Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. I'm
Speaker 1: your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and every week I talk about
Speaker 1: various rebels in history, and sometimes I have to spend
Speaker 1: the entire first episode telling you about absolutely terrible things,
Speaker 1: like this week, which my guest is Sarah Marshall, who's
Speaker 1: not is on the cool People, not the terrible things
Speaker 1: side of it.
Speaker 2: Hi say hello, I'm so happy to be here feeling
Speaker 2: deeply distressed my favorite show to feel deeply distressed on.
Speaker 1: I feel like usually I get to be the like
Speaker 1: fun show. It's just a it's a week. It's it's
Speaker 1: a week, that's all. I'm so happy to be here.
Speaker 2: For your you know you're extremely unfun week. I I'm
Speaker 2: I would imagine that perhaps my reputation precedes me as
Speaker 2: miss unfun topic, and I'm so happy that that's maybe.
Speaker 1: Our producer is Sophie.
Speaker 3: Hi, Sophie, Hi Meg Hi, Hi Sarah, Hi, Sophie.
Speaker 2: I'm so happy to be in your presence.
Speaker 3: I know it's so nice.
Speaker 2: We couldn't have dinner tonight and so but instead we're zooming.
Speaker 3: I know it was I was like, I was like,
Speaker 3: I still kind of get to see you today.
Speaker 1: We're having. We're snacking in a dinner. I ruined their
Speaker 1: dinner plans. No, you're telling me you did not.
Speaker 3: You did not ruin our dinner plans. This is your
Speaker 3: your innocent okay, but yeah, in a way, are we
Speaker 3: not having dinner right now?
Speaker 2: We're so having dinner market a beautiful sunlight sugar.
Speaker 3: Margaret is filling us up with knowledge.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the person who's editing the knowledge together and
Speaker 1: changing my words around. And if I ever sound like
Speaker 1: I'm stumbling or lost in thought, it's actually Ian maliciously
Speaker 1: editing to make what sound broken Hien and our music was, Oh,
Speaker 1: hi Ian. We can't go forward to everyone say Hien,
Speaker 1: hi Ian. Thanks love that. I like hearing from listeners
Speaker 1: who told me that their office looks at them funny
Speaker 1: whenever they say Hi Ian, Because listeners, you're not off
Speaker 1: the hook either. Yeah, you got it.
Speaker 2: If you don't say Hiian, then note we'll just sit
Speaker 2: here silently. Yeah, and the rest of your life might
Speaker 2: even be fun. Yeah, that's true. It could be like
Speaker 2: a silent retreat.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: That's the real money, Sophie. Can I do a podcast
Speaker 1: that's just a silent meditation where sure, I don't do anything.
Speaker 1: I would use it. I would listen to it. Cool.
Speaker 1: Our theme music for this show, not The Silent Retreat,
Speaker 1: but possibly the Silent Retreat too, is by Unwoman. And
Speaker 1: this is part two of a two parter where we
Speaker 1: are talking about the survivors and the escapees and the
Speaker 1: people fighting against the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland and against
Speaker 1: the theocracy in Ireland more generally. And it's not going
Speaker 1: to make any sense if you don't go back and
Speaker 1: listen to part one. So oh, we'll wait, okay, and
Speaker 1: you're back. Yay. So back to the laundries. Women and
Speaker 1: girls were getting sent to the laundries of that formal sentencing.
Speaker 1: The stories of how people ended up there, each one
Speaker 1: is heartbreaking. Survivors of sexual abuse, starving girls stealing a
Speaker 1: loaf of bread, girls who were seen as promiscuous, literally
Speaker 1: just because old men were attracted to them. You could
Speaker 1: straight up go to jail for being too pretty, which
Speaker 1: I'm just going to say, I'm glad they stopped before
Speaker 1: I came around.
Speaker 2: I know you really and it was like it was
Speaker 2: it was really close, right they changed that line right
Speaker 2: before you were born.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, I guess I was fourteen when they ended. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't live in Ireland because of but the the.
Speaker 3: Lore of your beauty was just it was too much.
Speaker 1: For them, I know, I know. So obviously they're practicing
Speaker 1: as Jesus taught, which is, if you see someone who's attractive,
Speaker 1: instead of plucking out your own eye, you should destroy
Speaker 1: the life of that child.
Speaker 2: Jesus did say that. Yeah, remember when Jesus was like,
Speaker 2: look at the lilies of the field, do they have jobs?
Speaker 2: And that hot girl put her in jail. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Girls with disabilities mental and physical, who couldn't live independently
Speaker 1: were sent there as well. And of course some of
Speaker 1: the unadopted children were sent there, which gets into the
Speaker 1: like there's like all these reports where the church is like, oh,
Speaker 1: and there was no racism as part of any of it.
Speaker 1: And then like some people were like, how come white
Speaker 1: children had a close to one hundred percent adoption rate
Speaker 1: but mixed race children who were born in the laundries
Speaker 1: had a forty eight percent adoption rate and a fifty
Speaker 1: two murder rate. Yeah, I don't even know. About twenty
Speaker 1: six percent of all inmates at the Magdalen Laundries in
Speaker 1: Ireland were referred there by the state itself. And the
Speaker 1: funny thing is the girls and women were told they
Speaker 1: were free. This was not a formal sentence. You weren't
Speaker 1: allowed to leave, and if you run away, the police
Speaker 1: will bring you back. But you're free and free of
Speaker 1: what parabends. And so if once you got out, you
Speaker 1: had to flee the country, but it wasn't illegal, you're friend.
Speaker 2: Like Steve McQueen is freeing the Great Escape. You just
Speaker 2: gotta leap your motorcycle over the border and you're good
Speaker 2: to go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, but not the border to northern Ireland because
Speaker 1: he got to get the soup pot and paddle fast. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Most kids were released the you could be released if
Speaker 1: someone came claiming responsibility for you, but people without families
Speaker 1: were more often stuck. Most girls spent about a year
Speaker 1: or two in confinement. I don't think that's the average.
Speaker 1: I think that's the median m h. Because the average
Speaker 1: would get fucked by all the people who were there
Speaker 1: for sixty years or whatever. And these institutions are secret
Speaker 1: of as fuck. Is very hard to get actual information,
Speaker 1: although the Irish government did do a very in depth
Speaker 1: investigation in the past ten years. There's only one at
Speaker 1: the time report about what people saw in there. Besides
Speaker 1: like that, I was able to find at least Halliday
Speaker 1: Sutherland wrote about them in the nineteen fifties. And he
Speaker 1: is an interesting guy. I'm not going to quite put
Speaker 1: him into the like hall of cool people did cool stuff,
Speaker 1: but I'm not going to not. And he's okay, So
Speaker 1: he's interesting here. He was interesting now he's dead. He
Speaker 1: was a Scottish Man who converted to Catholicism, and he
Speaker 1: spent his whole life doing the single best thing a
Speaker 1: cool person on this show can do. He fought tuberculosis.
Speaker 2: Really pandering to you, I might add.
Speaker 1: I know, I know. He founded a tuberculosis clinic in
Speaker 1: nineteen eleven, and he produced the first British public health film,
Speaker 1: which was about I think tuberculosis. He fought in World
Speaker 1: War One and then he came back and he wrote
Speaker 1: a ton of books, mostly about tuberculosis, except he also
Speaker 1: wrote a couple of books against birth control. But it
Speaker 1: gets weirder, right, it always does. We've covered birth control
Speaker 1: a bunch of times in the show, and like, look
Speaker 1: at all these amazing people. They were a little bit
Speaker 1: eugenesis too. That was really weird and mixed up. In
Speaker 1: the early twentieth century, he his books as being anti
Speaker 1: eugenics books, and specifically they would have titles with like
Speaker 1: against Neo Malthusianism. He wrote that overpopulation isn't the problem.
