For lack of accountability The logic of the price in Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries

Description
Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries are now infamous for the damaging impact they had on the
lives of the women who passed through them throughout the twentieth century. The
relationship between the state and the Laundries was constituted using a deliberately
informal frame characterised by an excision of the ‘‘logic of the price’’. This wilful disregard
for the economic was significant in form and function, and was mirrored within the institutions
where the women were ‘‘accounted for’’ in ways that rendered ‘‘accounting to’’
them unthinkable. The Laundries functioned for the emerging Irish state as a tool that
helped to orchestrate a shared national habitus and to moderate the state’s own account
of the role and record of women. The way in which the relationship between the state
and the institutions was constructed almost 100 years ago continues to mute accountability
and to serve the interests of power. The closed nature of the institutions now permits an
examination of the impact of this deliberate informality.

‘‘For lack of accountability’’: The logic of the price in Ireland’s
Magdalen Laundries
Sheila Killian
University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Available online 17 April 2015
a b s t r a c t
Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries are now infamous for the damaging impact they had on the
lives of the women who passed through them throughout the twentieth century. The
relationship between the state and the Laundries was constituted using a deliberately
informal frame characterised by an excision of the ‘‘logic of the price’’. This wilful disregard
for the economic was signi?cant in form and function, and was mirrored within the insti-
tutions where the women were ‘‘accounted for’’ in ways that rendered ‘‘accounting to’’
them unthinkable. The Laundries functioned for the emerging Irish state as a tool that
helped to orchestrate a shared national habitus and to moderate the state’s own account
of the role and record of women. The way in which the relationship between the state
and the institutions was constructed almost 100 years ago continues to mute accountabil-
ity and to serve the interests of power. The closed nature of the institutions now permits an
examination of the impact of this deliberate informality. This reveals the potentially
devastating consequences of the removal of accounting ways of thinking from relation-
ships between the state and private bodies to which pivotal services have been outsourced.
Analysis of the case using a Bourdieusian frame has implications for accounting as a disci-
pline in public contexts and for the way in which we understand the limits of state
responsibility in the case of outsourced or privatised service provision and policy
formation.
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
‘‘The most successful ideological effects are the ones that
have no need of words, but only of laissez-faire and com-
plicitous silence.’’
[Bourdieu, 1990b: 133]
This paper explores the relationship between price,
accounting and accountability by examining the harmful
effects of their absence from key relationships in and
around Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, through which some
10,000 women passed from the foundation of the state to
the closure of last such institution in 1996. Bourdieu is
used to understand the careful denial of the logic of the
price between the state and the religious orders, and a wil-
ful obscuring of accountability and excision of formality in
relations between these two bodies. The strategically
arranged informality and careful casualness with which
the women were ‘re-accounted for’ systematically drew
power away from them. This solved a problem for the
emerging state, and set a pattern for its pivotal relationship
with the Catholic Church throughout the twentieth
century, enabling and obscuring the operation of these
institutions as part of Ireland’s ‘‘architecture of
containment’’ (Smith, 2007).
Magdalen homes or Laundries operated throughout
Ireland and the UK from the late 18th century as asylums,
refuges or places of incarceration for ‘‘fallen women’’
(Finnegan, 2001; Mahood, 1990; Smith, 2007). From the
founding of the Irish state in 1922, however, the Irishhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2015.03.006
0361-3682/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
E-mail address: [email protected]
Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32
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j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ aos
Laundries functioned as a repressive and repressed system
of incarceration for a wide variety of women who for one
reason or another posed a problem for society (Smith,
2007). This contrast between the way in which the
Laundries developed in Ireland and the progress of their sis-
ter institutions inthe UKafter Irishindependence is marked,
and can be traced to the strategically obscure relationship
between the new Irish state and the institutions.
Given the long period over which the Laundries oper-
ated in Ireland, it has been suggested that the harsh condi-
tions within the institutions were not problematic by
contemporaneous norms. Maeve O’Rourke, barrister for
the advocacy group Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) addresses
this question as follows: ‘‘This isn’t a case of applying
today’s standards to something that happened in the past,
and judging it by today’s moral or legal lens to be wrong.
Under the 1926 Slavery Convention, the 1930 Abolition
of Forced Labour Convention, the European Convention
on Human Rights, Ireland had an obligation . . . to inter-
vene’’ (RTE, 2012).
