Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and every week I talk about various rebels in history, and sometimes I have to spend the entire first episode telling you about absolutely terrible things, like this week, which my guest is Sarah Marshall, who's not is on the cool People, not the terrible things side of it.
Hi say hello, I'm so happy to be here feeling deeply distressed my favorite show to feel deeply distressed on.
I feel like usually I get to be the like fun show. It's just a it's a week. It's it's a week, that's all. I'm so happy to be here.
For your you know you're extremely unfun week. I I'm I would imagine that perhaps my reputation precedes me as miss unfun topic, and I'm so happy that that's maybe.
Our producer is Sophie.
Hi, Sophie, Hi Meg Hi, Hi Sarah, Hi, Sophie.
I'm so happy to be in your presence.
I know it's so nice.
We couldn't have dinner tonight and so but instead we're zooming.
I know it was I was like, I was like, I still kind of get to see you today.
We're having. We're snacking in a dinner. I ruined their dinner plans. No, you're telling me you did not.
You did not ruin our dinner plans. This is your your innocent okay, but yeah, in a way, are we not having dinner right now?
We're so having dinner market a beautiful sunlight sugar.
Margaret is filling us up with knowledge.
Yeah, and the person who's editing the knowledge together and changing my words around. And if I ever sound like I'm stumbling or lost in thought, it's actually Ian maliciously editing to make what sound broken Hien and our music was, Oh, hi Ian. We can't go forward to everyone say Hien, hi Ian. Thanks love that. I like hearing from listeners who told me that their office looks at them funny whenever they say Hi Ian, Because listeners, you're not off the hook either. Yeah, you got it.
If you don't say Hiian, then note we'll just sit here silently. Yeah, and the rest of your life might even be fun. Yeah, that's true. It could be like a silent retreat.
Man.
That's the real money, Sophie. Can I do a podcast that's just a silent meditation where sure, I don't do anything. I would use it. I would listen to it. Cool. Our theme music for this show, not The Silent Retreat, but possibly the Silent Retreat too, is by Unwoman. And this is part two of a two parter where we are talking about the survivors and the escapees and the people fighting against the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland and against
the theocracy in Ireland more generally. And it's not going to make any sense if you don't go back and listen to part one. So oh, we'll wait, okay, and you're back. Yay. So back to the laundries. Women and girls were getting sent to the laundries of that formal sentencing. The stories of how people ended up there, each one is heartbreaking. Survivors of sexual abuse, starving girls stealing a loaf of bread, girls who were seen as promiscuous, literally
just because old men were attracted to them. You could straight up go to jail for being too pretty, which I'm just going to say, I'm glad they stopped before I came around.
I know you really and it was like it was it was really close, right they changed that line right before you were born.
Yeah, Well, I guess I was fourteen when they ended. Yeah, I don't live in Ireland because of but the the.
Lore of your beauty was just it was too much.
For them, I know, I know. So obviously they're practicing as Jesus taught, which is, if you see someone who's attractive, instead of plucking out your own eye, you should destroy the life of that child.
Jesus did say that. Yeah, remember when Jesus was like, look at the lilies of the field, do they have jobs? And that hot girl put her in jail. Yeah, exactly.
Girls with disabilities mental and physical, who couldn't live independently were sent there as well. And of course some of the unadopted children were sent there, which gets into the like there's like all these reports where the church is like, oh, and there was no racism as part of any of it.
And then like some people were like, how come white children had a close to one hundred percent adoption rate but mixed race children who were born in the laundries had a forty eight percent adoption rate and a fifty two murder rate. Yeah, I don't even know. About twenty six percent of all inmates at the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland were referred there by the state itself. And the funny thing is the girls and women were told they
were free. This was not a formal sentence. You weren't allowed to leave, and if you run away, the police will bring you back. But you're free and free of what parabends. And so if once you got out, you had to flee the country, but it wasn't illegal, you're friend.
Like Steve McQueen is freeing the Great Escape. You just gotta leap your motorcycle over the border and you're good to go.
Yeah, exactly, but not the border to northern Ireland because he got to get the soup pot and paddle fast. Yeah. Most kids were released the you could be released if someone came claiming responsibility for you, but people without families were more often stuck. Most girls spent about a year or two in confinement. I don't think that's the average. I think that's the median m h. Because the average would get fucked by all the people who were there
for sixty years or whatever. And these institutions are secret of as fuck. Is very hard to get actual information, although the Irish government did do a very in depth investigation in the past ten years. There's only one at the time report about what people saw in there. Besides like that, I was able to find at least Halliday Sutherland wrote about them in the nineteen fifties. And he is an interesting guy. I'm not going to quite put him into the like hall of cool people did cool stuff,
but I'm not going to not. And he's okay, So he's interesting here. He was interesting now he's dead. He was a Scottish Man who converted to Catholicism, and he spent his whole life doing the single best thing a cool person on this show can do. He fought tuberculosis.
Really pandering to you, I might add.
I know, I know. He founded a tuberculosis clinic in nineteen eleven, and he produced the first British public health film, which was about I think tuberculosis. He fought in World War One and then he came back and he wrote a ton of books, mostly about tuberculosis, except he also wrote a couple of books against birth control. But it gets weirder, right, it always does. We've covered birth control a bunch of times in the show, and like, look at all these amazing people. They were a little bit
eugenesis too. That was really weird and mixed up. In the early twentieth century, he his books as being anti eugenics books, and specifically they would have titles with like against Neo Malthusianism. He wrote that overpopulation isn't the problem. He explicitly named industrial capitalism as the problem. It as the ideology that profits from eugenics and a belief in
scarcity rather than abundance. So many of the heroes of the show have been on the other side of this coin since early feminism and birth control advocates often fell for eugenics, but also he fought against birth control. That sucks and politics are so fucking messy and no one wants to acknowledge it. And that's like the funniest most
interesting shit about reading. People can't see my wide eyed face as I talk about this, but like, this is a shit that I like call my friends and I'm like, oh my god, I found the opposite side of the people I'm usually writing about. Eugenicists were claiming that tuberculosis was hereditary. So by stopping tuberculodes people there's a word, I don't know, by stopping those people from having kids, we can get rid of the disease.
