory. Um. So so despite all the like all the d Anglish anglicization sentiment reformatory schools, you know, the anti British sentiment or whatever anti English sentiment. I don't know, fuck it, Like everybody keeps yelling at me about that. To hell with all of them, I say, um, reformatory schools were still based on a British model that had originally been established to deal with all the thieving orphans and street urchins

that Charles Dickens novels harbor over. Um now back at night again. If you consent children to prison, and yeah, you're a healthy society that deserves to rule the entire world. But if you have the laws on the books and they're even just send them to prison. Send them to prison. We'll send him to a reform school that is worse than most prisons. Today, just send them to child prison, all right, stop writing these novels about them, I mean

glorifying the orphans. Don't the orphans, Dickens, give them the chair. Yeah, fucking noted leftist Charles you think should be fed? You cook? Are you simping for kids? You fucking loser. So back in nineteen o eight, when Perfidious Albion still ran things in all of Ireland, the government had instituted a set of laws designed to protect the well being of children.

Since this was at that moment the UK, protecting children went meant incarcerating them if they were caught begging or homeless, or if they were found to have been neglected skipping school, or who had like stolen something as well. All of these are all of these kids exactly. Well everyone's that's that's the big Now that Biden's in charge, We're we're just gonna criminalize being poor as hard as we can,

and people continue to go to brunch. It's gonna be great. Um. So these kids, and this is back again we're talking about. This is in the UK, this is in Ireland, this is before independence. Kids are being sent to these these English reformatory schools which are also called industrial schools um now under the English government, under the Crown or whatever. These schools are run independently. Most of them were religious

in nature, but they were monitored by the state. When the UK left most of Ireland and the Republic took over, these industrial schools were officially managed by the Department of Local Government, and then by the Department of Justice and then by the Department of Education, but the Church did all of the actual work. Since the state was broke, they were more than happy to let the church take care of their social services. The church considered this a

worthwhile expense. Historian dicey okarrain, I'm so sorry. Gaelic is a beautiful language. Irish is a beautiful language. I'm going to butcher it every time I try to say one of these names. It is BEAUTI yeah, it's it's it's the it's gorgeous. I've spent a lot of Ireland's the first place I ever trailed outside of the US. I've

been back seven or eight times. I love listening. I take an Irish literature class in uh In College and since then I've been like so in love and like I said, a lot of the similarity of the depression, the good writing, it's wonderful from Ireland. That's good. Um. So this historian I've butchered explains quote that social service provision is designed to propagate the Catholic faith. So that's why the Catholic churches want to go out of pocket.

At least they're framing it as like, will pay since the government's broke, will pay for your social services because we see this as helping to expand the Catholic faith. Right, that's why we're going to cover social services for the country. Um. And while the wording of all these laws talked about criminal children, it's worth noting that again most of them had not committed anything we would recognize as a crime today.

In fact, the most common crime for which children were put in these facilities was that they were born to single mothers. Now no, me too. Yeah you're a crime baby throwing you in baby prison. As one researcher wrote in nine of the Church in Ireland, quote, the body was seen as a major source of evil. This was particularly true for women, whose proper role was to become there's in a good Catholic family. Any alternatives to this

Catholic ideal were a threat to the status quo. As a result, the Church and state worked together too heavily police children born out of wedlock, unsupervised and unkimpt children, poor children, and children in any other living situation that didn't seem Catholic enough. So when I talk about criminal behavior from children, this is what the Church considered criminal being born to a single mother, having a d h D, or something that made you misbehave in school, or coming

from a family without much money. Claire mcclun richards describes this as pathologized Catholicism, basically religion that has turned any behavior that dissents from the religious mainline into an illness or a crime. When the British left the Church. When the British left Ireland, Sorry, the Church saw that departure of that state as a way to legislate Catholic ideas

about proper behavior. From a write up in the Child Abuse Review quote, the children of poor or inadequate parenting were deemed to be in moral danger as the abused and neglected child was contaminated by adult knowledge. He argues that children were responded to and treated by the Church and state not in terms of what they were, but

