The Magdalene Laundries are a prominent part of Irish social history, which operated as philanthropic, lay institutions in the 1700s. The Religious Orders took ownership of the institutions in the mid-1800s until the last laundry closed in 1996. The running of the institutions became increasingly punitive, ensuring psychological and physical control of the "penitents" through strict regimes to encourage compliance. These institutions formed part of an "architecture of containment" (Smith, 2009), used by the Irish State and Religious Orders to incarcerate girls and women who were deemed to be immoral, including unmarried mothers, victims of sexual assault, and girls referred through the criminal justice system. The Irish State and Religious Orders are gatekeepers of the "official" archives related to the Magdalene Laundries, restricting all access to the data; this gatekeeping has contributed to an ongoing silencing and marginalization of the women's experiences (O'Mahoney-Yeager and Culleton 2016).
The Religious Orders have not released records for women entering the laundries after 1900. The archives of the Laundries are heavily restricted, pointing to the role of the Irish State and Religious Orders as gatekeepers of information, and participants in, continued gendered silencing towards these survivors (O'Mahoney-Yeager & Culleton, 2016). As a result, the history of the Magdalene Laundries continues to be contested, and the voices of survivors marginalized.
The Waterford Memories Project is an oral history project, documenting survivor narratives of the Magdalene Laundries and associated institutions in the South-East of Ireland. This paper will draw on the oral history testimony of survivors, alongside a critical analysis of current political developments, which are attempting to further suppress related institutional archives for a period of 30 years. This paper will consider the contemporary legal and ethical challenges brought from academics and survivor groups to the Government to halt the suppression of this data and will consider how the power dynamics between the historical and collective memory constructed by the Irish State and Religious Orders opposes the testimony of the Magdalene survivors.