Oh what a great plan. There was also a guy I always think of this. I'm pretty sure there was a guy who during the age of alchemy, was like, you know, when you think about it, urine is kind of the same color as gold.
So what if.
What if gold is his some form of urine? And so he like collected so much urine and just like let it sit forever to evaporate. And I forget the details, but he basically accidentally invented the material used to create matches because it turned out extremely dehydrated urine is also very flammable for reasons I forget. Because I read about this fifteen years ago.
I wonder if there was.
Like that's science at the time, You're like, what if this what You're like, I had an idea, let's try it.
It's like people approach.
Science like they were writing a poem.
Yeah, totally. But Sutherland had a different idea about what caused tuberculosis, a wild idea that left him out. His idea was that tuberculosis was an infection.
What No, don't be silly.
Yeah, that's not the point here. It just gives you a sense of who he is. He's a Catholic doctor who hates capitalism but also hates a woman's right to choose. He is also the only writer who has ever allowed to observe conditions in the Irish laundry that I believe, specifically that in Galway, which is the centerpiece of a bunch of it, was the centerpiece of the Twam story. Galway has a lot of the stories. Also, a lot of people broke out of the Galway one, and we'll
get to that. That's my favorite part of all this. So he visited the mother and Baby home at Twam where all those infants were dying, and he visited the Galway Magdalen Laundry in nineteen fifty five. He had to get permission from the local bishop, and he had to agree to let the Mother Superior censor his report in order to be allowed in because they weren't letting journals. But the fact that he's like a good Catholic and a well known writer, and they're like, uh, maybe, but
we get to censor it. In twenty thirteen, some people stumbled upon an unedited version of his manuscript and a basement in a suitcase, and so we get to know his uncensored thoughts eventually, but even in his censored report, he was clear about the condemnation of Catholic theocracy in Ireland. This is a quote from the introduction to the nineteen fifty eight American edition, where he felt like he could be a little bit more free in what he said.
In my opinion, the Irish secular clergy have too much political power. They hold themselves aloof from their people, and are too fond of money. In the bad old days, when Ireland was subject to the foreign power of England, the parish priest was probably the only educated man in the Irish village. The foreign power has been driven out, the people are bed or educated, but the parish priest
is loath to relinquish his political power. And so some of the things that I learned from his report on the Magdalen schools, and awful lot of the girls who get out go immediately to England to get a fuck away from the theocracy that imprisoned them. Seventy percent of the girls in the Galway laundry were unwhen mothers. The others were mostly children who had grown up in industrial schools that the stolen kids attended, And so some people were born lived and died as slaves to the Catholic
Church doing laundry. Those who stay for life were called consecrated penitents. And while I'm at it as an aside, where all the priests and nuns are coming from themselves, not really always volunteers. At that point in Irish history, your family wasn't respectable unless one of your kids became a nun or a priest. So a lot of these nuns and priests. One of the reasons are so shitty and bitter is that they're bitter about the life of celibacy that got forced upon them and like the life
of whatever. Anyway, back to Halliday. One of the censored lines includes from a conversation with the Mother Superior. He asks, do the girls try to escape? She answers, last year a girl climbed a twenty foot drain pipe at the top, she lost her nerve and fell. She was fortunate she only broke her pelvis. She won't try it again. Oh God, And this is after like the Mother Superior is like, I mean, they're free, they just can't leave, right. All of the women and girls told them that they were
happy there. They knew that the Mother Superior was going to read it, and some wouldn't look him in the face when they were like, oh, yeah, I'm totally happy. This is the life I always dreamed of. But there's an interesting side to the girls dejer free but de facto imprisoned. It wasn't actually illegal to rescue the girls who were called Maggie's, which like all the best women were called Maggies.
Rue.
Yes, this is this is known.
It is known.
Yeah, even though cops would try to stop you, it was. There was no actual crime to break Maggie's out.
Right, because what would the lobby like, you cannot spring imprisoned youths from their illegal nun prison, right. So this now we get to enter some of our best heroes of the week, the like no holds barred. I just fucking love these people. The mckintee family of Galway City. Ina McKinty was a free and married woman with three sons. In nineteen sixty three, she took a job at the
Galway laundry. Like she wasn't an inmate. She just like worked there and got like paid, you know, And she told her family about the conditions there, like at dinner. She'd come home and be like Oh, that's kind of kind of fucked up, you know. So she had three preteen boys. They range from like ten to thirteen. Her preteen children hatched a scheme and they the three boys worked out all of the details about how they were going to do it and presented their plan to their parents.
And their parents looked at their kids, listened to their plan and were like, yeah, fuck it.