what they were going to be. This may explain why so many boys who had committed petty crime or who were seeing at risk of committing crime, were placed in reformatory schools, and why so many girls, although having committed no crime, were placed in industrial schools because of the perceived risk of their sexual immorality. The patholomy is criminal a crime. It is that banksy drawing, but instead of a dude, it's a girl in a dress. Instead of throwing a malatov with like a flower in it, it's

a vulva, just tucking a volva? Is could is? Could we just get like? So obviously we're making tiny handcuffs for all the babies we're putting Oh no, no, no, don't work. Are they also finding a tiny single handcuff for the vulva for the services are throwing it over the cervix? What are we doing? The good news they're not. They're not handcuffing these kids. They're not putting them behind bars. They're just putting them in what I might call a

rape factory. So that's good. Oh, they're not locking them up. They're not locking them up though, you know, other than they locked them inside the rape factory with the rapists anyway, is like music factory. What what was that? Yeah, it's exactly That's actually what the C and C Music Factory is based on, which is why they're banned in Ireland. Um, okay,

you know who is not banned in Ireland? I don't think hopefully not maybe probably not the products and services and support this podcast services unless it's yeah, because the EU has some laws and stuff, and I don't know, we might get an advertisement from my favorite gun manufacturer, sig Sour, in which case probably isn't legal in Ireland. Um, dick pills might not be either, you know, they let

us know. Yeah, here's ads did pills. All right, we're back and we're thinking about the concept of dick pills and the Irish who until fairly recently could not legally perform or received blow jobs. Um. I'm going to continue that quote from the Child Abuse Review, which is talking about how children are being pathologized as a as a thought that they might commit immoral, sexual or other type

of crimes. Quote. The pathologizing of these children may have been may well have been because they were seen as undesirable and uncomfortable, reminders of the lack of sexual control. Or moral values of their parents, particularly their mothers, who

were deemed as sinful or unchaste. The rigors of discipline, enforcement and punishment under repressive practices driving Catholic doctrine at that time may have granted an entitlement to cure the social ills, problems, and products of sexual immorality as manifested by the children in these institutions. This entitlement and authority, which were endorsed by the silence and collusion of the agents of the state, sealed the fate of thousands of children.

So that's so. Wait, it's kind of dope though that if you having sex with your Catholic wife, the children that you have after somehow do not change the fact that you're chased. But if you are not in a Catholic marriage and you have a child, yeah, that is evidence of you not being chased, even though any children are evidence of you not being chased. Chased. Yeah, No, if it's within a Catholic relationship, it's fine. If it's not,

the children are guilty and need to go to prison. Um. So the question now becomes, as we've alluded to, what were these schools like in practice? Well, if you know anything about the Catholic church for the last I don't know, two thousands of years. You've probably assumed that it involved a lot of child molestation. So if you can we get an air horn for child molestation. Yeah no, I like that, like a solemn, mournful lairhorn. No no, no no, you want like a sad tromboe and you want like more.

It actually seems more disrespectful to do the more more more than Yeah, when we're talking about shout molestation, Um, you are broken? Okay, Yeah, that's the theme of the show. I think it should just be like one of those like like crash sounds like you know what I mean? What if we like sing a little? What if we're like, let's talk about rape, baby, let's talk about the Catholic Let's talk about rape. Let's talk about nuns and pretty rape, Let's talk about rape. There we go. I think it works.