Speaker 1: He explicitly named industrial capitalism as the problem. It as
Speaker 1: the ideology that profits from eugenics and a belief in
Speaker 1: scarcity rather than abundance. So many of the heroes of
Speaker 1: the show have been on the other side of this
Speaker 1: coin since early feminism and birth control advocates often fell
Speaker 1: for eugenics, but also he fought against birth control. That
Speaker 1: sucks and politics are so fucking messy and no one
Speaker 1: wants to acknowledge it. And that's like the funniest most
Speaker 1: interesting shit about reading. People can't see my wide eyed
Speaker 1: face as I talk about this, but like, this is
Speaker 1: a shit that I like call my friends and I'm like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, I found the opposite side of the
Speaker 1: people I'm usually writing about. Eugenicists were claiming that tuberculosis
Speaker 1: was hereditary. So by stopping tuberculodes people there's a word,
Speaker 1: I don't know, by stopping those people from having kids,
Speaker 1: we can get rid of the disease.
Speaker 2: Oh what a great plan. There was also a guy
Speaker 2: I always think of this. I'm pretty sure there was
Speaker 2: a guy who during the age of alchemy, was like,
Speaker 2: you know, when you think about it, urine is kind
Speaker 2: of the same color as gold.
Speaker 1: So what if.
Speaker 2: What if gold is his some form of urine? And
Speaker 2: so he like collected so much urine and just like
Speaker 2: let it sit forever to evaporate. And I forget the details,
Speaker 2: but he basically accidentally invented the material used to create
Speaker 2: matches because it turned out extremely dehydrated urine is also
Speaker 2: very flammable for reasons I forget. Because I read about
Speaker 2: this fifteen years ago.
Speaker 1: I wonder if there was.
Speaker 2: Like that's science at the time, You're like, what if
Speaker 2: this what You're like, I had an idea, let's try it.
Speaker 1: It's like people approach.
Speaker 2: Science like they were writing a poem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. But Sutherland had a different idea about what
Speaker 1: caused tuberculosis, a wild idea that left him out. His
Speaker 1: idea was that tuberculosis was an infection.
Speaker 2: What No, don't be silly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's not the point here. It just gives you
Speaker 1: a sense of who he is. He's a Catholic doctor
Speaker 1: who hates capitalism but also hates a woman's right to choose.
Speaker 1: He is also the only writer who has ever allowed
Speaker 1: to observe conditions in the Irish laundry that I believe,
Speaker 1: specifically that in Galway, which is the centerpiece of a
Speaker 1: bunch of it, was the centerpiece of the Twam story.
Speaker 1: Galway has a lot of the stories. Also, a lot
Speaker 1: of people broke out of the Galway one, and we'll
Speaker 1: get to that. That's my favorite part of all this.
Speaker 1: So he visited the mother and Baby home at Twam
Speaker 1: where all those infants were dying, and he visited the
Speaker 1: Galway Magdalen Laundry in nineteen fifty five. He had to
Speaker 1: get permission from the local bishop, and he had to
Speaker 1: agree to let the Mother Superior censor his report in
Speaker 1: order to be allowed in because they weren't letting journals.
Speaker 1: But the fact that he's like a good Catholic and
Speaker 1: a well known writer, and they're like, uh, maybe, but
Speaker 1: we get to censor it. In twenty thirteen, some people
Speaker 1: stumbled upon an unedited version of his manuscript and a
Speaker 1: basement in a suitcase, and so we get to know
Speaker 1: his uncensored thoughts eventually, but even in his censored report,
Speaker 1: he was clear about the condemnation of Catholic theocracy in Ireland.
Speaker 1: This is a quote from the introduction to the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight American edition, where he felt like he could
Speaker 1: be a little bit more free in what he said.
Speaker 1: In my opinion, the Irish secular clergy have too much
Speaker 1: political power. They hold themselves aloof from their people, and
Speaker 1: are too fond of money. In the bad old days,
Speaker 1: when Ireland was subject to the foreign power of England,
Speaker 1: the parish priest was probably the only educated man in
Speaker 1: the Irish village. The foreign power has been driven out,
Speaker 1: the people are bed or educated, but the parish priest
Speaker 1: is loath to relinquish his political power. And so some
Speaker 1: of the things that I learned from his report on
Speaker 1: the Magdalen schools, and awful lot of the girls who
Speaker 1: get out go immediately to England to get a fuck
Speaker 1: away from the theocracy that imprisoned them. Seventy percent of
Speaker 1: the girls in the Galway laundry were unwhen mothers. The
Speaker 1: others were mostly children who had grown up in industrial
Speaker 1: schools that the stolen kids attended, And so some people
Speaker 1: were born lived and died as slaves to the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church doing laundry. Those who stay for life were called
Speaker 1: consecrated penitents. And while I'm at it as an aside,
Speaker 1: where all the priests and nuns are coming from themselves,
Speaker 1: not really always volunteers. At that point in Irish history,
Speaker 1: your family wasn't respectable unless one of your kids became
Speaker 1: a nun or a priest. So a lot of these
Speaker 1: nuns and priests. One of the reasons are so shitty
Speaker 1: and bitter is that they're bitter about the life of
Speaker 1: celibacy that got forced upon them and like the life
Speaker 1: of whatever. Anyway, back to Halliday. One of the censored
Speaker 1: lines includes from a conversation with the Mother Superior. He asks,
Speaker 1: do the girls try to escape? She answers, last year
Speaker 1: a girl climbed a twenty foot drain pipe at the top,
Speaker 1: she lost her nerve and fell. She was fortunate she
Speaker 1: only broke her pelvis. She won't try it again. Oh God,
Speaker 1: And this is after like the Mother Superior is like,
Speaker 1: I mean, they're free, they just can't leave, right. All
Speaker 1: of the women and girls told them that they were
Speaker 1: happy there. They knew that the Mother Superior was going
Speaker 1: to read it, and some wouldn't look him in the
Speaker 1: face when they were like, oh, yeah, I'm totally happy.
Speaker 1: This is the life I always dreamed of. But there's
Speaker 1: an interesting side to the girls dejer free but de
Speaker 1: facto imprisoned. It wasn't actually illegal to rescue the girls
Speaker 1: who were called Maggie's, which like all the best women
Speaker 1: were called Maggies.
Speaker 3: Rue.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is this is known.
Speaker 2: It is known.
Speaker 1: Yeah, even though cops would try to stop you, it was.
Speaker 1: There was no actual crime to break Maggie's out.
Speaker 2: Right, because what would the lobby like, you cannot spring
Speaker 2: imprisoned youths from their illegal nun prison, right. So this
Speaker 2: now we get to enter some of our best heroes
Speaker 2: of the week, the like no holds barred. I just
Speaker 2: fucking love these people. The mckintee family of Galway City.
Speaker 2: Ina McKinty was a free and married woman with three sons.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty three, she took a job at the
Speaker 2: Galway laundry. Like she wasn't an inmate. She just like
Speaker 2: worked there and got like paid, you know, And she
Speaker 2: told her family about the conditions there, like at dinner.
Speaker 2: She'd come home and be like Oh, that's kind of
Speaker 2: kind of fucked up, you know. So she had three
Speaker 2: preteen boys. They range from like ten to thirteen. Her
Speaker 2: preteen children hatched a scheme and they the three boys
Speaker 2: worked out all of the details about how they were
Speaker 2: going to do it and presented their plan to their parents.
Speaker 2: And their parents looked at their kids, listened to their
Speaker 2: plan and were like, yeah, fuck it.
Speaker 1: Let's do it. What was their plan? It's so good.