Let's do it. What was their plan? It's so good. And also it's worth pointing out no one knows that it's not illegal to break these people out of prison, Like this is a plan that people that when the people are doing this, they're like, we go to prison for this. They think that they are breaking someone out of prison. You got to listen to the boys. Yeah,
So one day Ina stays late at work. She has the keys to the place, right because she's a free worker, and so she opens the back door and lets four girls out. Two of her sons, the two older boys, take the girls by the hand and just like run for their fucking lives. They run past the church, terrified that they'll be seen. Dad is down the block, parked in the van he borrowed from his job with only with the youngest son poised to open the door. As soon as the OWD show up, they all jump into
the van. They like peel off the four girls and the three boys. They have to drive right in front of the laundry in order to get back home. They make it back to their house, they all pile into the one bedroom right because all of the kids share one bedroom in this house, and so now there's like seven kids in the bedroom and they just start laughing. They're just like, holy shit, we did it, you know.
And I rarely try to be like okay. I recommend you can listen to one of the suns give a first hand account on the podcast Criminal, and I highly recommend listening to him talk about this. They thought that the sky was going to fall right, that the long arm of the law is going to come down. Ino went to work the next day, nothing no word about the four girls going missing. So Dad starts working on financing.
The family is poor as shit, but they scrounged up benefactors enough to get the four girls on a boat to England. And I think there's like this subt I think the people of Galway regularly help escaped laundresses or help escape maggies get to England and like pull together, and so they scrounge up enough money and they get the four girls sent out, and then they're like, well,
that went really well. We should do it again. So they did it again, and then they did it a third time, and then they did it a fourth time, the exact same plan, four different times. Fifteen girls. Yeah, finally the laundry figured out what happens, so they sent Ina mcintry a certified letter with her wages and notice
of termination. Oh no, and like and it's not like nothing, right, it's like a family that's pouring enough that the mom has to work, and we thought we were going to prison, right yeah.
And yeah, I love that there's so little they can do.
Yeah, And so they like went and like apparently like guinness had just hit the scene, and they like went and got a Guinness and cracked open a Guinness and it was like so carbonated that the beer hit the ceiling.
And then the like.
And and as more girls would escape, so they couldn't keep doing that anymore, right, But as more girls would escape, they'd show up at the Mick and Try House where they were whisked away to freedom, posthumously, Ino was granted freedom of the City of Galway, basically like the keys of the city. They're like, hey, you're a hero, and her son says it's the proudest day of his life, second only to the days where his kids were born.
Mm hmm.
There's a plaque in Galway in honor of Ena and of a local playwright who wrote a play exposing the horrors of the laundry.
I feel like so many stories the heroic figure is like Area Mom. Yeah, totally, especially like Marey of Love Canal to.
Wait, I don't I Love Canal is Love Canal.
It is the first super fund site, and super fun sites were created as a concept, and like cleaning up after you know, massive pollution was created as a concept because an Area mom was like, hey, my kids go to that school, and just like hell, yeah, you know Area Mom. Yeah, the unsung hero of history. And one of the themes I keep returning to is how hard I have to work to find women in history. Not this episode, almost everyone involved in the story, both good and bad,
girls of them. But yeah, we can't steal credit from women for doing horrible things as well.
Yeah, but if you're a woman and you've had credits stolen from you. I recommend a mace. You can't go wrong. They come in all different types. I personally have a fondness for the Gothic mace, which is flanged. It's particularly useful for bashing in armor. If you're facing an armored opponent, a mace might be a very good tool. And that's the only ad. And we're back. So most of the girls and women who escape these places, they do it themselves. Dinah Crowen was sent to a laundry at eight years
old by foster parents. She's possibly the youngest Magdalene. Although every time I read something it's like the youngest or the first, or any support superlative. I'm always like, I'm going to find another one who's younger. But whatever, she was sent at eight years old. She worked there barely fed. They got two meals a day. She woke up, went to mass, went to work doing laundry for the city government. No breaks, none's a company. You the toilet, then evening prayer,
then clean the dormitory, then sleep. She was left handed, and God knows you should never be left hand in front of a nun. They forced her to work right handed and beat her constantly for not perfectly folding laundry that she was folding with her non dominant hand. No one was allowed to talk to each other. The girls were encouraged to snitch each other out constantly, and they
were fed two meals a day. When she was twelve or thirteen, she had like the only person she talked to really was the girl in the bed next to her. I believe it's two physical beds that are apart, and they whisper late at night, and they come up with plants. And she never learns this girl's name, but they break out together. These two were the two who took the laundry out to the van. So they took the laundry out to the van, got in the van. I believe.
I think they probably hid in the laundry baskets because I kept reading this is like one of the main ways that girls were break out, as in the laundry baskets. But I watched this woman tell her story, and she didn't give the details. But that's my guess. I always one of the details of prison breaks. Oh someday, yeah, exactly. So her and her accomplice split up and she never sees her again. And you can tell that there's like sorrow in her voice when she's eighty and talking about
this right, that she never sees her accomplice again. And then she walks a fucking hundred miles to Doublin by herself. How old is she at this point? Twelve or thirteen different versions of the story I give different ages. She eats raw turnips that she pulls out of the field, She drinks from roadside wells, and the main people who take care of her, who help her are the travelers, which are well, they're they're traveling in horse drawn carriages and they give her tea and they help her on
her way to freedom. And so she goes from basically like caravans site to care van site that's where she stays each night. And they knew she was like, hey, I'm on the run from the nuns. And then the travelers who are actually mostly Catholic, right, But they're like, yeah, of course, we're not going to fucking turn you into the fucking nuns. Because as I keep going on and on about the show, I swear I'm going to cover
a different country soon. There's a difference between Catholic as a cultural identification and Roman Catholic adherence to the hierarchy and just as an aside, the Irish Travelers are a distinct ethnic group within Ireland that finally want its acknowledgment as such in twenty seventeen. It's not exactly known when they became culturally distinct from the rest of Irish culture. The various guesses they differ by literally thousands of years.