I think we got an I think we got an album. I once again think I don't get paid enough. Wait, how about this one. It's a cal flick summer. Don't leave your kids with a priest. It's a kath kath lick summer. I don't know how to continue it, but you know, we've got we've got enough. This is the start of the cruel Summer summer? Is that Jaylor Swift? No, that's not Taylor. That's older than that. Okay, sorry, the

Cruel Summers? Are there a couple anyway? Let's talk about one of the inmates in one of these industrial schools. Des Murray, arrived at the Art and Industrial School in Dublin when he was twelve and a half years old. He'd been born in nineteen forty one, the son of a Yeah, prime hard time, that's twel he's ready, a twelve and a half year old man. Get him in here. Um. He'd been born in nineteen forty one the son of an unmarried mother and was almost immediately taken from her

and thrown into the system. We discussed in our Georgia Tan episode how up until like the seventies in the US, it was very common for single mothers to have their children taken from them straight away without any kind of recourse. That happened here to god knows how many women. And then the Georgia Tan episodes, you were saying that they were like a lot of fake signing the way like you know, that's what you were signing, and that was happening when like Carter was in office not that long ago.

Here in Ireland it was worse because not only were children separated from their mothers, but both were put in church run prisons. So here's Death's experience of this system from a rite up in the Irish Examiner. Artaine was a concentration camp. He says quietly. I was singled out by two brothers to sadists. My biggest regret is that I didn't kill those two bastards. One was particularly savage.

One fella I knew had a rheumatic heart, but brother B used to make him fill a wheelbarrow with stones and wheel it around the yard three or four times. The Artan School was run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, a worldwide religious community founded in Waterford, Ireland in eighteen o two. Their goal was to educate poor Catholic boys and ed you to expect. They have a long history of allegations of sexual abuse, and a quote again from

the Irish Examine are here. Dez witnessed sexual abuse in Artaine, but did not encounter it directly himself. I remember seeing a brother on the landing and he was spotting the boys, He says, they carefully chose their victims. You wouldn't see the boys going into the brother's room, but sometimes you'd see them running out screaming. They chose the vulnerable ones. Valentine Walsh was not as fortunate, and he went to

St Joseph's Industrial School of Charlie, County Kerry. So while des just witnessed sexual abuse, Valentine was sexually and physically assaulted at St Joseph's from the ages of nine to thirteen. Valentine, Yeah, and the article of Valentine shows a photograph of himself as a little kid. He's seven, it's the day of his first communion um. And yeah, he's a nice little boy in a suit with his his hair and til done up. But he's very much not smiling. From the article,

he doesn't ever remember a reason to smile. All Valentine remembers is the terror, a locked door, a darkened room, and three Christian brothers who sexually and physically abused him. This is the world that lay in wait for the little boy in the commune group of nineteen sixty and Saint Joseph's Industrial School. The first memory I have of being sexually abused by Brother D. Was when I was nine or ten, says Valentine. He would take me into his own classroom in the evening when it was empty,

he would lock the door behind me. He recalls how it happened and how brother D prepared the room for this hell. I remember the blackboard and the wind in the classroom and used by Brother D to block off the windows. Other clippings in newspaper were on the windows and blocked off any site into the classroom. The clippings in the blackboard prevented anyone from the outside looking in.

We were locked in and they were locked out. So that's what happened to the boys in this was a mix of physical abuse that kid recalls like a kid with a bad heart being forced to wheelbarrow around rocks just because one of the brothers of say this, and like mass child rape. That's what happens to a lot of the boys in these schools. Now, what happened to Valentine and Deza's mothers. You know they're both taken from

their mothers, their single moms, at an early age. They don't know, They have no idea where their mothers wound up. Because the Catholic Church considered their mothers to be dangerous criminal influences. There is a fairly decent chance, though, that both mothers were sent to what we're called the Magdalene laundries, now officially called them sisters. It's about to be. It's about to be, and it's also about to involve the game mouse trap oddly enough, so officially called yeah just

just just wait, Sophia. Oh, you're gonna have a good time with this one. So officially called the Magdalene asylums. These were essentially prisons for unwed mothers. They had their roots in the mid seventeen hundreds in a campaign by the church to put so called fallen women, who were often sex workers to work. Um now, this was actually a rare joint Catholic and Protestant Effrica. It's really quick though. It's in the name sex workers. What do you mean

to put sex workers to work? Honest God fearing working? Yeah, but not giving him another job. That's fucking rude. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty rude religion. Um Now, I should note that when the Magdalene asylums started, because this kicks off in the seventeen hundreds, Ireland still under the UK. This starts is actually a very rare joint Protestant and Catholic effort, which tells you how much about Irish society at all levels despised single mothers and English society.