Speaker 1: And also it's worth pointing out no one knows that
Speaker 1: it's not illegal to break these people out of prison,
Speaker 1: Like this is a plan that people that when the
Speaker 1: people are doing this, they're like, we go to prison
Speaker 1: for this. They think that they are breaking someone out
Speaker 1: of prison. You got to listen to the boys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So one day Ina stays late at work. She has
Speaker 1: the keys to the place, right because she's a free worker,
Speaker 1: and so she opens the back door and lets four
Speaker 1: girls out. Two of her sons, the two older boys,
Speaker 1: take the girls by the hand and just like run
Speaker 1: for their fucking lives. They run past the church, terrified
Speaker 1: that they'll be seen. Dad is down the block, parked
Speaker 1: in the van he borrowed from his job with only
Speaker 1: with the youngest son poised to open the door. As
Speaker 1: soon as the OWD show up, they all jump into
Speaker 1: the van. They like peel off the four girls and
Speaker 1: the three boys. They have to drive right in front
Speaker 1: of the laundry in order to get back home. They
Speaker 1: make it back to their house, they all pile into
Speaker 1: the one bedroom right because all of the kids share
Speaker 1: one bedroom in this house, and so now there's like
Speaker 1: seven kids in the bedroom and they just start laughing.
Speaker 1: They're just like, holy shit, we did it, you know.
Speaker 1: And I rarely try to be like okay. I recommend
Speaker 1: you can listen to one of the suns give a
Speaker 1: first hand account on the podcast Criminal, and I highly
Speaker 1: recommend listening to him talk about this. They thought that
Speaker 1: the sky was going to fall right, that the long
Speaker 1: arm of the law is going to come down. Ino
Speaker 1: went to work the next day, nothing no word about
Speaker 1: the four girls going missing. So Dad starts working on financing.
Speaker 1: The family is poor as shit, but they scrounged up
Speaker 1: benefactors enough to get the four girls on a boat
Speaker 1: to England. And I think there's like this subt I
Speaker 1: think the people of Galway regularly help escaped laundresses or
Speaker 1: help escape maggies get to England and like pull together,
Speaker 1: and so they scrounge up enough money and they get
Speaker 1: the four girls sent out, and then they're like, well,
Speaker 1: that went really well. We should do it again. So
Speaker 1: they did it again, and then they did it a
Speaker 1: third time, and then they did it a fourth time,
Speaker 1: the exact same plan, four different times. Fifteen girls. Yeah,
Speaker 1: finally the laundry figured out what happens, so they sent
Speaker 1: Ina mcintry a certified letter with her wages and notice
Speaker 1: of termination. Oh no, and like and it's not like nothing, right,
Speaker 1: it's like a family that's pouring enough that the mom
Speaker 1: has to work, and we thought we were going to prison,
Speaker 1: right yeah.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I love that there's so little they can do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so they like went and like apparently like
Speaker 1: guinness had just hit the scene, and they like went
Speaker 1: and got a Guinness and cracked open a Guinness and
Speaker 1: it was like so carbonated that the beer hit the ceiling.
Speaker 2: And then the like.
Speaker 1: And and as more girls would escape, so they couldn't
Speaker 1: keep doing that anymore, right, But as more girls would escape,
Speaker 1: they'd show up at the Mick and Try House where
Speaker 1: they were whisked away to freedom, posthumously, Ino was granted
Speaker 1: freedom of the City of Galway, basically like the keys
Speaker 1: of the city. They're like, hey, you're a hero, and
Speaker 1: her son says it's the proudest day of his life,
Speaker 1: second only to the days where his kids were born.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: There's a plaque in Galway in honor of Ena and
Speaker 1: of a local playwright who wrote a play exposing the
Speaker 1: horrors of the laundry.
Speaker 2: I feel like so many stories the heroic figure is
Speaker 2: like Area Mom. Yeah, totally, especially like Marey of Love
Speaker 2: Canal to.
Speaker 1: Wait, I don't I Love Canal is Love Canal.
Speaker 2: It is the first super fund site, and super fun
Speaker 2: sites were created as a concept, and like cleaning up
Speaker 2: after you know, massive pollution was created as a concept
Speaker 2: because an Area mom was like, hey, my kids go
Speaker 2: to that school, and just like hell, yeah, you know
Speaker 2: Area Mom. Yeah, the unsung hero of history. And one
Speaker 2: of the themes I keep returning to is how hard I
Speaker 2: have to work to find women in history. Not this episode,
Speaker 2: almost everyone involved in the story, both good and bad,
Speaker 2: girls of them. But yeah, we can't steal credit from
Speaker 2: women for doing horrible things as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but if you're a woman and you've had credits
Speaker 1: stolen from you. I recommend a mace. You can't go wrong.
Speaker 1: They come in all different types. I personally have a
Speaker 1: fondness for the Gothic mace, which is flanged. It's particularly
Speaker 1: useful for bashing in armor. If you're facing an armored opponent,
Speaker 1: a mace might be a very good tool. And that's
Speaker 1: the only ad. And we're back. So most of the
Speaker 1: girls and women who escape these places, they do it themselves.
Speaker 1: Dinah Crowen was sent to a laundry at eight years
Speaker 1: old by foster parents. She's possibly the youngest Magdalene. Although
Speaker 1: every time I read something it's like the youngest or
Speaker 1: the first, or any support superlative. I'm always like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to find another one who's younger. But whatever, she
Speaker 1: was sent at eight years old. She worked there barely fed.
Speaker 1: They got two meals a day. She woke up, went
Speaker 1: to mass, went to work doing laundry for the city government.
Speaker 1: No breaks, none's a company. You the toilet, then evening prayer,
Speaker 1: then clean the dormitory, then sleep. She was left handed,
Speaker 1: and God knows you should never be left hand in
Speaker 1: front of a nun. They forced her to work right
Speaker 1: handed and beat her constantly for not perfectly folding laundry
Speaker 1: that she was folding with her non dominant hand. No
Speaker 1: one was allowed to talk to each other. The girls
Speaker 1: were encouraged to snitch each other out constantly, and they
Speaker 1: were fed two meals a day. When she was twelve
Speaker 1: or thirteen, she had like the only person she talked
Speaker 1: to really was the girl in the bed next to her.
Speaker 1: I believe it's two physical beds that are apart, and
Speaker 1: they whisper late at night, and they come up with plants.
Speaker 1: And she never learns this girl's name, but they break
Speaker 1: out together. These two were the two who took the
Speaker 1: laundry out to the van. So they took the laundry
Speaker 1: out to the van, got in the van. I believe.
Speaker 1: I think they probably hid in the laundry baskets because
Speaker 1: I kept reading this is like one of the main
Speaker 1: ways that girls were break out, as in the laundry baskets.
Speaker 1: But I watched this woman tell her story, and she
Speaker 1: didn't give the details. But that's my guess. I always
Speaker 1: one of the details of prison breaks. Oh someday, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So her and her accomplice split up and she never
Speaker 1: sees her again. And you can tell that there's like
Speaker 1: sorrow in her voice when she's eighty and talking about
Speaker 1: this right, that she never sees her accomplice again. And
Speaker 1: then she walks a fucking hundred miles to Doublin by herself.
Speaker 1: How old is she at this point? Twelve or thirteen
Speaker 1: different versions of the story I give different ages. She
Speaker 1: eats raw turnips that she pulls out of the field,
Speaker 1: She drinks from roadside wells, and the main people who
Speaker 1: take care of her, who help her are the travelers,
Speaker 1: which are well, they're they're traveling in horse drawn carriages
Speaker 1: and they give her tea and they help her on
Speaker 1: her way to freedom. And so she goes from basically
Speaker 1: like caravans site to care van site that's where she
Speaker 1: stays each night. And they knew she was like, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm on the run from the nuns. And then the
Speaker 1: travelers who are actually mostly Catholic, right, But they're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, we're not going to fucking turn you into
Speaker 1: the fucking nuns. Because as I keep going on and
Speaker 1: on about the show, I swear I'm going to cover
Speaker 1: a different country soon. There's a difference between Catholic as
Speaker 1: a cultural identification and Roman Catholic adherence to the hierarchy
Speaker 1: and just as an aside, the Irish Travelers are a
Speaker 1: distinct ethnic group within Ireland that finally want its acknowledgment
Speaker 1: as such in twenty seventeen. It's not exactly known when
Speaker 1: they became culturally distinct from the rest of Irish culture.