It is possible that they are pre Celtic. It is possible that they split off in the sixteen fifties when Cromwell invaded. It's amazing to not know, I know something so may here it kind of I don't know. I love that we can't figure everything out through carbon dating. Yeah, And it's like and I think the main way that people are trying to figure it out right now is is like DNA testing, genetic testing and stuff. And it's like,
but that's not answering everything, right, because it's not. It's there is some like DNA difference variation, right, but overall you're talking about a different culture within Irish culture, you know, right. So these are the people will help her until she gets to Dublin, when at some point she tries to like get on a bus and the bus drivers like you and got him money. Get the fuck off, right, So she walks one hundred fucking miles. No one came after her, no one was looking for her. She gets
to Dublin. She goes up to a dorman and she's like, hey, where can I stay? And he's like, why do you have any money? And she's like no, and he sends her to a hostel and gives her enough money for the hostel and she started a new life. She stayed religious, but she has no nice words to say about the people kept her in captivity, And when she was interviewed about it when she was eighty, she had one message she wanted to get through to the audience. So I
just feel like it's like worth repeating. Whether you're a man or a woman, or a boy or a girl, everybody is equal. This is what she wants you to know, because she's fucking cool. Okay, She's just cool, And she's not the only person who broke out. In the nineteen fifties, there was a mass escape from the Galway the Galway laundry by a workman's ladder, where thirty women made it out, some of them which I know. I think I read a couple different times the numbers of people who are
at these things. I think that's like most are all of the girls, and so these things where they're like, oh, everyone's happy to be here, Like, motherfucker, thirty people just broke out. No one's happy to be some muction liberal arts colleges. Yeah, totally. We just drop out one by one, not all together generally. Yeah, some of these thirty women were recaptured. Some made it to Dublin or England with
help from families who gave them money in clothes. This is where I get the like belief that Galway had a culture of like, yeah.
We.
You see something, you don't say something. You know, you see something, you help it makes sense. Yeah, And others got out in laundry baskets or climbed down from the roof and heavy rain like you do in heavy rain, it's like harder for people to follow you. It's like one of the direct action tips with Margaret. One of the things that I learned by doing forest defense is that if the police are chasing you, you always run uphill.
And the reason is that you always want to get away more than someone wants to catch you and running uphill is really really annoying. Yeah, yeah, God, I'm gonna remember that. Yeah. In nineteen ninety three, this is like the last escapee that I'm aware of. There was a girl named Jenny who doesn't give she's alive. She does not give her real or last name to the press
about this. She broke out of the laundry at fifteen And this is the same laundry I think that Shenad O'Connor was at, because Snead O'Connor was at the last one to close, and this Jenny was at the last one to close. She had tried to escape time after time, and each time she was brought back by the police, even though you know she was free. This woman is basically my age now, like she's in her early forties. Wow. And she was an inmate at the last laundry in Ireland.
She'd been sent into the system when she was nine or ten by a dying mother. Six years later, she stole some money from the nun's office, then bribed her fellows with fruit. She didn't spend the money on this, She had it all fucking planned out. She gets some money, she bribes her fellows with fruit so that she could be near the front door when the mother superior came in. And then when the mother superior came in, she just fucking ran through that old lady like it's like what
she talks about. She's like, I don't think I pushed her too hard. She didn't, She didn't go flying. She totally just fucking like just fucking knocked that lady flat and kept running neck and then just took off. And her theory, which proved true, is that kids run faster than.
Adults, especially old nuns who set around abusing children all day.
Yeah, so she sprinted two fucking miles before she stopped to collect herself. Her uniform would give her away, so she shoplifted some jeans and a shirt and slept in a park. She made her way to the port. The next day she bought tickets to England and she went off to London, not knowing a fucking soul in the world. This was really hard, right, They really fucked her by putting her in this situation. She told the Irish Times, who sent sort of the cuss words she's about to say.
The nuns were bitches and cunts, but London on your own. The convent was a breeze compared to living homeless in London. But so she had a rough go of it for a good long while. But eventually her and her kids moved to a small town in rural Island, where she lives to this day. And I think she's found some peace. The last laund go ahead. Sorry, god, no.
This reminds me of something I believe, which is women can survive anything, but should we have to totally?
Totally? Yeah? Like, and it's it's like all of the she had to commit crimes in order to get away, right, And I'm sure people would use this against her. You're like, oh, you stole from the nuns, you shoplifted jeans, you like, did all kinds of stuff to survive in London, you know, like yeah, when she was nine, she was given to a hell nightmare land. Yeah, like right, fuck do you want?
Right? And it feels like one of the you know, one of the more horrible things about aspects of history like this is that the things you have to do to survive being placed in the category you're placed in by society are then used to reinforce people's document about why you should be there.
Yeah, And I think that's probably why she's not like, you know, like the article I read where she's talking about it, her photo is her back turned, you know, and she's not using her name, just like people would get mad that she talks about the stuff that she had to do in order to fucking survive, you know. Yeah, and yeah, so the last laundry in Ireland was probably the last Magdalen laundry that in the world. I don't know whatever, anytime I'm like the last, the first, I've
been over this bunch of times. I just hate it. It was closed on the twenty fifth of September nineteen ninety six in Waterford, a city in the South Feast of Ireland, and.
Which is like that's the year the bird Cake came out, you.
Know, yeah, totally, Like I was in I don't remember if I went to high school in nineteen ninety six or nineteen ninety seven, but because I'm bad at math, but like, yeah, like I.
