IRELAND
The Telegraph (United Kingdom)
How did the Irish go from being the pluckiest and funniest people in Europe to the most boring and self-pitying?
By Brendan O’Neill Politics
Last updated: February 7th, 2013
Whatever happened to the Fighting Irish? Once upon a time, the inhabitants of the wild, rocky patch of land next to Britain were considered among the hardiest in Europe, liable to laugh in the face of misfortune or possibly punch it square between the eyes. Now – as the publication of yet another official report into yet another “shameful episode” in Irish history confirms – the Irish have become Europe’s great moaners, the nation-state equivalent of teenagers who never stop banging on about how hard they have it. From craic-loving fist-throwers to couch-hogging therapy seekers in the space of one generation… has any people on Earth ever transmogrified as speedily and wholly as the Irish?
Ireland’s latest report into its own horrible history focuses on the Magdalene laundries: harsh, punishing institutions through which an estimated 10,000 so-called “wayward” women passed between 1922 and 1996. Written by Senator Martin McAleese following a long inquiry, the 1,000-page report describes the nasty things some of these women experienced.
Now, there is no doubt the Magdalene laundries were unpleasant places, as was every youth correctional facility in Christendom in the 1940s and 50s (the period when the laundries were at their harshest). But even so, the shock-horror headlines that have greeted the new report don’t tally with the report’s own findings. Irish commentators tell us the inhabitants of the laundries were “slaves” or “prisoners”, subjected to “lifelong pain”. But actually, the report found that 35 per cent of the women stayed in the laundries for just three months or less; 60 per cent stayed less than a year; and many of the women chose to enter the laundries – they “volunteered through impoverishment”. What’s more, the report found no evidence whatsoever of sexual abuse in the laundries, which calls into question at least one scene in the much-lauded 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters, which showed fat nuns perving over naked, crying girls in a laundry shower.
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