Coming clean about Ireland’s ‘Maggies’

It was one of Ireland’s darkest secrets: Over the course of the 20th century, tens of thousands of poor Catholic women were banished to a lifetime of servitude in church-run asylums because they were unwed mothers or had committed other “moral crimes.” The women were forced to work unpaid for eight to 10 hours a day, seven days a week, in commercial laundries that served some of Ireland’s biggest institutions.

The plight of these women, who lived in what were known as the Magdalene asylums, is the subject of an award-winning film by director Peter Mullan called “The Magdalene Sisters,” which makes its U.S. debut Friday in Los Angeles and New York.

A Scottish-born actor who won critical acclaim in Ken Loach’s “My Name Is Joe,” Mullan wrote the screenplay for “The Magdalene Sisters,” setting the drama in the swinging 1960s. “At the time, everyone assumed that women were attaining greater freedom,” he said, “but in Ireland, just the opposite was happening.”

Mullan said he got the idea for his film after watching the British documentary “Sex in a Cold Climate” directed by Steve Humphries, which detailed the stories of four former Magdalene inmates. Mullan later came to meet more than 100 of these women, who were dubbed “Maggies.”

The last of the Magdalene asylums closed in 1996, he said, a victim of economics.

The movie has played well in Europe, Mullan said, including Ireland, where “almost one in four has seen the film.”

And how has the Catholic Church reacted?

“When the film opened at the Venice Film Festival, they condemned it completely, saying I was a liar,” Mullan recalled. “Then in October, when we opened in Ireland, the church said nothing, absolutely nothing. Then this year ... the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland took out a half-page review of the film which recommended that every Catholic in the country see the film. I nearly choked on my cornflakes.”

-- Robert W. Welkos