Were like having sentient political thoughts at that age.
Yeah, you know, they were bad ones, but yeah, but they were thoughts.
But right, but yes, the idea of like this within our lifetimes is uh, yeah, astounding, totally. Yeah, at this point it makes I believe it.
And so we're talking about runaways from the fifties, and we're talking about runaways who are like, you know, young middle aged people now you know. Yeah, And it would have happened without fanfare, the last closure, and it would have been memory Hold, probably except when the Sisterhood sold the building, which they sold because they like couldn't account for some debts or something. They also couldn't account for all the bodies in the graveyard. Nuns never can can
they They're like, oh, who put that there? There was like fifteen bonus corpses. Oh my god. And it became a scandal. Right in twenty eleven, the government put together a thousand page report detailing the nightmare of the laundryes, with a call for apologies and reparations. You'll be shocked. This is gonna prepare yourself for the most shocking news of the week. The US has done no such thing.
There have been no acknowledgments, and the US isn't apologize. No, we certainly don't pay reparations, even though we're entirely built on anyway. We don't have any money. It's in it's all tied up in unusable weapons. Honey, Yeah, totally and not cool weapons. This isn't an ad break god. No, not the real genius laser or anything like that.
No.
And you want to know how I know. One of the ways that I know that it was never about helping women besides, of course all the things that they did to women, because of how they ended most Magdalen laundries, especially in the US, they shut down in the nineteen sixties. And this wasn't because like the US was like a women are people and we shouldn't get treated this way, right, They shut down because of the automated washing machine.
Ah, I want to go. I want to go walk around the block because it's like, right, of course, we like never realized that we should stop being really evil. We're like, oh my god, this has stopped being profitable. Got a king cartoon.
Yeah. See the fact that an industrialized economy doesn't work as well with chattel slavery as an agricultural one. And there are many.
Many racists in the North, and there's all the immigrants you can maim up in New York City, Yeah, totally, or steal and self at a profit. There's so many things you can so so many ways to derive profit. Yeah, that's yeah.
I'm so sad the uh the automatic washing machine I now know about. I've spent a while researching the history of the washing machine after this. The electric ones have been around for a while, but like automated ones and like stop and go and are like fancy or whatever. They hit the scene in the nineteen fifties and they destroyed the profit margin on the laundries. And in Ireland the laundry is kept going using washing machines because home washing machine adoption was slower and.
Because your white skut wider. If you have a kidnapped teenage girl, press the button.
Yeah, yeah, totally. In twenty thirteen, the government of Ireland issued a formal apology to survivors and started paying out compensation. The religious institutions involved have kept documents sealed and have refused to help compensate their victims, and so it's like all on the government or whatever, you know. In twenty eleven, the town of Ennis put up a plaque in honor of the not the victims of it, the perpetrators of it.
The town of n has put up a plaque in honor of the Sisters of Mercy, not the cool band, but the Order of Nuns with the plaque specifically honored them for their for profit no due process torture prison. It didn't phrase it that way. It was about like helping wayward souls or whatever the fuck. I believe all Sisters of Mercy plaques should just say, what's a I listened to Sisters of Mercy once a week at least, and how do I not know any Sisters of Mercy lyrics?
Off of the top of my head. Here you come, your marching men with callers wrapped around. There you go. That's what the Sisters of Mercy plaques should say. And if you want a custom plaque, are we are? We? Did you get the custom plac sponsorship, Sophie.
I mean don't.
Doesn't that automatically happen with a podcast like this?
I think so. But if we don't, if we're not paid by custom plaques, then fuck custom plaques. You should only get pre manufactured plaques with specific trait sayings on them, like women fear fish and men dot dot dot. That's a really popular plaque. I like that.
I love the idea of ending something with men dot dot dot. We just haven't figured it out yet. Metare from Mars. Women are from dot dot dot dot.
We don't know. Yeah, women are from Ellipsis. And if we are a sponsor by custom plaques, then I take it back and you should get plaques that say anything you want. Did you know you can just get custom plaques and then install them around the city and people will think that they're legitimate. They could say anything you want. Custom plats are recently affordable. Wow, here's some other ads and we're back.
Hi.
Hello, I want to talk about the most famous survivor of the Magdalen laundries. His recent death is the thing that spurred me into research in the first place. I was like totally, like, I've done so many Ireland episodes lately, and I've been like, I'm moving to talk about other places, and then I don't know. How was it for you when you heard shnado Connor die? You did an episode
about shnado' connor. You're wrong by Shnado Connor, like only a couple months ago, right, yeah, like three months ago, I think.
And I it was, as you said, you have listened to me in this episode more recently than I have been myself hearing what I said in it. But I believe that, you know, we ended up talking about how you know, we ended it on a really hopeful note, and I remember quoted, you know, one of her recent songs, and I don't. It's not as if I feel like this is a reversal of that, because no, I think whatever piece you're able to find in your life is points the way toward hope for everybody, and it is
worth recognizing. But I guess I think what my first coherent thought was that the American media is also to blame in all this, and that we did things to her that we could never make right, not that we tried.
I think that that is absolutely true. Yeah, so this isn't going to be a deep dive in Shnad O'Connor. Those are available worth looking into. I liked you wrong about shnado' connor. People probably figured out that out by now. I would argue Shinead O'Connor was famous for three things, and I'm going to do this in order of what
I knew about her. One having a shaved head, two having one of the strongest voices God has ever put onto this earth, and three ripping up a picture of the Pope on live TV and having everyone get mad about it and not understand what she was doing.
Yeah, as immortalized on the Mark McGrath hosted VH one's one hundred Most Shocking Moments in Rock.