Speaker 1: The various guesses they differ by literally thousands of years.
Speaker 1: It is possible that they are pre Celtic. It is
Speaker 1: possible that they split off in the sixteen fifties when
Speaker 1: Cromwell invaded. It's amazing to not know, I know something
Speaker 1: so may here it kind of I don't know. I
Speaker 1: love that we can't figure everything out through carbon dating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's like and I think the main way that
Speaker 1: people are trying to figure it out right now is
Speaker 1: is like DNA testing, genetic testing and stuff. And it's like,
Speaker 1: but that's not answering everything, right, because it's not. It's
Speaker 1: there is some like DNA difference variation, right, but overall
Speaker 1: you're talking about a different culture within Irish culture, you know, right.
Speaker 1: So these are the people will help her until she
Speaker 1: gets to Dublin, when at some point she tries to
Speaker 1: like get on a bus and the bus drivers like
Speaker 1: you and got him money. Get the fuck off, right,
Speaker 1: So she walks one hundred fucking miles. No one came
Speaker 1: after her, no one was looking for her. She gets
Speaker 1: to Dublin. She goes up to a dorman and she's like, hey,
Speaker 1: where can I stay? And he's like, why do you
Speaker 1: have any money? And she's like no, and he sends
Speaker 1: her to a hostel and gives her enough money for
Speaker 1: the hostel and she started a new life. She stayed religious,
Speaker 1: but she has no nice words to say about the
Speaker 1: people kept her in captivity, And when she was interviewed
Speaker 1: about it when she was eighty, she had one message
Speaker 1: she wanted to get through to the audience. So I
Speaker 1: just feel like it's like worth repeating. Whether you're a
Speaker 1: man or a woman, or a boy or a girl,
Speaker 1: everybody is equal. This is what she wants you to know,
Speaker 1: because she's fucking cool. Okay, She's just cool, And she's
Speaker 1: not the only person who broke out. In the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: there was a mass escape from the Galway the Galway
Speaker 1: laundry by a workman's ladder, where thirty women made it out,
Speaker 1: some of them which I know. I think I read
Speaker 1: a couple different times the numbers of people who are
Speaker 1: at these things. I think that's like most are all
Speaker 1: of the girls, and so these things where they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: everyone's happy to be here, Like, motherfucker, thirty people just
Speaker 1: broke out. No one's happy to be some muction liberal
Speaker 1: arts colleges. Yeah, totally. We just drop out one by one,
Speaker 1: not all together generally. Yeah, some of these thirty women
Speaker 1: were recaptured. Some made it to Dublin or England with
Speaker 1: help from families who gave them money in clothes. This
Speaker 1: is where I get the like belief that Galway had
Speaker 1: a culture of like, yeah.
Speaker 3: We.
Speaker 1: You see something, you don't say something. You know, you
Speaker 1: see something, you help it makes sense. Yeah, And others
Speaker 1: got out in laundry baskets or climbed down from the
Speaker 1: roof and heavy rain like you do in heavy rain,
Speaker 1: it's like harder for people to follow you. It's like
Speaker 1: one of the direct action tips with Margaret. One of
Speaker 1: the things that I learned by doing forest defense is
Speaker 1: that if the police are chasing you, you always run uphill.
Speaker 1: And the reason is that you always want to get
Speaker 1: away more than someone wants to catch you and running
Speaker 1: uphill is really really annoying. Yeah, yeah, God, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: remember that. Yeah. In nineteen ninety three, this is like
Speaker 1: the last escapee that I'm aware of. There was a
Speaker 1: girl named Jenny who doesn't give she's alive. She does
Speaker 1: not give her real or last name to the press
Speaker 1: about this. She broke out of the laundry at fifteen
Speaker 1: And this is the same laundry I think that Shenad
Speaker 1: O'Connor was at, because Snead O'Connor was at the last
Speaker 1: one to close, and this Jenny was at the last
Speaker 1: one to close. She had tried to escape time after time,
Speaker 1: and each time she was brought back by the police,
Speaker 1: even though you know she was free. This woman is
Speaker 1: basically my age now, like she's in her early forties. Wow.
Speaker 1: And she was an inmate at the last laundry in Ireland.
Speaker 1: She'd been sent into the system when she was nine
Speaker 1: or ten by a dying mother. Six years later, she
Speaker 1: stole some money from the nun's office, then bribed her
Speaker 1: fellows with fruit. She didn't spend the money on this,
Speaker 1: She had it all fucking planned out. She gets some money,
Speaker 1: she bribes her fellows with fruit so that she could
Speaker 1: be near the front door when the mother superior came in.
Speaker 1: And then when the mother superior came in, she just
Speaker 1: fucking ran through that old lady like it's like what
Speaker 1: she talks about. She's like, I don't think I pushed
Speaker 1: her too hard. She didn't, She didn't go flying. She
Speaker 1: totally just fucking like just fucking knocked that lady flat
Speaker 1: and kept running neck and then just took off. And
Speaker 1: her theory, which proved true, is that kids run faster than.
Speaker 2: Adults, especially old nuns who set around abusing children all day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so she sprinted two fucking miles before she stopped
Speaker 1: to collect herself. Her uniform would give her away, so
Speaker 1: she shoplifted some jeans and a shirt and slept in
Speaker 1: a park. She made her way to the port. The
Speaker 1: next day she bought tickets to England and she went
Speaker 1: off to London, not knowing a fucking soul in the world.
Speaker 1: This was really hard, right, They really fucked her by
Speaker 1: putting her in this situation. She told the Irish Times,
Speaker 1: who sent sort of the cuss words she's about to say.
Speaker 1: The nuns were bitches and cunts, but London on your own.
Speaker 1: The convent was a breeze compared to living homeless in London.
Speaker 1: But so she had a rough go of it for
Speaker 1: a good long while. But eventually her and her kids
Speaker 1: moved to a small town in rural Island, where she
Speaker 1: lives to this day. And I think she's found some peace.
Speaker 1: The last laund go ahead. Sorry, god, no.
Speaker 2: This reminds me of something I believe, which is women
Speaker 2: can survive anything, but should we have to totally?
Speaker 1: Totally? Yeah? Like, and it's it's like all of the
Speaker 1: she had to commit crimes in order to get away, right,
Speaker 1: And I'm sure people would use this against her. You're like, oh,
Speaker 1: you stole from the nuns, you shoplifted jeans, you like,
Speaker 1: did all kinds of stuff to survive in London, you know,
Speaker 1: like yeah, when she was nine, she was given to
Speaker 1: a hell nightmare land. Yeah, like right, fuck do you want?
Speaker 2: Right? And it feels like one of the you know,
Speaker 2: one of the more horrible things about aspects of history
Speaker 2: like this is that the things you have to do
Speaker 2: to survive being placed in the category you're placed in
Speaker 2: by society are then used to reinforce people's document about
Speaker 2: why you should be there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think that's probably why she's not like,
Speaker 1: you know, like the article I read where she's talking
Speaker 1: about it, her photo is her back turned, you know,
Speaker 1: and she's not using her name, just like people would
Speaker 1: get mad that she talks about the stuff that she
Speaker 1: had to do in order to fucking survive, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and yeah, so the last laundry in Ireland was probably
Speaker 1: the last Magdalen laundry that in the world. I don't
Speaker 1: know whatever, anytime I'm like the last, the first, I've
Speaker 1: been over this bunch of times. I just hate it.
Speaker 1: It was closed on the twenty fifth of September nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety six in Waterford, a city in the South Feast
Speaker 1: of Ireland, and.
Speaker 2: Which is like that's the year the bird Cake came out, you.