The first of these institutions was actually run by the Protestant Church of Ireland, the Magdalene Asylum for Penitent Females in Dublin. Now, there was a worry on the time that prostitution was on the rise. Wayward women who were willing to have sex outside of marriage and get pregnant outside of wedlock were thought to be in danger of

becoming sex workers. So when I say these fallen women were sex workers, off and they were just women who wanted to have sex with people they weren't married to, that was the same thing at the time. Fearing this, parents started sending their unwed daughters to the Magdalene asylums because they were worried, like, your daughter looks at a boy, you send her there, or your daughter gets pregnant, you send her there. Either way you're worried your daughter might fuck,

you send her to the Magdalene Asylum. Now the goal here was twofold. First, it was to hide the shameful fact that a woman in the family had gotten pregnant or had been having sex without a husband. And second, it was hoped that time in the asylums would rehabilitate sinful sex and baby havevers. Initially, inmates were only meant

to be incarcerated for limited periods of time. They would be sentenced to several years, during which they would learn a respectable profession so that when they left they'd be able to avoid the horrific sin of having consensual sex for money. However, the work they did at the Magdalene asylums made money for the church, and as decades and eventually centuries passed, the Magdalene Asylums became institutions within the

Irish Catholic Church. From a write up and history dot Com quote, the stints the prison sentences grew longer and longer women were off sent there were often charged with redeeming themselves through lace, making, needlework, or doing laundry. Though most residents had not been convicted of any crime, conditions

inside were prison like. Redemption might sometimes involve a variety of coercive measures, including shaven heads, institutional uniforms, bread and water, diets, restricted visiting, supervised correspondence, solitary confinement, and even flogging writes a story in Hell and j self. So that's good. I love a casual flogging you didn't expect. Yeah yeah, an adult tasks woman live in your life getting flogged for not washing clothes fast enough because you winked at

a boy when you were fifteen. Yes, also like so fucked up. You were just like maybe giving like blow jobs and ship and now you have to learn how to needle point. Yeah. Yeah, it's not great and I don't want someone to force me to do that. Like, those are really different skills. They are very different skills. Um, both can involve needles, but only if your partners into sounding so initially honestly, I mean hand iye. A coordination is important in both, it is, Yeah, but that's probably

where the similarity ends. They're like, they're both like basketball in that both needle point and blow jobs a lot of similarities to basketball, which is why NBA players give such famously good blow jobs. Yeah, so that's why they Paul Lebron King James King King James, because job, that's what that documentary song My Milkshake brings all the Boys to the Art was about Lebron James. I will not

be so good at blow jobs. And you know what else, that's the reason that you know he has a little bit of a bald spot on the top of his head. Job happen. Don't come for his hair line, I'm not. But when he's blowing and he's on his knees, he's so good. People literally rubbed the hair off his head. Yeah, that's a compliment. That's yes, that's all I'm saying. That's evidence of how skillful he will not. I will not accept this slander of Lebron James. Famously, Jerry West hella jealous,

Hella jealous of lebron sucking skills. I just put it out there, So, yeah, why I think you were just talking about fun, consensual sex with an NBA slash blowjob star. That's fine. Um, it's not children in prison, putting children in their single mothers in prison slash rape factories. Now Sophia. Initially most of the inmates at the Magdalene laundries. They came to be known as that because doing laundry for money was one of the most common things that they

would have these women do. Um, Initially, most of these inmates went voluntarily and the focus was on rehabilitation, but over time these grew into penal institutions. As this happened, their scope change from providing rehabilitation to fallen women to taking in women who had been admitted to psychiatric institutions, women with special needs, victims of rape and assault, and girls deemed too flirtatious or tempting to men. So if you're a girl, who draw me out, my God exactly.