Similarly, accounting and accountability are not immu-
table concepts, readily migrated through history and
across different contexts. The Laundries were run as part
of religious institutions, and so were arguably subject to
different norms of accountability (Goddard & Assad,
2006). In addition, norms of accountability at the founda-
tion of the Irish state in 1922 were not the same as those
which prevailed at the closure of the last Magdalen
Laundry in 1996. The analysis below is informed by
Oakes and Young (2008) who take as the object of their
study another women-run institution in a historical con-
text, that of Hull House around the turn of the twentieth
century. Key to their analysis is the idea that the women
in Hull House modelled their public assistance around
the private roles of women, including motherhood and
other domestic roles. The fact that the nuns who ran the
Laundries referred to themselves as ‘‘mothers’’ and to the
women in their care as ‘‘children’’ may indicate a similar
dynamic at play in the Irish institutions. ‘‘The relationship
of mother or neighbor would seem to bring with them dif-
ferent conceptions of accountability than the formal, more
distant relationships central to current notions of account-
ability’’ (Oakes & Young, 2008: 773). Given this idea, it is
possible that the nuns working in the Irish Laundries
may have shared with the women of Hull House a ‘‘for-
mulation of relations as reciprocal rather than hierarchical
. . . [that] . . . may cause accountability to be more mutual or
self-critical than punitive and authoritative’’ (Oakes &
Young, 2008: 775). Within Hull House, this perspective
did not remove the need for accountability, but rather gen-
erated ‘‘a different sort of accountability than the bureau-
cratic and formalized accountability recommended by the
managerial literature’’ (Oakes & Young, 2008: 773). This
led to more narrative and less quantitative forms of report-
ing, a feature echoed in the ?ndings of Evans and Pierpoint
(2015) in their study of a Scottish Magdalen Institution.
Recent work on the ‘‘accounterability’’ concept of Kamuf
(2007) prioritises such inclusive conceptions of accounting
and accountability, beyond purely calculative measures
(Joannides, 2012; Lowe, Locke, & Lymer, 2012; McKernan
& McPhail, 2012; Smyth, 2012). ‘‘It is clear that the idea
of accountability contains threads of both calculation and
narration: counting and accounting, recounting and
explaining oneself.’’ (McKernan & McPhail, 2012: 177)
However, given the almost complete absence of either
quantitative or narrative forms of reporting, by any mea-
sure, the levels of accountability offered from the Irish
Magdalen Laundries fell far below those of either Hull
House (Oakes & Young, 2008) or the Edinburgh Magdalen
Asylum (Evans & Pierpoint, 2015). Neither, as evidenced
by the remarkable parliamentary silence on the subject
discussed in ‘The Magdalen Laundries in Ireland’ below,
was there any clamour for accountability on the part of
the state. Instead, in contrast to the ‘‘vast accounting appa-
ratus’’ described by O’Regan (2010) in 1840s Ireland, the
Laundries were ‘‘for many years characterised primarily
by secrecy, silence and shame’’ (McAleese, 2013: 11).
For the state, the social silence surrounding the
Laundries facilitated their use to avoid accounting for
aspects of Irish society that were troubling to the national
identity. The relationship between the Laundries as a sys-
tem of containment and the formal state networks of con-
trol was marked by strategic obfuscation. Women were
consigned to the Laundries both formally and informally,
and to the extent that there was an associated ?nancial
relationship between the state and the religious orders, it
was framed in terms of a gift, a free exchange of offered
services, with state payments sometimes given on an ex-
gratia basis, or described as something in the nature of a
donation. This had the effect of blurring the normal lines
of accountability as to the welfare, education or release
of the women concerned. No annual reports were made.
Very little data was sought or supplied. As a result, the inci-
dents or situations that caused the women
1
to be sent to
the Laundries were rarely recorded, and so did not enter his-
tory or form part of the image the state presented to the
world or to itself. While Ireland developed economically,
culturally and socially through the twentieth century, with
broad improvements to welfare, housing and the rights of
workers and of women, behind the walls of the Laundries
the closed, unaccounted-for ?eld prioritised symbolic capital
over economic, and prevented the ability of the women
inside from taking their place in Irish society.
As discussed in Smith (2007), the occluded nature of the
Magdalen system facilitated the young Irish state in a post-
colonial context, helping it to create for itself a separate,
Catholic identity, untainted by ideas of prostitution, single
motherhood or sexual violence, effectively approaching
what Kuipers (2013) called a form of national habitus that
served its political needs at the time, and long after the clo-
sure of the Laundries. This also created a duality in the
work of the religious orders, as observed by Kerr (1931).
In describing the work of the Good Shepherd homes he
writes: ‘‘Surely there is no grander work for God and soul
1
The terminology used to describe the women who were detained in the
Laundries is challenging. Over the years, terms including inmates, victims,
children, penitents, residents and survivors have all been used by different
actors, and all are problematic to some extent. Conscious of issues raised in
Bourdieu, 1982) and broadly following McAleese (2013), the slightly
cumbersome description women who were admitted to or detained in
Magdalen Laundries is used in this paper.
18 S. Killian/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32
and the spiritual uplifting of this nation’’ (Kerr, 1931: 11).
This con?ating of a secular concern for the emergent
nation with the spiritual welfare of the women in the care
of the religious orders was driven by a conservative state
intent on suppressing signs of what was seen as moral
weakness. It impacted on the missions of the religious
orders, broadening and refocusing them to also address
what were seen as more pragmatic and patriotic concerns.
This was achieved in an unarticulated and informal way,
‘‘an immediate adherence, a doxical submission to the
injunctions of the world’’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 103) that
allowed for no opposition. The very absence of accounting
technologies and accountability created the conditions for
symbolic violence which was not perceived as such at the
time, and so was dif?cult to resist.