Speaker 1: Know, yeah, totally, Like I was in I don't remember
Speaker 1: if I went to high school in nineteen ninety six
Speaker 1: or nineteen ninety seven, but because I'm bad at math,
Speaker 1: but like, yeah, like I.
Speaker 2: Were like having sentient political thoughts at that age.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, they were bad ones, but yeah, but
Speaker 1: they were thoughts.
Speaker 2: But right, but yes, the idea of like this within
Speaker 2: our lifetimes is uh, yeah, astounding, totally. Yeah, at this
Speaker 2: point it makes I believe it.
Speaker 1: And so we're talking about runaways from the fifties, and
Speaker 1: we're talking about runaways who are like, you know, young
Speaker 1: middle aged people now you know. Yeah, And it would
Speaker 1: have happened without fanfare, the last closure, and it would
Speaker 1: have been memory Hold, probably except when the Sisterhood sold
Speaker 1: the building, which they sold because they like couldn't account
Speaker 1: for some debts or something. They also couldn't account for
Speaker 1: all the bodies in the graveyard. Nuns never can can
Speaker 1: they They're like, oh, who put that there? There was
Speaker 1: like fifteen bonus corpses. Oh my god. And it became
Speaker 1: a scandal. Right in twenty eleven, the government put together
Speaker 1: a thousand page report detailing the nightmare of the laundryes,
Speaker 1: with a call for apologies and reparations. You'll be shocked.
Speaker 1: This is gonna prepare yourself for the most shocking news
Speaker 1: of the week. The US has done no such thing.
Speaker 1: There have been no acknowledgments, and the US isn't apologize. No,
Speaker 1: we certainly don't pay reparations, even though we're entirely built
Speaker 1: on anyway. We don't have any money. It's in it's
Speaker 1: all tied up in unusable weapons. Honey, Yeah, totally and
Speaker 1: not cool weapons. This isn't an ad break god. No,
Speaker 1: not the real genius laser or anything like that.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: And you want to know how I know. One of
Speaker 1: the ways that I know that it was never about
Speaker 1: helping women besides, of course all the things that they
Speaker 1: did to women, because of how they ended most Magdalen laundries,
Speaker 1: especially in the US, they shut down in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't because like the US was like a
Speaker 1: women are people and we shouldn't get treated this way, right,
Speaker 1: They shut down because of the automated washing machine.
Speaker 2: Ah, I want to go. I want to go walk
Speaker 2: around the block because it's like, right, of course, we
Speaker 2: like never realized that we should stop being really evil.
Speaker 2: We're like, oh my god, this has stopped being profitable.
Speaker 2: Got a king cartoon.
Speaker 1: Yeah. See the fact that an industrialized economy doesn't work
Speaker 1: as well with chattel slavery as an agricultural one. And
Speaker 1: there are many.
Speaker 2: Many racists in the North, and there's all the immigrants
Speaker 2: you can maim up in New York City, Yeah, totally,
Speaker 2: or steal and self at a profit. There's so many
Speaker 2: things you can so so many ways to derive profit. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm so sad the uh the automatic washing machine I
Speaker 1: now know about. I've spent a while researching the history
Speaker 1: of the washing machine after this. The electric ones have
Speaker 1: been around for a while, but like automated ones and
Speaker 1: like stop and go and are like fancy or whatever.
Speaker 1: They hit the scene in the nineteen fifties and they
Speaker 1: destroyed the profit margin on the laundries. And in Ireland
Speaker 1: the laundry is kept going using washing machines because home
Speaker 1: washing machine adoption was slower and.
Speaker 2: Because your white skut wider. If you have a kidnapped
Speaker 2: teenage girl, press the button.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, totally. In twenty thirteen, the government of Ireland
Speaker 1: issued a formal apology to survivors and started paying out compensation.
Speaker 1: The religious institutions involved have kept documents sealed and have
Speaker 1: refused to help compensate their victims, and so it's like
Speaker 1: all on the government or whatever, you know. In twenty eleven,
Speaker 1: the town of Ennis put up a plaque in honor
Speaker 1: of the not the victims of it, the perpetrators of it.
Speaker 1: The town of n has put up a plaque in
Speaker 1: honor of the Sisters of Mercy, not the cool band,
Speaker 1: but the Order of Nuns with the plaque specifically honored
Speaker 1: them for their for profit no due process torture prison.
Speaker 1: It didn't phrase it that way. It was about like
Speaker 1: helping wayward souls or whatever the fuck. I believe all
Speaker 1: Sisters of Mercy plaques should just say, what's a I
Speaker 1: listened to Sisters of Mercy once a week at least,
Speaker 1: and how do I not know any Sisters of Mercy lyrics?
Speaker 1: Off of the top of my head. Here you come,
Speaker 1: your marching men with callers wrapped around. There you go.
Speaker 1: That's what the Sisters of Mercy plaques should say. And
Speaker 1: if you want a custom plaque, are we are? We?
Speaker 1: Did you get the custom plac sponsorship, Sophie.
Speaker 2: I mean don't.
Speaker 3: Doesn't that automatically happen with a podcast like this?
Speaker 1: I think so. But if we don't, if we're not
Speaker 1: paid by custom plaques, then fuck custom plaques. You should
Speaker 1: only get pre manufactured plaques with specific trait sayings on them,
Speaker 1: like women fear fish and men dot dot dot. That's
Speaker 1: a really popular plaque. I like that.
Speaker 2: I love the idea of ending something with men dot
Speaker 2: dot dot. We just haven't figured it out yet. Metare
Speaker 2: from Mars. Women are from dot dot dot dot.
Speaker 1: We don't know. Yeah, women are from Ellipsis. And if
Speaker 1: we are a sponsor by custom plaques, then I take
Speaker 1: it back and you should get plaques that say anything
Speaker 1: you want. Did you know you can just get custom
Speaker 1: plaques and then install them around the city and people
Speaker 1: will think that they're legitimate. They could say anything you want.
Speaker 1: Custom plats are recently affordable. Wow, here's some other ads
Speaker 1: and we're back.
Speaker 2: Hi.
Speaker 1: Hello, I want to talk about the most famous survivor
Speaker 1: of the Magdalen laundries. His recent death is the thing
Speaker 1: that spurred me into research in the first place. I
Speaker 1: was like totally, like, I've done so many Ireland episodes lately,
Speaker 1: and I've been like, I'm moving to talk about other places,
Speaker 1: and then I don't know. How was it for you
Speaker 1: when you heard shnado Connor die? You did an episode
Speaker 1: about shnado' connor. You're wrong by Shnado Connor, like only
Speaker 1: a couple months ago, right, yeah, like three months ago,
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 2: And I it was, as you said, you have listened
Speaker 2: to me in this episode more recently than I have
Speaker 2: been myself hearing what I said in it. But I
Speaker 2: believe that, you know, we ended up talking about how
Speaker 2: you know, we ended it on a really hopeful note,
Speaker 2: and I remember quoted, you know, one of her recent songs,
Speaker 2: and I don't. It's not as if I feel like
Speaker 2: this is a reversal of that, because no, I think
Speaker 2: whatever piece you're able to find in your life is
Speaker 2: points the way toward hope for everybody, and it is
Speaker 2: worth recognizing. But I guess I think what my first
Speaker 2: coherent thought was that the American media is also to
Speaker 2: blame in all this, and that we did things to
Speaker 2: her that we could never make right, not that we tried.
Speaker 1: I think that that is absolutely true. Yeah, so this
Speaker 1: isn't going to be a deep dive in Shnad O'Connor.
Speaker 1: Those are available worth looking into. I liked you wrong
Speaker 1: about shnado' connor. People probably figured out that out by now.
Speaker 1: I would argue Shinead O'Connor was famous for three things,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to do this in order of what
Speaker 1: I knew about her. One having a shaved head, two
Speaker 1: having one of the strongest voices God has ever put
Speaker 1: onto this earth, and three ripping up a picture of
Speaker 1: the Pope on live TV and having everyone get mad
Speaker 1: about it and not understand what she was doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as immortalized on the Mark McGrath hosted VH one's
Speaker 2: one hundred Most Shocking Moments in Rock.