Pregnant teenagers continue to be sent to the laundries as well, but by the early nineteen hundreds and that to come of the Independent Republic of Ireland, things had reached a point where large numbers of women were being incarcerated for no clear reason at all. While the laundries were run by various Catholic orders, they also received support from the Irish government, who paid the Church for laundry fees. Since the Church didn't pay incarcerated women, this was basically free money.

And what was it like to live in the Magdalene laundries, Well, we don't have a whole lot in the way of detailed testimony from the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds but we know a lot about how they were in the middle of the twentieth century. I'm gonna quote again from that rite up in history dot com. Nuns ruled the laundries with impunity, sometimes beating inmates and enforcing strict rules

of silence. You didn't know when the next beating was going to come, said survivor Mary Smith in an oral history. Smith was incarcerated in the Sundays Well laundry and Cork after being raped. Nuns told her it was in case she got pregnant. Once there, she was forced to cut her hair and take on a new name. She was not allowed to talk and was assigned backbreaking work in the laundry, where nuns regularly beat her for minor infractions

and forced her to sleep in the cold. Due to the rama she suffered, Smith doesn't remember exactly how long she spent in sundays Well. To me, it felt like my lifetime, she said. Smith wasn't alone. Often women who women's names were stripped from that. You survive rape and then someone fucking puts you in prison for it, for life, for life. Yeah, Smith wasn't alone. Often women's names were stripped from them. They were referred to by numbers or

as child or penitent. Some inmates, often orphans, are victims of raper abuse, stayed there for a lifetime. Others escaped and were brought back to the institutions. Another survivor, Marina Gambled, was placed in a laundry by her local priest. She recalls being forced to eat off the floor after breaking a cup and getting locked outside in the cold for a minor infraction. I was working in the laundry from eight in the morning until about six in the evening,

she told the BBC in twos thirteen. I was starving with the hunger. I was given bread and dripping for my breakfast. So pretty bad ship. Yeah, pretty bad ship. Pretty not good ship. And the Magdalene laundries really came into being their more into their modern form in the nineteen twenties. This was the first decade of the Irish States existence, but it was also a time when rates of illegitimate childbirths started to rise precipitously. This sparked panic

among moral ninnies like the Catholic clergy. Initially, they worried that single mothers would become prostitutes somehow, locking these women up hadn't stopped prostitution or unwed motherhood, so they decided the solution to the very real struggles faced by poor single mothers was to separate them from their children and incarceerate them for life. Mother and child were kept together until the moment it was possible to semi safely separate them.

Starting in the nineteen fifties, when adoption was legalized in Ireland, that became the standard for newborn children who were in reasonably good health. Historian diffy Or Karaine told the BBC there was a viewpoint perhaps that by facilitating adoption or putting them into an industrial school, that those children were being given a chance at a better and more stable life. Uh, it's kind of um wild that these are named after Mary Magdalene when the whole thing was told that Jesus

was like pretty good friends with her. Yeah, for sure, wasn't punishing her for being a sex worker. That was kind of the whole thing and pretty positive. The vibe wasn't like fuck you. Mary Magdalene's absolutely part of these places that were like fuck you women, and then they

named them after her, like the audacity. It's bizarre because like, yeah, the whole if I am understanding that part of the Bible, right, the whole thing is that like she was a quote unquote fallen woman, but Jesus was like, I don't give a funk. I'm Jesus. Like everybody's shit, I still love you. Was his attitude, right, Yeah, I think his whole vibe was like, I don't care. You're not any better than this woman just because she's a prostitute. You got shipped,

you're going on too. It's whatever, Like I'm Jesus, I don't care, I think was his attitude. Um. But yeah, they take this as like, let's make a prison for women and their children. Um. And to be honest, the fact that they were finally adopting these children in the fifties is better than incarcerating them. But that said, as we'll talk about, they were only adopting the marketable children.

