Growing into Freedom

Professor,

The Magdalenes may have been unpleasant places, for sure - however, their closure is much more likely to be the result of factors other than growth.

At the time of their heyday, Ireland was to all intents a closed, almost totalitarian, society. Eamonn de Valera ran it as a fiefdom as much as a nation, abetted, to the shame of the Church, by clerics such as the late Dr. John McQuade, sometime Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. The passing of the de Valera/McQuade era, which had seen, inter alia, the Irish become one of Europe's greatest consumers of white bread for no reason other than Dev's insistence that they grow wheat instead of potatoes, was as much responsible for the end of the Magdalene culture as economic growth.

You may not be aware that Peter Mullan, the Scottish director of 'The Magdalene Sisters', is a committed Trotskyite and close political associate of Tommy Sheridan, the former 'convenor' of the Trotskyite Scottish Socialist Party. That's another prism through which his movie should be viewed.