Speaker 1: I mean, like it's funny because I'm like, what belongs there,
Speaker 1: doesn't belong to be shamed and yelled at. But it
Speaker 1: was a certainly an effective and eye opening and shocking
Speaker 1: thing that happened.
Speaker 2: It was, although I will say, because I have recently
Speaker 2: gone back and studied Mark McGrath's delivery, that it was
Speaker 2: like framed kind of as if it was like too
Speaker 2: dangerous to ever watch that footage again. God, and an
Speaker 2: you know it's not exactly eating the head off of
Speaker 2: a bat or whatever that was.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the like that story is up there
Speaker 1: with like Marilyn Manson removing his ribs. To me, I
Speaker 1: don't know what's true. Yeah, well actually I think that
Speaker 1: the bad thing might be true and the rib thing isn't,
Speaker 1: but like it's just.
Speaker 2: A mythologys Yeah, but yeah, that I don't know, and
Speaker 2: that it felt like it also, you know, if you
Speaker 2: become notorious for one moment of your career, which many
Speaker 2: people do, then like that always flattens you know, the
Speaker 2: whole of who you are as a person.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And then people like always yelled at her
Speaker 1: for being a good artist. She talks about this sometimes.
Speaker 1: This is I'm now offscript. She would talk about this
Speaker 1: sometimes where she was like, people get mad at me
Speaker 1: for being vulnerable, but I'm I'm an artist. That is
Speaker 1: my job. My job is to like channel emotions, right,
Speaker 1: and like, you shouldn't have to be have a thick
Speaker 1: skin in order to create art. In fact, specifically having
Speaker 1: a thin skin is useful for the creation of art.
Speaker 1: And like, one of the things that I think about
Speaker 1: again and again and how she was treated, I mean,
Speaker 1: society is doing to her, what American society and media
Speaker 1: did to her, what Irish society did about respectability, politics
Speaker 1: and shit. She like, she was diagnosed as bipolar, and
Speaker 1: so she would like told people she was like, oh,
Speaker 1: I was diagnosed as bipolar. But then she got second
Speaker 1: and third and fourth opinion and all the other opinions
Speaker 1: were like, you don't have a fucking bipolar Like, but
Speaker 1: because she was honest about something she was going through,
Speaker 1: everyone was like, ah, it's crazy, bitch, you know, And
Speaker 1: not that anyone who had bipolar deserved to have what
Speaker 1: happened to her. What happened to her. But okay, so
Speaker 1: to me, what stands out about Shnada Connors that she
Speaker 1: was two things. So she was a fighter and she
Speaker 1: was a seeker. She was a fighter against inequality and
Speaker 1: oppression everywhere she saw it. And I think theologically she
Speaker 1: was a seeker. She never lost faith in the Divine,
Speaker 1: which most of her life she referred to as the
Speaker 1: Holy Spirit, even though she spent her entire life fighting
Speaker 1: against the end institutions that wielded the Divine like a cudgel.
Speaker 1: At the end of her life, her name was Shuhata
Speaker 1: Sadakat because her theological journey led her, like so many
Speaker 1: people that I've covered on this show, to Islam. I'm
Speaker 1: using the name Shanade here because it seems like she
Speaker 1: accepted that as a usable name for her right including
Speaker 1: at the end of her life like that. That's my understanding.
Speaker 1: I hope I'm not being disrespectful. And she was the
Speaker 1: middle child of five. She was born in nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: six to a Catholic family. Her father was the chairperson
Speaker 1: of the Divorce Action Group, which was dedicated to trying
Speaker 1: to allow divorce in the Republic of Ireland, because we
Speaker 1: really only scratched the surface on the theocratic bullshit about Ireland.
Speaker 1: Her mother was abusive to her, and when she was
Speaker 1: fourteen or fifteen, she was caught shoplifting. So her father
Speaker 1: paid the nuns to take her to a Magdalen laundry.
Speaker 1: And she claims, and I believe her, that he did
Speaker 1: not know what a nightmare of the place was. He
Speaker 1: thought he was doing what was right to help his
Speaker 1: daughter get back on the straight and arrow, right and okay.
Speaker 1: And then one of the things I'm really mad at
Speaker 1: the press about, I'm just like mad about everything about
Speaker 1: the way that Shenad O'Connor stories talked about. When I
Speaker 1: was like researching about her time in the Magdalen laundries,
Speaker 1: all the surface level stuff you find is all about
Speaker 1: how positive it is. It's all like, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: like the nun like she got special treatment and one
Speaker 1: of the nuns like gave her a guitar and gave
Speaker 1: her music lessons and stuff. You know, Oh great, And
Speaker 1: clearly these people did not ask Shnad O'Connor her opinion
Speaker 1: about what happened to her. She told the Irish son quote.
Speaker 1: We were girls in there, not women, just children really,
Speaker 1: and the girls in their cried every day. It was
Speaker 1: a prison. We didn't see our families. We were locked in,
Speaker 1: cut off from life, deprived of a normal childhood. We
Speaker 1: were told that we were there because we were bad people.
Speaker 1: Some of the girls had been raped at home and
Speaker 1: not believed. One girl was in because she had a
Speaker 1: bad hip and her family didn't know what to do
Speaker 1: with her. She does specifically say that she doesn't consider
Speaker 1: her experience their abuse because it wasn't nearly so bad
Speaker 1: as the earlier days of the laundries. But I mean whatever,
Speaker 1: if she misbehaved, she was sent up as punishment to
Speaker 1: sleep in the room with the older dying penitence, like
Speaker 1: the concentrated penitence. She worked unpaid as a laundress. One
Speaker 1: nun there gave her first guitar and set up with
Speaker 1: music lessons as if she and they talk about this
Speaker 1: because it's like basically, it's like, look at this ungrateful
Speaker 1: bitch is like mad at the Catholic church. But they're
Speaker 1: the ones who gave her her start. She wouldn't have
Speaker 1: been a pop star if it wasn't for the mane
Speaker 1: not trauma. What could she have written all those songs about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a really trauma. I mean, like, certainly she
Speaker 1: didn't have complex PTSD that people often misdiagnos as these
Speaker 1: other personality disorders. Heavens now. She was released after eighteen months,
Speaker 1: because most most girls were. She was released to a
Speaker 1: boarding school, and soon enough she became a pop star.
Speaker 1: Her cover of Nothing Compares to You a Prince Song
Speaker 1: became the number one song worldwide in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 2: Also the number one song I listened to the first
Speaker 2: time I fell in love with a complete moron in
Speaker 2: two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, I can't believe you're talking about your spouse
Speaker 1: that way. I didn't like Shinead O'Connor much when I
Speaker 1: was a teenager, but I do now. My tastes have
Speaker 1: evolved and gotten better, but I always but I was
Speaker 1: like so torn because I loved her image. Right. She
Speaker 1: had fucking boots, she had a shaved head, she was
Speaker 1: a no apollo like. I loved everything about the aesthetics
Speaker 1: she was selling, and like or I perceived as being whatever.
Speaker 1: She wasn't actually out there trying to make a book.
Speaker 1: You know, she was actually really fucking authentic, and I
Speaker 1: think that that came across, you know, which is why
Speaker 1: people liked to try and get money out of her.
Speaker 1: But she used that platform. She took incredible amounts of
Speaker 1: risk to be in the public eye that we we
Speaker 1: don't know how she died, but I'm sure that the
Speaker 1: way she was treated impacted her health. Is I think
Speaker 1: that I don't want to make assumptions about how she died,
Speaker 1: but you.
Speaker 2: Know, being kicked around by the public does tend to
Speaker 2: shorten your lifespan in one way or another.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and she did it to help people like that?