Bourdieu is used here to explore accountability both
within the closed systems of the Laundries, and between
the institutions and the state (Bourdieu, 1982, 1990a,
1998). Speci?cally, the study employs his ideas on the logic
of the price to interrogate the contested narratives of the
Laundries, highlighting the places where accounting and
accountability are absent. Insights from this and his work
on the economy of symbolic goods are particularly useful
in exploring whose interests were served by this social
silence and shed light on the strategic use of obfuscation
and mysti?cation that develops in an unaccounted-for
world. Bourdieu’s writings on the way in which a state is
formed through the orchestration of a kind of collective
habitus are also applied, together with his concepts of
doxa, the various forms of capital and the ?eld (Bourdieu,
1982, 1990b, 1990c, 1998, 2005a).
The unarticulated nature of the relationship between
the new state and the religious orders created a denial of
Bourdieu’s logic of the price (Bourdieu, 1998) which
seemed to grow organically, as though it were never for-
mally decided, but simply accepted as a useful status
quo: ‘‘never stated as such because [it is] inscribed in the
obviousness of ordinary experience’’ (Bourdieu, 1998:
36). The excising of the commercial rede?ned the nominal
purpose of the Laundries, and prioritised abstract mea-
sures of progress that did not lend themselves to account-
ability in terms that are readily inscribed. This in turn
facilitated an almost complete lack of oversight by the
state, and a disclaiming of responsibility that endures
beyond the life of the institutions themselves. This was
the essence of what the then Irish Minister for Health
and future President of Ireland Erskine Childers described
in 1970 as ‘‘the happy relationship between the Health
Authority and the sisters’’ (McAleese, 2013: 630).
The lack of accounting and accountability manifested
within the closed system of the Laundries themselves as
a lack of records, and a perversion of internal accountabil-
ity. Almost everything about the women was rede?ned by
their entry into the Laundries. Young mothers were identi-
?ed as children or penitents; their names, roles, permitted
relationships and personal choices were dictated on arrival
by systems that were both harsh in their implementation
and obscure in the limits of their authority. The strange-
ness of this new ?eld disoriented and effectively impris-
oned thousands of women whose habitus left them
completely unprepared to challenge a power that seemed
self-evident. Further, the act of ‘accounting for’ the women
in this objectifying way appears to have precluded any
impulse to ‘account to’ them on how the institutions aimed
to serve their welfare.
Malsch, Gendron, and Grazzini (2011: 213) observed
that ‘‘accounting researchers have . . . relied on Bourdieu’s
ideas to study processes of domination sustained through
accounting technologies.’’ This is perhaps because, as noted
by Neu (2006: 394), Bourdieu ‘‘provides us with a vocabu-
lary for understanding the organization and dynamics of
institutional ?elds in which governance is attempted.’’
Here, Bourdieu is used in a slightly different way to provide
a way of thinking about a process of domination that was
upheld by a stark absence of accounting and accountabil-
ity. This follows calls by Hopwood (1994) and Jeacle
(2009) to examine the role of accounting and accounting
technologies in non-?nancial settings, and extends it to
consider the potentially devastating impact of the pur-
poseful excision of such technologies in circumstances
where they would have been expected to play a key but
nominally peripheral role.
The paper seeks to address two gaps identi?ed in
Malsch et al. (2011: 220): to apply Bourdieusian concepts
as inclusively and relationally as possible, and to address
them to an important social/political issue to uncover hid-
den mechanisms of domination. The use of Bourdieu’s
ideas on the logic of the price in an accounting context
and the application of his thoughts on an orchestrated
habitus and symbolic capital to the absence of accounting
relationships contribute to the ?rst call. The application of
the analysis to a secretive institution of repression and
domination addresses the second. The study also seeks to
contribute to our understanding not simply of how
accounting functions in relation to questions of power
and identity, but how its nonappearance in relationships
can also be used perversely to rede?ne the interface
between public and private organisations. This is illus-
trated by the creation in this case of a structure of intense
internal control coupled with an almost complete absence
of external supervision that effectively shifts power in a
fundamental way on both an inter-personal and a national
basis.
Some of the insights of Shenkin and Coulson (2007) on
the application of Bourdieu’s work to accountability stud-
ies are deployed, addressing the gap they have highlighted
by taking a focus other than that of corporations and their
shareholders. In particular, the concept of accountability or
of giving an account is taken to include the ways in which
the reality of the Laundries themselves and the relation-
ships between them, the women, the state and society
were neither described nor recorded, a silence that creates
a kind of of?cial truth, primarily serving the interests of the
state. This is consistent with the observation in Shenkin
and Coulson (2007) that the non-neutrality of social com-
munication is a guiding principle of Bourdieusian theory.