So a big part of this story is like kids with physical disabilities, right, kids with mental disabilities, um, kids who just aren't attractive as adoption candidates for whatever reason by the standards of the time, those kids still stay incarcerated because you can't you can't sell them, and it is they're selling them. They're profiting off of the adoption of these children. The Catholic Church is trafficking babies, is is what this turns into is a for profit baby

trafficking operation. Even when you're getting abused, do you have to be hot? So well? Yeah? I mean, like God, can I just be ugly if you're gonna fucking like steal my whole life? Anyway? Yep, it's good stuff. You know what won't traffic chldren for profit? These goods down services. That's the only promise we make about these goods and services. They are not child traffickers as best as we know

from googling them once. So far we're back, Oh yeah, having a great time, just talking about cool and fun things with my friends. So, from what I can tell, some of the women incarcerated in the Magdalene asylums were set free once their newborn child was taken from them, And I don't have a clear rubric for when that was done and when they were kept in It was not that was not always what was done, it was

not even necessarily often what was done. A lot of women were incarcerated for life, um and this seems to have been about money as much as it was about anything remember, the Irish state is too broke to fund any of their social services. If we can even like this is their calling this a social service. I would argue kidnapping and trafficking children and their mothers is not a service, But honest men can disagree. The Catholic Church um.

The way this was framed as like, we the church, because we so love faithful Ireland and want to facilitate the growth of our religion, will pay for the social services you know ourselves. This is a service that will provide to the state. The reality is that the Catholic Church was rich as ship and could have provided excellent social services to the entirety of the island of Ireland, but instead made a profit um off of trafficking their bodies.

Um because they didn't get that rich by giving their money away to poor countries, I think is the gist of the story. Estimates of the number of women who went through the Magdalene laundryes Ferry. Getting an accurate count has been complicated by the fact that various the various religious orders responsible for these particular crimes against humanity have a vested interest in refusing to provide archival information to historians.

As best as anyone can guess, around three thousand men were incarcerated in the laundries over a two hundred and thirty one year period. At least ten thousand of those inmates went through the system after nineteen The Magdalene laundries operated without major criticism or controversy well into the nineteen nineties. It is well worth asking why and how this was allowed.

History dot Com rights to start with, Any talk of hearts treatment at the Magdalene Laundries and Mother's homes tended to be dismissed by the public, since the institutions were run by religious orders. Survivors who told others what they had been through were often shamed or ignored. Other women were too embarrassed to talk about their past and never told anyone about their experiences. Details on both the inmates and their lives are scant now. Healthcare was obviously not

great in the laundries. The work was often unsanitary, as we've heard from some of the eyewitness accounts I read earlier. Women were often starved and beaten. Some of them died from illnesses or as a result of the physical abuse they endured. We have no idea how many perished. But we do know that in nineteen the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity decided to sell some of their land. Um Sisters of Lady of Charity sold their land anyway, but also the whole name for a place that just

souses women. When the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity sold some of their land that they had operated laundries on for profit, it was because they didn't need the land anymore. The laundries were closing down at this point. They weren't making money. Yeah, after we had beaten the greatest number of women we could beat the vacation and weren't allowed to beat anymore. We couldn't be more charity. Yeah.

And also like when you reach you know, iconic status, it's like, maybe it's time to hang up the paddle, you know, the Cat of nine Tales. Yeah, maybe you stop, you know, beating people for just a little bit to reset, you know, find out who you really would rather be beating. Yeah. Yeah, And the sisters they decided to do this. They decide they got to clear out, you know, they sell this land because they can't operate this laundry for profit anymore.

When they sell the property, they apply with the government to have a hundred and thirty three bodies moved from unmarked graves real sisters of our Lady of charity. Stuff is unmarked Matt's graves. So thankfully this was the nineties, and even though Ireland in the nineties little bit of a ship show, still the government was like, wait a minute, how many bodies in a must grave are we talking about here, and so that they were like, wait a minute, it's a lot of infants in an adult size grave.