I mean, like it's funny because I'm like, what belongs there, doesn't belong to be shamed and yelled at. But it was a certainly an effective and eye opening and shocking thing that happened.
It was, although I will say, because I have recently gone back and studied Mark McGrath's delivery, that it was like framed kind of as if it was like too dangerous to ever watch that footage again. God, and an you know it's not exactly eating the head off of a bat or whatever that was.
I mean, that's the like that story is up there with like Marilyn Manson removing his ribs. To me, I don't know what's true. Yeah, well actually I think that the bad thing might be true and the rib thing isn't, but like it's just.
A mythologys Yeah, but yeah, that I don't know, and that it felt like it also, you know, if you become notorious for one moment of your career, which many people do, then like that always flattens you know, the whole of who you are as a person.
Yeah. Yeah, And then people like always yelled at her for being a good artist. She talks about this sometimes. This is I'm now offscript. She would talk about this sometimes where she was like, people get mad at me for being vulnerable, but I'm I'm an artist. That is my job. My job is to like channel emotions, right, and like, you shouldn't have to be have a thick skin in order to create art. In fact, specifically having a thin skin is useful for the creation of art.
And like, one of the things that I think about again and again and how she was treated, I mean, society is doing to her, what American society and media did to her, what Irish society did about respectability, politics and shit. She like, she was diagnosed as bipolar, and so she would like told people she was like, oh,
I was diagnosed as bipolar. But then she got second and third and fourth opinion and all the other opinions were like, you don't have a fucking bipolar Like, but because she was honest about something she was going through, everyone was like, ah, it's crazy, bitch, you know, And not that anyone who had bipolar deserved to have what happened to her. What happened to her. But okay, so to me, what stands out about Shnada Connors that she was two things. So she was a fighter and she
was a seeker. She was a fighter against inequality and oppression everywhere she saw it. And I think theologically she was a seeker. She never lost faith in the Divine, which most of her life she referred to as the Holy Spirit, even though she spent her entire life fighting against the end institutions that wielded the Divine like a cudgel. At the end of her life, her name was Shuhata Sadakat because her theological journey led her, like so many
people that I've covered on this show, to Islam. I'm using the name Shanade here because it seems like she accepted that as a usable name for her right including at the end of her life like that. That's my understanding. I hope I'm not being disrespectful. And she was the middle child of five. She was born in nineteen sixty
six to a Catholic family. Her father was the chairperson of the Divorce Action Group, which was dedicated to trying to allow divorce in the Republic of Ireland, because we really only scratched the surface on the theocratic bullshit about Ireland. Her mother was abusive to her, and when she was fourteen or fifteen, she was caught shoplifting. So her father paid the nuns to take her to a Magdalen laundry. And she claims, and I believe her, that he did
not know what a nightmare of the place was. He thought he was doing what was right to help his daughter get back on the straight and arrow, right and okay. And then one of the things I'm really mad at the press about, I'm just like mad about everything about the way that Shenad O'Connor stories talked about. When I was like researching about her time in the Magdalen laundries, all the surface level stuff you find is all about
how positive it is. It's all like, oh, you know, like the nun like she got special treatment and one of the nuns like gave her a guitar and gave her music lessons and stuff. You know, Oh great, And clearly these people did not ask Shnad O'Connor her opinion about what happened to her. She told the Irish son quote. We were girls in there, not women, just children really, and the girls in their cried every day. It was a prison. We didn't see our families. We were locked in,
cut off from life, deprived of a normal childhood. We were told that we were there because we were bad people. Some of the girls had been raped at home and not believed. One girl was in because she had a bad hip and her family didn't know what to do with her. She does specifically say that she doesn't consider her experience their abuse because it wasn't nearly so bad
as the earlier days of the laundries. But I mean whatever, if she misbehaved, she was sent up as punishment to sleep in the room with the older dying penitence, like the concentrated penitence. She worked unpaid as a laundress. One nun there gave her first guitar and set up with music lessons as if she and they talk about this because it's like basically, it's like, look at this ungrateful bitch is like mad at the Catholic church. But they're
the ones who gave her her start. She wouldn't have been a pop star if it wasn't for the mane not trauma. What could she have written all those songs about. Yeah, it was a really trauma. I mean, like, certainly she didn't have complex PTSD that people often misdiagnos as these other personality disorders. Heavens now. She was released after eighteen months, because most most girls were. She was released to a boarding school, and soon enough she became a pop star.
Her cover of Nothing Compares to You a Prince Song became the number one song worldwide in nineteen ninety.
Also the number one song I listened to the first time I fell in love with a complete moron in two thousand and six.
Hell yeah, I can't believe you're talking about your spouse that way. I didn't like Shinead O'Connor much when I was a teenager, but I do now. My tastes have evolved and gotten better, but I always but I was like so torn because I loved her image. Right. She had fucking boots, she had a shaved head, she was a no apollo like. I loved everything about the aesthetics she was selling, and like or I perceived as being whatever. She wasn't actually out there trying to make a book.
You know, she was actually really fucking authentic, and I think that that came across, you know, which is why people liked to try and get money out of her. But she used that platform. She took incredible amounts of risk to be in the public eye that we we don't know how she died, but I'm sure that the way she was treated impacted her health. Is I think that I don't want to make assumptions about how she died, but you.
Know, being kicked around by the public does tend to shorten your lifespan in one way or another.