The remainder of the paper is set out as follows: the
next section outlines some of Bourdieu’s ideas as they are
utilised in this study, and brie?y explores their application
to accounting research. Section three describes the data
and method that form the basis for the case studied. The
following section brie?y outlines the context and
S. Killian/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32 19
development of the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland since
the foundation of the state, highlighting the divergence
between the evolution of the Laundries in Ireland and the
UK following Irish independence. Section ?ve examines
the (un)accounting under three headings: the absence of
a logic of the price in the relationship between the state
and the institutions; the perverse mirroring of this overtly
symbolic, non-economic relationship within the Laundries
and how this objecti?ed the women and allowed them to
be ‘‘accounted for’’ in a controlling way; and the impact
this had, particularly for the state with a focus on ideas
around the orchestration of a shared national habitus.
The ?nal section concludes.
Bourdieu, identity, price and the state
Bourdieu’s ideas have been used to examine accounting
issues (Everett, 2003, 2008; Haynes, 2008; Jacobs, 2003;
Neu, Friesen, & Everett, 2003; Neu, Silva, & Gomez, 2008),
often with a particular focus on the regulation of social
or public spaces (Neu, 2006). Malsch et al. (2011), for
example, reviews the application of Bourdieusian ideas in
critical accounting research from 1999 to 2008, highlight-
ing an increase in the application of his ideas to this ?eld,
noting that the most commonly-deployed Bourdieusian
concepts in accounting research are those of the ?eld and
the various categories of capital (Bourdieu, 1982, 1990b,c,
2005b). This section of the paper describes the way in
which some Bourdieusian concepts that are less commonly
applied in the accounting literature are used here. It is
important to note that we are essentially ‘translating’
Bourdieu in the sense of adapting his ideas fromtheir origi-
nal context to apply them in a new setting, and this ‘‘im-
plies the development of a certain gap between the
original idea and its adaptation in the importing ?eld’’
(Malsch et al., 2011: 196).
Writing in In Other Words, Bourdieu describes the con-
cept of habitus as deriving from similar concepts expressed
by Hegel, Husserl, Weber, Durkheim and Mauss (Bourdieu,
1990a). It means more than the sum of an agent’s experi-
ences that enable her to act in a particular way; it is ‘‘in-
scribed in their bodies by past experiences’’, creating a
‘‘feel for the game’’ that allows action on a particular ?eld
to be unconscious and intuitive as well as rational
(Bourdieu, 1990b, 2000: 138). The embodied nature of
the habitus, and more widely of cultural capital is of par-
ticular relevance in this case. Women experienced a physi-
cal detention largely created by a social and symbolic
system, which was in turn partly created by an embodied
habitus. ‘‘The most serious social injunctions are addressed
not to the intellect but to the body’’ (Bourdieu 2000: 141).
The silence surrounding the Laundries strengthened this
habitus, because ‘‘the habitus goes hand in glove with
vagueness and indeterminacy’’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 77).
While the habitus is most classically viewed as an essen-
tially cognitive concept (Lizardo, 2004), it has also been
applied to larger groups or nations (Kuipers, 2013);
‘‘Habitus thus implies ‘a sense of one’s place’ but also ‘a
sense of the place of others’‘‘ (Bourdieu, 1989: 19). The
concept is used in both senses in this paper, and applied
not only to the women within the Laundries, but also to
the emerging Irish state. This is based largely on
Bourdieu’s Rethinking the State, in which he describes
how the state ‘‘creates the conditions for a kind of immedi-
ate orchestration of habitus that is itself the foundation for
a consensus over this set of shared evidences constitutive
of (national) common sense (Bourdieu, 1998: 54).
This paper follows Neu, Ocampo Gomez, Graham, and
Heincke (2006) in framing accounting techniques as
‘‘informing technologies’’ that not only directly facilitate
oversight and governance and allow ‘‘a ‘de?ation’ of things,
people and events into accounting inscriptions’’, but per-
haps more fundamentally, ‘‘re-present the ?eld in terms
of new vocabularies and calculations’’ thereby changing
the habitus of actors on the ?eld. In doing so, it also
addresses the inverse of these technologies, echoing
Power (2004) in seeking out where an ‘‘accounting way of
thinking’’ has conspicuously not been applied. The act of
accounting for (and deliberately not accounting for) aspects
of the lives of the women of the Laundries altered howthey
were seen, how they saw themselves, how they were con-
trolled. Beyond this, the absence of informing technologies
allowed a story to be created about the women and what
had befallen them which supported the new state in creat-
ing for itself a newidentity through the repression and con-
trol of social realities that did not ?t that frame. ‘‘ . . . a
nation begins to exist as such, for those who belong to it
as well as for the others, only when it is distinguished,
according to one principle or another, from other groups,
that is, through knowledge and recognition’’ (Bourdieu,
1989: 23). Thus the categorisation of the women of the
Magdalen Laundries is a move in the creation of a kind of
national habitus or self-identity for Ireland in the early
years of its independence. ‘‘The power to impose and to
inculcate a vision of divisions, that is, the power to make
visible and explicit social divisions that are implicit, is
political power par excellence’’ (Bourdieu, 1989: 23).