Speaker 1: Is she fucking like like I just like she took
Speaker 1: the hit so that other people didn't have to. She
Speaker 1: immediately used the attention she got to draw attention to
Speaker 1: other issues. In nineteen eighty nine, she appeared at the
Speaker 1: Grammys for the first time I think maybe the only time.
Speaker 1: I'm not actually sure, and Rap had been excluded from
Speaker 1: being televised. They had finally like condescended to give Rap
Speaker 1: a like award Best Rap Album, but they were like, oh,
Speaker 1: we can't like televise. It's just this flash in the
Speaker 1: pan thing for you know, people of color or whatever.
Speaker 1: I'm sure they didn't use that terminology, and so Shinad
Speaker 1: O'Connor performed with the Public Enemy logo painted on her
Speaker 1: shaved head. And I love her.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 1: It's so fucking cool, I know. And there's all these
Speaker 1: like photos of her just like hanging out with punks
Speaker 1: while wearing a like by any means necessary, Malcolm XX shirt.
Speaker 1: You know whose spiritual journey she followed essentially, you know,
Speaker 1: Malcolm X. We've covered him a little bit on this show.
Speaker 1: Started off as sort of being like, whodwinked by a
Speaker 1: Khan religion the Nation of Islam and ended up actually
Speaker 1: Islamic and the Nation of Islam killed him for it. Uh. Anyway,
Speaker 1: and all of this time she's reading about the church,
Speaker 1: and I actually had assumed. I was like, oh it
Speaker 1: was people say that the pope thing was about child abuse,
Speaker 1: but it's actually probably about her own experiences. It was
Speaker 1: actually about the child abuse. She read about the child
Speaker 1: abuse scandals that weren't broken widely yet, but people fucking knew,
Speaker 1: you know. Oh yeah, And so she read about the
Speaker 1: rampant pedophilia and the church. So she went on Saturday
Speaker 1: Night Live in nineteen ninety two, she did an acoustic
Speaker 1: cover of a Bob Marley song called War. She took
Speaker 1: her abusive mother's photo of the pope out and ripped
Speaker 1: it up, staring at the camera and saying, fight the
Speaker 1: real enemy. And everything went great for her and everyone
Speaker 1: realized they just needed a wake up call. She was
Speaker 1: universally reviled, nearly universally reviled, like even like Bob Dylan
Speaker 1: didn't stand up for her, but like Chris Christofferson did,
Speaker 1: and she was right. The child abuse scandals, the cash
Speaker 1: for Kids programs, and the horrors of the laundry had
Speaker 1: yet to be revealed to the world, so people didn't
Speaker 1: know what the fuck she was on about. You know,
Speaker 1: it seemed like someone going up and just like attacking
Speaker 1: a religious symbol. And as far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: this is the first widely viewed statement about the abuse
Speaker 1: in the Catholic Church. And it seems too gets completely
Speaker 1: bounced off people. Yeah yeah, and uh yeah. Losing her
Speaker 1: megastartom didn't stop her from singing, It didn't stop her
Speaker 1: from fighting, It didn't stop her from her seeking her
Speaker 1: theological wisdom. And want to I want to talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about how okay from She wrote an article
Speaker 1: about some of this stuff in the Washington Post in
Speaker 1: twenty ten. I'm gonna quote the very people who say
Speaker 1: they are the keepers of the Holy Spirit are stamping
Speaker 1: all over everything. The Holy Spirit truly is. Pope Benedict
Speaker 1: criminally misrepresents the God we adore. We all know in
Speaker 1: our bones that the Holy Spirit is truth. That's how
Speaker 1: we can tell that Christ is not with these people
Speaker 1: who so frequently invoke him. Irish Catholics are in a
Speaker 1: dysfunctional relationship with an abusive organization in Ireland. It is
Speaker 1: time we separated our God from our religion and our
Speaker 1: faith from its alleged leaders. All I regretted was that
Speaker 1: people assumed I didn't believe in God. That's not the
Speaker 1: case at all. I'm Catholic by birth and culture and
Speaker 1: would be the first at the church door if the
Speaker 1: Vatican offered sincere reconciliation, and like that makes sense that
Speaker 1: that's like the one thing. She was like, ah shit.
Speaker 1: People thought it was like I hate God thing, you know,
Speaker 1: so it'd be like, no, I hate the Pope. It
Speaker 1: was a picture of the Pope that was you know, right, well, right,
Speaker 1: I guess this idea that tearing up a picture of
Speaker 1: the Pope. I feel like still in the like I
Speaker 1: feel like still in the Mark McGrath presentation of it's
Speaker 1: the idea that it's somehow like sacrilegious, dangerous, right vaguely satanic,
Speaker 1: and it's like the Pope is a guy. Yeah, just
Speaker 1: a guy. Yeah, you know, totally.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Shineida Connor didn't live as long as she could have.
Speaker 1: She died in July twenty twenty three at fifty six
Speaker 1: years old, but she lived fully and like, yeah, she
Speaker 1: was married four times. She had four children, not necessarily
Speaker 1: with those it doesn't line up smoothly. She released like
Speaker 1: ten albums. She continued to tour and continued to fight
Speaker 1: for basically everything work, fighting for work with basically every
Speaker 1: musician with enough integrity to have her. And then some
Speaker 1: of my favorite stories that came out was that at
Speaker 1: one point, after she gained some weight, she called up
Speaker 1: a trans charity and was like, Hey, I've got all
Speaker 1: these clothes that some trans girl might need that don't
Speaker 1: fit me anymore. Do you want them? And another trans
Speaker 1: charity she called and anonymously donated all over makeup. So
Speaker 1: just fucking on the right side of everything. Yeah, she
Speaker 1: wrote three different popes to request excommunication from the church.
Speaker 1: For a while, she joined an independent Catholic organization that
Speaker 1: had no loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church, and then
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen, she converted to Sunni Islam with a
Speaker 1: ceremony performed buying a mom named Umar Al Khadri, who
Speaker 1: champions abortion access in Ireland and organizes Muslims to protect
Speaker 1: protest isis Just in case anyone was like, ah, she
Speaker 1: in case some Islamophobia makes people think that, well, hopefully
Speaker 1: anyone who just listened to this episode doesn't think that
Speaker 1: Islam is inherently more conservative than any other religion. But yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: any last thoughts on Shinead O'Connor before I get to
Speaker 1: the last topic. Yeah, I mean, I guess I am.
Speaker 1: I love her.
Speaker 2: I feel like we as a society generally punish people
Speaker 2: who tell the truth pretty harshly, especially if they are
Speaker 2: among the first to try and do it. And yeah,
Speaker 2: I just hope that we can take better care of
Speaker 2: souls like her. Yeah, and I'm sure people listening have
Speaker 2: the power to help do that totally.
Speaker 1: And when you hear a bandwagon attacking someone about some nonsense,
Speaker 1: it's not a good bandwagon totally. Yeah. So one final
Speaker 1: thought about Irish folks fighting against the theocracy, and it's
Speaker 1: one that people in the US should probably take particular
Speaker 1: note of. Right now. Abortion state illegal in Ireland for
Speaker 1: almost a century after independence, with limited abortion services legalized
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen. Well okay, like really limited a little
Speaker 1: bit before that, but currently abortion up to the twelve
Speaker 1: weeks is legal in the Republic of Ireland, which brings
Speaker 1: us to our final cool people, I want to shout
Speaker 1: out on the show all of the groups that organized
Speaker 1: to help thousands of Irish people travel to to have
Speaker 1: the ability to control their own bodies, and between nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight and two thousand and eight, an estimated is
Speaker 1: the same number I apparently I don't know how to read.