Yeah, and she did it to help people like that? Is she fucking like like I just like she took the hit so that other people didn't have to. She immediately used the attention she got to draw attention to other issues. In nineteen eighty nine, she appeared at the Grammys for the first time I think maybe the only time. I'm not actually sure, and Rap had been excluded from being televised. They had finally like condescended to give Rap a like award Best Rap Album, but they were like, oh,
we can't like televise. It's just this flash in the pan thing for you know, people of color or whatever. I'm sure they didn't use that terminology, and so Shinad O'Connor performed with the Public Enemy logo painted on her shaved head. And I love her.
I know.
It's so fucking cool, I know. And there's all these like photos of her just like hanging out with punks while wearing a like by any means necessary, Malcolm XX shirt. You know whose spiritual journey she followed essentially, you know, Malcolm X. We've covered him a little bit on this show. Started off as sort of being like, whodwinked by a Khan religion the Nation of Islam and ended up actually
Islamic and the Nation of Islam killed him for it. Uh. Anyway, and all of this time she's reading about the church, and I actually had assumed. I was like, oh it was people say that the pope thing was about child abuse, but it's actually probably about her own experiences. It was actually about the child abuse. She read about the child abuse scandals that weren't broken widely yet, but people fucking knew, you know. Oh yeah, And so she read about the
rampant pedophilia and the church. So she went on Saturday Night Live in nineteen ninety two, she did an acoustic cover of a Bob Marley song called War. She took her abusive mother's photo of the pope out and ripped it up, staring at the camera and saying, fight the real enemy. And everything went great for her and everyone
realized they just needed a wake up call. She was universally reviled, nearly universally reviled, like even like Bob Dylan didn't stand up for her, but like Chris Christofferson did, and she was right. The child abuse scandals, the cash for Kids programs, and the horrors of the laundry had yet to be revealed to the world, so people didn't know what the fuck she was on about. You know, it seemed like someone going up and just like attacking
a religious symbol. And as far as I can tell, this is the first widely viewed statement about the abuse in the Catholic Church. And it seems too gets completely bounced off people. Yeah yeah, and uh yeah. Losing her megastartom didn't stop her from singing, It didn't stop her from fighting, It didn't stop her from her seeking her theological wisdom. And want to I want to talk a little bit about how okay from She wrote an article about some of this stuff in the Washington Post in
twenty ten. I'm gonna quote the very people who say they are the keepers of the Holy Spirit are stamping all over everything. The Holy Spirit truly is. Pope Benedict criminally misrepresents the God we adore. We all know in our bones that the Holy Spirit is truth. That's how we can tell that Christ is not with these people who so frequently invoke him. Irish Catholics are in a
dysfunctional relationship with an abusive organization in Ireland. It is time we separated our God from our religion and our faith from its alleged leaders. All I regretted was that people assumed I didn't believe in God. That's not the case at all. I'm Catholic by birth and culture and would be the first at the church door if the Vatican offered sincere reconciliation, and like that makes sense that that's like the one thing. She was like, ah shit.
People thought it was like I hate God thing, you know, so it'd be like, no, I hate the Pope. It was a picture of the Pope that was you know, right, well, right, I guess this idea that tearing up a picture of the Pope. I feel like still in the like I feel like still in the Mark McGrath presentation of it's the idea that it's somehow like sacrilegious, dangerous, right vaguely satanic, and it's like the Pope is a guy. Yeah, just a guy. Yeah, you know, totally.
Yeah.
So Shineida Connor didn't live as long as she could have. She died in July twenty twenty three at fifty six years old, but she lived fully and like, yeah, she was married four times. She had four children, not necessarily with those it doesn't line up smoothly. She released like ten albums. She continued to tour and continued to fight for basically everything work, fighting for work with basically every
musician with enough integrity to have her. And then some of my favorite stories that came out was that at one point, after she gained some weight, she called up a trans charity and was like, Hey, I've got all these clothes that some trans girl might need that don't fit me anymore. Do you want them? And another trans charity she called and anonymously donated all over makeup. So
just fucking on the right side of everything. Yeah, she wrote three different popes to request excommunication from the church.
For a while, she joined an independent Catholic organization that had no loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church, and then in twenty eighteen, she converted to Sunni Islam with a ceremony performed buying a mom named Umar Al Khadri, who champions abortion access in Ireland and organizes Muslims to protect protest isis Just in case anyone was like, ah, she in case some Islamophobia makes people think that, well, hopefully anyone who just listened to this episode doesn't think that
Islam is inherently more conservative than any other religion. But yeah, okay, any last thoughts on Shinead O'Connor before I get to the last topic. Yeah, I mean, I guess I am. I love her.
I feel like we as a society generally punish people who tell the truth pretty harshly, especially if they are among the first to try and do it. And yeah, I just hope that we can take better care of souls like her. Yeah, and I'm sure people listening have the power to help do that totally.
And when you hear a bandwagon attacking someone about some nonsense, it's not a good bandwagon totally. Yeah. So one final thought about Irish folks fighting against the theocracy, and it's one that people in the US should probably take particular note of. Right now. Abortion state illegal in Ireland for almost a century after independence, with limited abortion services legalized
in twenty nineteen. Well okay, like really limited a little bit before that, but currently abortion up to the twelve weeks is legal in the Republic of Ireland, which brings us to our final cool people, I want to shout out on the show all of the groups that organized to help thousands of Irish people travel to to have the ability to control their own bodies, and between nineteen sixty eight and two thousand and eight, an estimated is the same number I apparently I don't know how to read.