Bourdieu’s work on the economy of symbolic goods
(Bourdieu, 1998) is useful in helping to articulate the way
in which a denial of commercial concerns or formal transac-
tions can become a way of rendering relationships inexpli-
cit, making them impossible to contest or resist. ‘‘To refuse
the logic of the price is a way to refuse calculation and cal-
culability’’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 97). In sharing a silence about
the underlying economic nature of the transactions
between agents of the state and the Laundries, both state
and religious orders employed practical euphemisms to
deny the underlying economic and social drivers of the
committal of women to the institutions. This could be seen
as a form of symbolic alchemy prioritising the symbolic
capital at play within the institutions and disempowering
the women who were sent there. This may go some way
to explain the persistent mythology and baf?ement that
surrounds even the most basic facts of the Laundries’ opera-
tion. More fundamentally, it explains the strategic advan-
tage obtained by the state in maintaining this informality
and denial of the logic of the price.
As Lebaron (2003) observes, for Bourdieu the concept of
price is not simply a monetary one, to be measured in ?nan-
cial units (Lebaron, 2003: 94). In his use of economic terms
such as capital, price, and exchange, Bourdieu, Lebaron
20 S. Killian/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32
argues, seeks to ‘‘generalize an ‘economic’ discourse that
will no longer be purely ‘economic.’’’ (Lebaron, 2003: 99).
Similarly, the absence of the logic of the price from the
relationship between the state and the Laundries means
more than an absence of ?nancial records, or a conventional
accounting relationship. It refers to the constituting of the
service that was outsourced to the religious orders as some-
thing akin to a gift, a service freely offered in a way consis-
tent with the not-for-pro?t nature of the orders’ mission.
The consequences of this apparently simple but fundamen-
tal framing are discussed in more detail in ‘The ‘‘happy
relationship’’ between state and the Laundries’ below.
Bourdieu is also useful for thinking more generally
about the role and the responsibility of the state, particu-
larly in the context of outsourced services. As discussed
further below, the fact that the Magdalen Laundries oper-
ated as private institutions, one step removed from direct
scrutiny, was useful to the state, allowing it to distance
itself from both perceived social problems and the means
to address them. A kind of buffer zone was created
between the responsibility of the state and that of the reli-
gious orders. As observed by Smith, ‘‘Condemning ‘those
bad nuns’ . . . allows the state and society to scapegoat
the Catholic Church for all the sins of the past. The
nation-state, as a result, evades culpability not just for
complicity and collusion in past institutional abuses but
also for the unresolved challenges of that history in the
present’’ (Smith, 2007: xix). However, Bourdieu points
out that ‘‘the state is the culmination of a process of con-
centration of different species of capital . . . the holder of
a sort of metacapital granting power over other species
of capital and over their holders’’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 41),
and that ‘‘matters of culture, and in particular the social
divisions and hierarchies associated with them, are consti-
tuted as such by the actions of the state’’ (Bourdieu, 1998:
38). This perspective highlights the responsibility of the
state in creating an environment that allowed the
Laundries to ?ourish. It also positions the state as holding
a power over the religious orders which it has been quick
to disclaim. This is largely done through the ‘‘of?cial dis-
course . . . which assigns everyone an identity’’, and
through a process of misrecognition, dictates not only
‘‘what people have to do, given who they are’’, but also
‘‘what people have actually done’’, through of?cial records
and their lacunae (Bourdieu, 1989: 22).
Malsch et al. (2011) observe that while Bourdieu is
widely used, relatively few studies employ the concepts
listed above in a holistic way, and that in particular, the
notion of habitus is not applied to its full potential. They
note that using all of the concepts ‘‘should not become a
methodological automatism when one wants to reply on
Bourdieu in enlightening some accounting phenomenon’’
(Malsch et al., 2011: 218). Nonetheless, this study attempts
a step towards a more holistic application of the concepts,
to see what contribution they make to our understanding
of how accounting and its absence impacted on power
and identity in the Irish Magdalen Laundries. In translating
Bourdieu’s ideas to this local context, they are inevitably
modi?ed. As noted by Malsch et al. (2011: 196)
‘‘Translation is a complex enterprise, characterized by a
high degree of epistemological uncertainty.’’ However, I
have tried to apply them in the spirit in which they were
read, and to use the concepts to illuminate the creation
and support of power.
Scope and sources
While Magdalen institutions of one kind or another
existed throughout Ireland and Britain since the
Eighteenth Century, the focus in this paper is on their
operation from the foundation of the Irish state, up to the
closure of the last institution in the 1990s. The study is
based on archival material, parliament records, media
accounts, a series of government reports, eye-witness
reports, submissions compiled by advocacy groups to vari-
ous human rights bodies and their responses, and the testi-
monies of the women themselves.
Bourdieu (2005b: 126) observes that the way people
experience the state is through their interactions with
the agents of the state, even if these are aberrant or atypi-
cal on a national level. It follows that the meaning of
Ireland as a home country to the women of the Magdalen
Laundries was directly (in)formed by their experiences in
the Laundries. The relationship between the state and its
citizens was mediated through (in)actions of the religious
orders; despite efforts made to distance themselves from
the operations of the Laundries, this was choreographed
through the full consent and cooperation of successive
governments. This is why the lived experiences and
accounts of the women are important in understanding
how the state related to its citizens. Fortunately there is
a rich reserve of ?rst-person accounts of life in and after
the Laundries, and these have been incorporated where
relevant into this paper.