You're not nearly enough babies in these graves. So the government quickly realizes that actually there were much more people in the unmarked grave than the sisters of our Lady of Charity. It admitted. They find the remains of at least a hundred and fifty five people there, and bonus

dead babies and hair that was an appropriate accent. Journalists dig into the matter and find only seventy five death certificates that can be traced to this grave with a hundred and fifty five dead people, which means the sisters of our Lady of Charity, we're covering up an awful lot of dead people. That's a lot of dead people. It was a bogo sales. Yeah, it was a bogo on corpses report one for the deaths of two yeah. Um. Now the nuns claimed this was all just the result

of an administrative error. Then they burned the corpses and reburied the ashes in a mass grave somewhere else. That's a go administrative error, classic nuns. You know what they always say, babies don't stay buried unless you do it twice.

It's not nice. It's one of those things you talk about, let's say the Spanish Civil War and the anarchists who murdered a lot of priests and nuns in that war, and who also would dig up graves of priests and nuns and incinerate the corpses, and you're like, what a horrible crime, And then you realize this ship was definitely happening in Spain too, and maybe people just had the church's fucking number, because most nuns and most priests in

the Catholic Church have been fucking monsters. It's the SS with better branding is the fucking Catholic Church in most of its history, in most of the places where it's operated. Um. With a notable exception of liberation theology, Catholicism in Latin America during this most recent century, which did some red ship. It's a big church, right, but like this fucking ship happened all over the place. It's not just Ireland. Ireland's

just where the documentation is best right now. It happened everywhere. Now. The women who survived and escaped often did so only after enduring profound abuse. Mary Merritt was incarcerated by the Sisters of Mercy when she was sixteen. She had been born in a workhouse to a single mother, and her own entrance to the Magdalene laundries was assured when she was caught stealing apples from an orchard. You gotta throw that bitch in prison. She stay at apples, so the

nuns renamed her Attracta, and she was. She spent the next fourteen years of her life in a convent where she was regularly beaten and abused. When she was thirty, Mary managed to escape. Unfortunately, the first person she went to for help was a Catholic priest who raped her. She became pregnant and was taken back into the system because now she's a sinful single mother. Her child was taken from her and given up for adoption without her consent.

The good news is that Mary did eventually escape forever. She found love and was married for more than fifty years. Mary's story makes the peculiar dimensions of incarceration, and the laundry is clear. She was repeatedly told you are free to leave at any time, and in the legal sense of the word, that was probably true. She was not legally incarcerated for life, but she was kept there much longer than she wanted to be because leaving was not

really an option for her most women. Not only was their physical coercion, there was the fact that a lot of these women had no money, no family support, no way of supporting themselves outside of the church. And if you leave the church and you have no money and you wind up on the street, where do you go a facility operated by the Catholic Church. If you decide the only way I can make money is by selling my body on the street because I have no other options,

where do you go? You go to the again, it's this, you're free to leave. You're not free to leave? Now again? About ten women, maybe much more, we don't know. There is no escape. Well, I mean she did get out eventually, but it took her thirty years, you know, yeah uh, And thankfully, you know, she she seems to have found true love and was married for fifty years and had a good life after that, which is about the best case scenario you get for someone who has to go

through this ship. She doesn't find her kid um. Now again, about ten thousand women were run through the laundries from about to the nineteen nineties, but that doesn't give the whole story of the scale of church incarceration in Ireland. The laundries were one set of institutions. There were also workhouses for young boys and young adult men who had been incarcerated as children. There were asylums for people with special needs. The Irish Times writes, quote in the nineteen fifties,

this country locked up one percent of its population. We incarcerated more people per head of population than Stalin did in Russia. The Catholic Church during the entirety of the Cold War incarcerated a higher percentage of the Irish population for like stealing apples and ship than Stalin did in the U s s R. Not to whitewash Stalin, but let's let's let's keep in mind the scale of the