One hundred and fifty thousand people from the Republic of Ireland and fifty three thousand people from Northern Ireland traveled to England and Wales to be able to express bodyly autonomy and have access to abortion services. And the people who did that, who helped them get there, by and large, were Irish feminists in exile. Because how bad do you have to fuck up? As a recently free colony that people seeking in freedom have to go to the fucking
country that you just had to break up with God. Yeah, it's really embarrassing, isn't it. Yeah, And there's this like people get like matt at Nat O'Connor because like she Nad O'Connor always supported Irish independence and Irish unification. She wasn't like, hooray the IRA during the troubles, was like always the good guys, right, m but that's fair, that's probably the position I take. But at one point.
It's hard to find a good guy in an ongoing civil war at a certain point.
Yeah, and there's like people, I'm still going to be like overall, I'm more on this side, right, But at one point she made a statement that was like it would be better for Ireland to have stayed with England than to become the theocracy it became. And I'm paraphrasing, and people were like, oh, she hates Irish independence. Like she has been very consistent that she is pro Irish independence. She is making a point about how Ireland didn't become free,
it became pawns of the Catholic Church anyway. So you've got the Irish Women's Support Group which was founded in the early nineteen eighties, and they sent funds. They met women at airports and escorted them to clinics. The code name is you'd call a number in England and ask for Amelda, which is the kind of like the Jane Collective, which was an underground abortion clinic in Chicago and the night late nineteen sixties, early seventies. You'd like call and
ask for Jane. Basically this is the same thing. You call and ask for Amelda, and the Ameldas would show up and meet you at the airport and they would wear red skirts so that they knew that the folks coming from Ireland could recognize them, and they would like you'd stay with them. They'd come with you to the clinic. They'd just like help take care of everything, and if you didn't have enough money for the abortion, they'd give
you enough money for the abortion. And they raised the money by what they call the usual ways quote letters to charities, begging letters to the rich. Among us sponsored swims, walks and benefits. What are the swims like? I don't know, and I'm really annoyed because I ran across two different references that were just like, oh, you know, like a charity swim and I'm like, is that a thing?
Let's do more charity swimming in this country. That sounds great. One has to swim more as it is.
Yeah, it's true, Yeah, all right, all right, if you're listening to this, start a charity swim for anything. MACES for people who need access to abortions. Maybe abortion access for the people who need access to abortions. But if things get bad enough, maces and then not everyone in the Irish. The Irish Women' Support Group was in England.
A lot of them, the auxiliaries were in Ireland and they would pass out information about how to get abortion access on the other island, and they'd put up stickers in all the public bathrooms everywhere. And they started doing this one. This was hella illegal for like a decade or more. They were running around passing out pamphlets about how you can access to abortion services, which was crazy illegal. In nineteen ninety five, it became legal to tell people
about abortion access in other countries. Basically around the turn of the millennia, you have this slow move away where people are like, wait, what if we were, if we were a proper country, will remain our own laws instead of just listening to the church. Because in twenty eighteen, the Irish people voted overwhelmingly to overturn their eighth Amendment,
which banned abortion. It's still not great. It's hard to get an abortion after twelve weeks, but it is better than what twenty five million women in the US live with acts because twenty five million in the US live in states without access to abortion services. Because this is my fun, not cheery, but hopefully we can Okay. My note I'm ending on is that theocracy is on the rise in the US, and it is not the Catholic Church this time. It is evangelical Christian like Christian nationalists.
And this is a decentralized enemy, which in some ways is harder to confront, but confront it we will, and we're going to win. Yeah, we are, huh, especially if everyone has maces crucial. That's that's my Uh. Cool people who fought theocracy.
So what's an interesting one thinks it's beautiful. A lot a lot of bad shit, but a lot of cool shit too.
Yeah. I like about halfway through, I was like, oh my god, I really this is not usually the direction I try and take things. But it's like when I do an episode about like people breaking out of prison, I can just be like prison, prison's bad, and people
are like, yeah, prison sucks. You're like in jail, right, And so I feel like when I want to talk about people thirty people escaping out down a ladder, you know in Galway and Shinead O'Connor ripping up a letter to the Pope, I don't want people to just be like yeah, like I mean, like Pope sucks. He like tells peop what to do. That like sucks. What if we were like free and cool and Nikasius or whatever, you know, And like I feel like it's like the
context was darker than usual. That's all I'm gonna say.
It was.
But I that felt I don't know, I felt genuine hope and excitement and determination at the end. So there you go, oh good, yeah, because it's it's nice to be told, you know, hey, this is what things get to. Yeah.
Yeah, Sare you have anything you'd like to uh mentioned here at the end?
Hmmm. If it's warm where you are, try chopping up a watermelon and putting it in the blender and then you can drink that or maybe mix it with some vodka. It's perfect watermelon drink.
Watermelon's the best Magpie. Anything you got tofu?
I like tofu. You gotta put it in the press first if you're gonna if you're gonna store a fry tofu. If you think you hate tofu. I used to hate tofu, but it has to be seasoned and you have to cook it right. But once you know, and it's like all you want. I used to know someone with tofu time tattooed on their knuckles. If you're listening, I like your tattoo. I love tofu too. An I'm on substack and you can google me. Hell yeah, what you got? Sophie Lickterman food?
I would like to plug Magpie? What food am I going to plug? What food am I going to plug? That?
I love so much?
Oh? But I don't know how to pronounce it. I don't want to mispronounce it on there.
I'm gonna plug asa E bowls because I think they're awesome and refreshing and delicious and are usually vegan and gluten free, which is nice for people that I either have food allergies and are usually dairy free, also nice for all, nice for All's what I'm saying yeah. And then I would like to plug my dog Anderson, whose photos I post on social media. You know where to find me. She's cute.
See you next week. Bye bye.
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