British Crime Historians Symposium

'At home with the Empire in historical criminology'

'The Stories We Tell: Or, why can’t we remember the Magdalene Laundries?'

Industrial schools, asylums, Mother and Baby Homes, and Magdalene Laundries were once vast islands of abandonment marking the Irish social landscape. They are closed now, but their legacies linger, and the Irish have been in a protracted period of historical reckoning, seeking justice for the past. In this presentation, I focus on the enormous amount of cultural output and social discourse regarding Magdalene Laundries. Where once there was silence there now seems to ceaseless objection to this past. There are hit movies, best-selling books, BBC dramas, podcast sleuths, break out poems, and much more, all dealing creatively with the Laundries as an ugly part of our past. There is a curiously persistent pattern in these aesthetics and historical narratives, which is amenable to critical and sociological analysis. Following the work of Gillian Rose, I explore why we continue to see this history, which we are supposedly confronting, persistently reimagined? And ask what story remains untold? And what lessons remain unlearned? And most importantly, what role has history – that slow and patient enquiry of the past – in the search for justice?