The source material can be roughly categorised as
follows:
Archival material from the Justice for Magdalenes
group, including
– Their submissions to the Irish Human Rights
Commission (IHRC), United Nations Universal
Periodic Review and United Nations Committee
Against Torture (JFM, 2011, 2012a).
– Their survivor guides, publicly-available testimonies
and relatives’ guides (JFM, 2012b, 2013; Smith,
O’Rourke, Hill, & McGettrick, 2013).
– The response to their submissions from the Irish
Human Rights Commission (IHRC, 2013).
Records of both houses of the Irish parliament (Dáil and
Senate) from 1922 to date (Oireachtas, 1922-2014).
Media accounts covering both the operation of the
Laundries and the public responses to various reports,
including newspapers, television and radio
documentaries.
Five government reports that deal either directly or per-
ipherally with operations of the Laundries (Carrigan,
1931; Kennedy, 1970; McAleese, 2013; Quirke, 2013;
Ryan, 2009).
Signi?cantly, these sources do not combine to tell a
coherent story either of how the Laundries operated and
S. Killian/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32 21
were experienced, or why they were able to operate as they
did. It is remarkable that despite the plethora of docu-
mentation, accounts remain contested. McCarthy (2010)
observes that since the Laundries were not obliged to main-
tain records, and many women who were admitted to the
Laundries have been reluctant to share stigmatised or trau-
matic memories, caution must be applied to any analysis of
what records exist. The religious orders have also been par-
ticularly reticent on their role in the operation of the
Laundries, and have not made their records publicly avail-
able other than to the inter-departmental committee
tasked with the preparation of the McAleese report
(McAleese, 2013). As noted by McGettrick (2014), that com-
mittee returned these records to the orders and destroyed
its own copies, leaving none of the source documentation
in the public domain. However, these factors alone do not
adequately explain the consistent theme of blurred
accounts and mythologised motivations since the suppres-
sion of the ?rst government report in 1931 (Maguire, 2007;
Smith, 2004). A high level of inconsistency and dispute per-
sists both between the of?cial accounts and those of advo-
cacy groups and within those two broad categories. Even
questions as apparently objective as the pro?tability or
even the pro?t motive of the Laundries are contested. I
argue below that much of this can be traced to the way in
which the logic of the price was systematically excluded
from the relationship between the state and the
Laundries, a feature mirrored within the institutions them-
selves. A systematic absence of accounting and account-
ability has damaged historical truth, and almost two
decades after the closure of the last institution, accounting
has still failed to record, and accountability to reassure.
The Magdalen Laundries in Ireland
Magdalen homes are neither an exclusively Irish nor a
twentieth century phenomenon. The ?rst such refuge
opened in London in 1758, and by the end of the 19th cen-
tury there were more than 300 operating across England,
housing more than 6000 women (Finnegan, 2001). The
Dublin Magdalen Asylum was the ?rst to open in Ireland
in 1767 as a refuge for ‘‘fallen women’’, catering for unmar-
ried women who were pregnant or mothers of no more
than one child, speci?cally excluding those ‘‘hardened by
vice’’ (Smith, 2007: 212). Similar homes were operated
throughout the 19th century in Scotland, as described by
Mahood (1990). In common with the homes operating
throughout Britain, the ?rst Dublin Magdalen Asylum
aimed to completely transform the lives of women in a
very positive way. Finnegan (2001) quotes a public pam-
phlet on the establishment of the home as follows:
‘‘Here, instead of loathsome disease these reclaimed
individuals will enjoy the blessings of health. They will
exchange gross ignorance for useful knowledge, the pangs
of guilt for peace of mind, the base drudgery of prostitution
for pro?table employment in innocent recreations . . .
Instead of being the detested pests of society, they will
be useful and well-regarded members of it
2
‘‘(Finnegan,
2001: 8). It is clear that the original aim of the Laundries
was to increase the social, cultural and economic capital of
the women who spent time there.
This paper focuses on the involvement of the Irish state
in the operation of the Magdalen Laundries. The scope is
therefore limited to the ten such institutions that operated
in Ireland from the foundation of the state in 1922 through
to 1996 when the last one closed its doors. The way in
which these institutions were run in Ireland in the twenti-
eth century and the experiences of women who lived there
differed signi?cantly in a number of ways both to ostensi-
bly similar institutions in the UK and to the experiences in
Ireland in the nineteenth century. Smith (2007) notes that
in the twentieth century in Ireland, fewer women entered
voluntarily and they were detained for longer periods. The
women also came from a wider variety of backgrounds and
were less likely to be single parents or prostitutes. The
institutions became far more secretive: shockingly, there
is more publicly-available data on the numbers of women
in Irish Magdalen homes in the 19th than in the 20th cen-
tury. Smith (2007) argues that the purpose of the institu-
tions changed with the founding of the Irish state from
one of rehabilitation to one of containment, functioning
as part of a wider network of industrial schools, mother
and baby homes, and borstals.