crimes of you know, organizations opposed to the Catholic Church. Yeah, that's putting up some serious numbers, Like you come in here with a triple double when no one even knew you. Gotta like that. And one of the points a lot of people will rightly make is that the Irish, the Catholic Church and ire Ireland in its earliest decades of independence was a theocracy. It was not a free nation. They had fought so long for free and and again

that's why I started with the English. I don't want to just be harping on the just be harping on the Irish government the Catholic Church, because part of this is inevitable just by how horrifically abused they are by the English right. That's how abuse works in societies as well as individuals. If you don't actively attempt to reform it, it gets perpetuated down through the generations. Yeah, but truly

the only trickle down economics. Um, So it's important that we note that, Like, as much as we should be blaming the Catholic Church and the Irish government in this period, a decent amount of this is also on fucking Great Britain. Right, they start a lot of the they start a lot

of this cycle of trauma. Um. And in part they start because the government has no money, has this need for the church to provide services, and because being Catholic had been oppressed for so much, it's become part of the Irish identity of oppression, which led to people not being as sort of you know, and they've massacred a lot of the people who maybe would have fought for a more secular state. You know. All of this stuff factors into it. But Ireland is a fucking theocracy in

this period of time with a brutal car serrale state. Um. And yeah, it's it's it's cool, Um, it's cool and good Sophia. And on Thursday we're going to talk about how the most popular board game company in the world tied into all of this. But Sophia, that's a story for another day. May I wear my Monopoly Man out the next please dresses the Monopoly Man, stick your fingers in the operation guy and trap mice for episode two

of How the Catholic Church Murdered Ireland's babies. And anyway, let's get an air horn or two here, really buck us up. Thank you. Thank you, sad Air Horns Sofia you've got any plugables to plug? Sure? Um, it's almost a year since I released my album Father's Day. You should definitely get it. It was number one on ITUE. It's stand up, it's fun and good. Uh. You can get it anywhere that you get albums, but you can

also get it at Sophia Alexandra dot com. And as always, you can catch me on my other podcasts for Fiance with Miles Gray about and Private Parts Unknown about Love and Sex Around the World with Courtney Kosak and We Just Want to Believe. Hell yeah, so yeah, check that out? Do it? You cowards? Listen? Do you do? Um? Well, I've been Robert Evans. This has been behind the bastards.

If you want to read a book that doesn't involve mass rape by the Catholic Church, although it does involve Christian extremists, yeah, you can read my novel After the Revolution. It's available online at a t R book dot com. Uh. And it's also available wherever podcasts are found if you just look up After the Revolution, so you can find the text online line where there's both an in browser version and there's a free e pub no ads or anything. You can just get it for free, read it on

your ear reader. And there's a podcast with sound effects and ship that's After the Revolution, So check it out every Monday, right and UM, I don't know, uh, tear up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live if you get the chance. If you're on Saturday Night Live, do a send O'Connor based O'Connor. Um. All right, hey everybody. Initially I was going to plug the go fund me for the sequel to my book, UM After the Revolution, which you can find at a t r book dot com.

But um, here in the Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave and it's causing disastrous conditions, life threatening conditions for a lot of houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning. UM, particularly in the city of Salem. UM activists everywhere have been kind of gathering to try and mitigate uh, set up cooling stations, hand out cold drinks,

to do things to help people get their temperature down. UM. I want to try and raise funds for the Free Fridge of Salem, UM, which are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem. So if you go to venmo at Free Fridge Salem. That's venmo At Free Fridge Salem and send them a couple of bucks. They could really use it. Um. Local government has destroyed a number like police particularly have destroyed a number of water and

cooling stations they've set out. Um, it's you know, we're not going to be in triple digit heats for the next couple of days after I'm recording this on Monday, but it's still going to be very hot. People still need this, So please venmo at Free Fridge Salem if you have the wherewithal and the financial resources to do so one more time. The venemo is at Free Fridge Salem. Thanks