Speaker 1: One hundred and fifty thousand people from the Republic of
Speaker 1: Ireland and fifty three thousand people from Northern Ireland traveled
Speaker 1: to England and Wales to be able to express bodyly
Speaker 1: autonomy and have access to abortion services. And the people
Speaker 1: who did that, who helped them get there, by and large,
Speaker 1: were Irish feminists in exile. Because how bad do you
Speaker 1: have to fuck up? As a recently free colony that
Speaker 1: people seeking in freedom have to go to the fucking
Speaker 1: country that you just had to break up with God. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really embarrassing, isn't it. Yeah, And there's this like
Speaker 1: people get like matt at Nat O'Connor because like she
Speaker 1: Nad O'Connor always supported Irish independence and Irish unification. She
Speaker 1: wasn't like, hooray the IRA during the troubles, was like
Speaker 1: always the good guys, right, m but that's fair, that's
Speaker 1: probably the position I take. But at one point.
Speaker 2: It's hard to find a good guy in an ongoing
Speaker 2: civil war at a certain point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's like people, I'm still going to be
Speaker 1: like overall, I'm more on this side, right, But at
Speaker 1: one point she made a statement that was like it
Speaker 1: would be better for Ireland to have stayed with England
Speaker 1: than to become the theocracy it became. And I'm paraphrasing,
Speaker 1: and people were like, oh, she hates Irish independence. Like
Speaker 1: she has been very consistent that she is pro Irish independence.
Speaker 1: She is making a point about how Ireland didn't become free,
Speaker 1: it became pawns of the Catholic Church anyway. So you've
Speaker 1: got the Irish Women's Support Group which was founded in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen eighties, and they sent funds. They met
Speaker 1: women at airports and escorted them to clinics. The code
Speaker 1: name is you'd call a number in England and ask
Speaker 1: for Amelda, which is the kind of like the Jane Collective,
Speaker 1: which was an underground abortion clinic in Chicago and the
Speaker 1: night late nineteen sixties, early seventies. You'd like call and
Speaker 1: ask for Jane. Basically this is the same thing. You
Speaker 1: call and ask for Amelda, and the Ameldas would show
Speaker 1: up and meet you at the airport and they would
Speaker 1: wear red skirts so that they knew that the folks
Speaker 1: coming from Ireland could recognize them, and they would like
Speaker 1: you'd stay with them. They'd come with you to the clinic.
Speaker 1: They'd just like help take care of everything, and if
Speaker 1: you didn't have enough money for the abortion, they'd give
Speaker 1: you enough money for the abortion. And they raised the
Speaker 1: money by what they call the usual ways quote letters
Speaker 1: to charities, begging letters to the rich. Among us sponsored swims,
Speaker 1: walks and benefits. What are the swims like? I don't know,
Speaker 1: and I'm really annoyed because I ran across two different
Speaker 1: references that were just like, oh, you know, like a
Speaker 1: charity swim and I'm like, is that a thing?
Speaker 2: Let's do more charity swimming in this country. That sounds great.
Speaker 2: One has to swim more as it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's true, Yeah, all right, all right, if you're
Speaker 1: listening to this, start a charity swim for anything. MACES
Speaker 1: for people who need access to abortions. Maybe abortion access
Speaker 1: for the people who need access to abortions. But if
Speaker 1: things get bad enough, maces and then not everyone in
Speaker 1: the Irish. The Irish Women' Support Group was in England.
Speaker 1: A lot of them, the auxiliaries were in Ireland and
Speaker 1: they would pass out information about how to get abortion
Speaker 1: access on the other island, and they'd put up stickers
Speaker 1: in all the public bathrooms everywhere. And they started doing
Speaker 1: this one. This was hella illegal for like a decade
Speaker 1: or more. They were running around passing out pamphlets about
Speaker 1: how you can access to abortion services, which was crazy illegal.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety five, it became legal to tell people
Speaker 1: about abortion access in other countries. Basically around the turn
Speaker 1: of the millennia, you have this slow move away where
Speaker 1: people are like, wait, what if we were, if we
Speaker 1: were a proper country, will remain our own laws instead
Speaker 1: of just listening to the church. Because in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: the Irish people voted overwhelmingly to overturn their eighth Amendment,
Speaker 1: which banned abortion. It's still not great. It's hard to
Speaker 1: get an abortion after twelve weeks, but it is better
Speaker 1: than what twenty five million women in the US live
Speaker 1: with acts because twenty five million in the US live
Speaker 1: in states without access to abortion services. Because this is
Speaker 1: my fun, not cheery, but hopefully we can Okay. My
Speaker 1: note I'm ending on is that theocracy is on the
Speaker 1: rise in the US, and it is not the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church this time. It is evangelical Christian like Christian nationalists.
Speaker 1: And this is a decentralized enemy, which in some ways
Speaker 1: is harder to confront, but confront it we will, and
Speaker 1: we're going to win. Yeah, we are, huh, especially if
Speaker 1: everyone has maces crucial. That's that's my Uh. Cool people
Speaker 1: who fought theocracy.
Speaker 3: So what's an interesting one thinks it's beautiful. A lot
Speaker 3: a lot of bad shit, but a lot of cool
Speaker 3: shit too.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I like about halfway through, I was like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, I really this is not usually the direction
Speaker 1: I try and take things. But it's like when I
Speaker 1: do an episode about like people breaking out of prison,
Speaker 1: I can just be like prison, prison's bad, and people
Speaker 1: are like, yeah, prison sucks. You're like in jail, right,
Speaker 1: And so I feel like when I want to talk
Speaker 1: about people thirty people escaping out down a ladder, you
Speaker 1: know in Galway and Shinead O'Connor ripping up a letter
Speaker 1: to the Pope, I don't want people to just be
Speaker 1: like yeah, like I mean, like Pope sucks. He like
Speaker 1: tells peop what to do. That like sucks. What if
Speaker 1: we were like free and cool and Nikasius or whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, And like I feel like it's like the
Speaker 1: context was darker than usual. That's all I'm gonna say.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 2: But I that felt I don't know, I felt genuine
Speaker 2: hope and excitement and determination at the end. So there
Speaker 2: you go, oh good, yeah, because it's it's nice to
Speaker 2: be told, you know, hey, this is what things get to. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Sare you have anything you'd like to uh mentioned
Speaker 3: here at the end?
Speaker 2: Hmmm. If it's warm where you are, try chopping up
Speaker 2: a watermelon and putting it in the blender and then
Speaker 2: you can drink that or maybe mix it with some vodka.
Speaker 2: It's perfect watermelon drink.
Speaker 3: Watermelon's the best Magpie. Anything you got tofu?
Speaker 1: I like tofu. You gotta put it in the press
Speaker 1: first if you're gonna if you're gonna store a fry tofu.
Speaker 1: If you think you hate tofu. I used to hate tofu,
Speaker 1: but it has to be seasoned and you have to
Speaker 1: cook it right. But once you know, and it's like
Speaker 1: all you want. I used to know someone with tofu
Speaker 1: time tattooed on their knuckles. If you're listening, I like
Speaker 1: your tattoo. I love tofu too. An I'm on substack
Speaker 1: and you can google me. Hell yeah, what you got?
Speaker 1: Sophie Lickterman food?
Speaker 3: I would like to plug Magpie? What food am I
Speaker 3: going to plug? What food am I going to plug? That?
Speaker 2: I love so much?
Speaker 1: Oh? But I don't know how to pronounce it. I
Speaker 1: don't want to mispronounce it on there.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna plug asa E bowls because I think they're
Speaker 3: awesome and refreshing and delicious and are usually vegan and
Speaker 3: gluten free, which is nice for people that I either
Speaker 3: have food allergies and are usually dairy free, also nice
Speaker 3: for all, nice for All's what I'm saying yeah. And
Speaker 3: then I would like to plug my dog Anderson, whose
Speaker 3: photos I post on social media. You know where to
Speaker 3: find me. She's cute.
Speaker 1: See you next week. Bye bye.
Speaker 3: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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Speaker 3: visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
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Speaker 3: your podcasts.