3
This is echoed by
Guilbride and Kennedy (2004: 179) who note that the
homes operated as a de facto place of detention for women
convicted of infanticide up to the 1950s. This is also sup-
ported by the observation of Eoin O’Sullivan of Trinity
College Dublin that the number of women detained in prison
in Ireland fell below thirty in some years in the 1930s,
1940s, 1950s and 1960s as they were being detained in
alternative institutions (RTE, 2012).
This change in the nature and purpose of the Laundries
is traceable to the pivotal suppression of the Carrigan
report (Carrigan, 1931). This report was produced by a
committee of enquiry convened to consider the need for
further legislation on the subject of juvenile prostitution.
Noting that Criminal Justice laws in place at the time of
independence were effectively inherited from the UK, but
that subsequent Irish law had not kept pace with amend-
ments in Northern Ireland and Great Britain, it found that
women and children in the new Free State were not
afforded the level of protection that was available to their
peers in the UK. The committee sought not only to recom-
mend legislation, but to ‘‘take such evidence as might
afford us a conspectus, from the legal standpoint of
Public Decency, of the extent to which abuses exist’’.
From this research, they produced a damning report of
the level of child abuse, incest, single parenthood and
infanticide in Ireland at the time. The language of the
report, in keeping with the norms of the time, clearly stig-
matised single motherhood, lamenting, for instance, ‘‘the
objectionable fact that unmarried mothers of ?rst-born
children cannot be maintained apart from the other
inmates (the decent poor and sick)’’ and describing women
in terms such as ‘‘weak-minded’’ or ‘‘often mentally and
2
Anon (1767) ‘A Letter to the Public on an Important Subject,
Establishing a Magdalen Asylum in Dublin.’,
3
Borstal was the contemporary term for a youth detention centre.
Borstals for young male offenders operated throughout the period.
22 S. Killian/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32
emotionally unstable.’’ However, it succeeded in giving an
account of an Ireland at odds with the of?cial image being
perpetuated by the government, and one which ‘‘proved
profoundly unsettling for the political and clerical elites
governing Irish society’’ (Smith, 2004: 214). The recom-
mendations of the report included moves towards greater
accountability, the criminalisation of a wider range of
offences against women and girls, and the establishment
of a formal borstal system for girls aged between 16 and
21 years.
The report was immediately suppressed. The year after
its publication the Fianna Fáil party began what would
become a sixteen-year period in government, led by
Eamonn DeValera. He would use the period to draw up
the Irish constitution and to cultivate a close relationship
with the Catholic Church as a way of forging a national
identity which was distinct from that of the UK
4
. Instead
of a transparent system of female borstals, women were
passed to the Magdalen Laundries by the state either
directly from reform schools or through the criminal justice
system. In RTE (2012) Smith describes probation of?cers
escorting women from court directly to the Laundries to
begin their sentences, and notes ‘‘there is no evidence that
probation of?cers came back to ensure women got out, at
the end of their sentence.’’ Others were committed by family
members or priests or from county homes. A survivor notes
‘‘a lot of young girls were in there for no reason at all’’ . . .
‘‘Some of them would jump over the wall, and they would
be brought back again’’ (RTE, 1992). Some were unmarried
mothers, orphaned, ill, poor or homeless. Others were
‘‘placed in the Magdalen Laundries by their own families,
for reasons that we may never know or fully understand,
but which included the socio-moral attitudes of the time
as well as familial abuse’’ (McAleese, 2013: 3).
An example recorded in a 1992 radio documentary
describes how an elderly lady resident in the Magdalen
Laundry in Galway had been sent there as a young woman
simply because she had stayed late at a dance. The witness
goes on: ‘‘Well her name was gone, that time. She was a
‘bad woman’. You know, that time, like. Crazy. She was
locked up for that? She was put into the Magdalen. I mean
you were. Automatically’’ (RTE, 1992). The sense of bewil-
derment on the part of the witness is palpable, as she sets
the incident in its historical context that was so different
from her reality in 1992. The irretrievability of the
woman’s reputation is vividly illustrated by the phrase
‘‘Her name was gone’’. In a 2012 television documentary,
one survivor explained ‘‘I did not really know why I was
there’’. Another said ‘‘You weren’t supposed to know what
you were there for. And you had to just wash the clothes,
iron them, and work the big machines.’’ The women were
unable to share experiences in order to piece together their
situation; ‘‘Well it was complete silence. Nobody spoke to
one another’’ (RTE, 2012).
Despite the variation in the means of their entry, all the
Magdalen women experienced ‘‘stigma and shame’’ from
their involvement with the Laundries (Smith, O’Rourke,
Hill, & McGettrick, 2013: 34). By 1960, the stigma attach-
ing to Magdalen Laundries was widely known. This is illus-
trated by the Seanad (Senate) debates in July of that year
on the 1960 Criminal Justice Bill that included the follow-
ing contributions from senators: ‘‘I do not think there is
any member of this House who is ignorant of what the
stigma would mean to a girl if she had mended her ways,
if she had been corrected and was leading a normal and
upright life, and had to spend the rest of her life in the fear
and terror of being charged with having in her youth been
an inmate of St. Mary Magdalen’s Asylum. I think to a girl
when she becomes an adult the stigma of having been a
‘Magdalen’ is even greater than would be the stigma of
having been a ‘Borstal boy’ for a boy delinquent when he
becomes an adult’’; and ‘‘It is just a question of whether
the indignity of being remanded to St. Mary Magdalen’s
Asylum is a greater indignity than being remanded to
Mountjoy prison’’ (Oireachtas, 1922-2014).
Signi?cantly, given the suppression of Carrigan (1931),
the stigma was considered to be greater than that which
would have been experienced by young female offenders
had the formal Borstal system it recommended been estab-
lished. The stigma also applied equally to those who had
been referred there from the courts, or committed without
having been convicted of any crime. Their status as
Magdalens superseded their previous lives outside of the
Laundries, and they shared a common sense of institution-
alised identity. This is in line with Bourdieu’s observation
that: ‘‘Individuals or groups are objectively de?ned not
only by what they are, but by what they are reputed to
be’’ (Bourdieu, 1990b: 135).
There is little record of concern on the part of the gov-
ernment. Over the entire period of their operation in the
Irish state, from 1922 to 1996, the Magdalen institutions
were only mentioned in parliament six times. In 1923, a
female Senator brie?y deplored a provision denying public
assistance to unmarried mothers who refused to enter the
Magdalen system. In 1930, a more substantial debate on
whether or not to allow unmarried mothers to go to public
court to seek support from the fathers of their children was
informed by advice from ‘‘the nuns who run the Magdalen
Asylum’’ that ‘‘many girls hesitate to bring actions on
account of the publicity given to them, but they would
be glad to get relief if the cases were heard in camera.’’
The logic behind taking advice from the nuns was that
‘‘The people who are the best judges of the psychology of
the unmarried mother are surely the people whose duties
bring them into contact with them, such as social workers,
the clergy and certain religious orders like nuns’’
(Oireachtas, 1922-1914). This short contribution exposes
two ways in which unmarried mothers were ‘othered’ in
Irish society at that time. First, by entering the Laundries,
they seem to have surrendered their status as mothers, sis-
ters and daughters, members of society at large with their
own voices, and attained a new classi?cation of unmarried
mother, to be understood and advocated for only by the
institutions that housed them. Secondly, the phrase
‘‘whose duties bring them into contact’’ reveals the extent
of the isolation of these women, thoroughly removed from
ordinary society.
4
A vivid example of the success of this strategy was the 1932 Eucharistic
Congress, which attracted 25% of the country’s population to an open-air
mass in Dublin (McCarthy & O’Riordan, 2011).
S. Killian/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32 23
Over the following thirty years, the Magdalen Laundries
were never mentioned in parliament. Even when concerns
were being expressed in parliament about the safety of
new steam equipment used in commercial laundries, and
the fact that it might be operated in some cases by young
boys or by women who had not received adequate training,
there was no reference to the Magdalen institutions. In the
1960s, they came up on four occasions; two of these, in
June and July 1960, were to express gratitude to the
Archbishop of Dublin for making the Laundry at Sean
McDermott St available as a place of remand for female
prisoners awaiting trial. In July 1960, a discussion on the
stigma associated with remand to the Magdalen
Laundries led to a call by one Member of Parliament to ?nd
alternative convents without the Magdalen title to which
women could be remanded. In 1967 a member of the main
house of parliament asked if payments to one Laundry
‘‘could be a little more generous,’’ a phrase re?ective of
the ex-gratia and gift-like nature of such subventions.
Following this reference, a parliamentary silence again
descended, which remained in place until the closure of
the last institution in 1996.
From the 1960s on, many young women entered the
Laundries on what was described in McAleese (2013) as a
voluntary basis. This characterisation is largely based on
the fact that at that time the state had no borstal for young
female offenders, and so young women charged with a
range of petty crimes were ‘‘offered’’ the option of spend-
ing time in a Magdalen Laundry as an alternative to prison.
However, the ‘choice’ to enter a Magdalen institution was
generally uninformed and made from a position of weak-
ness, as a direct alternative to the imposition of a prison
sentence for one or other misdemeanour. Women were
ordered to obey the rules of Magdalen Laundries or be sent
from there to prison, ‘‘so in that case, the Magdalen is
directly an alternative to a prison sentence’’ (Smith, M in
RTE, 2012). The reasons for these detentions, or ‘referrals’
in the language of the McAleese report, vary; despite three
state-commissioned reports signi?cant gaps persist in the
data that is publicly available. The fact that the women
were invited to make a nominal choice to enter the home
is a graphic illustration of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘‘symbolic
violence . . . the violence which extorts submission, which
is not perceived as such, based on ‘‘collective expectations’’
or socially inculcated beliefs’’ (Bourdieu, 1998). For many,
the act of choosing internalised the idea that they belonged
in the institution. In a 1960 Seanad debate, one Senator
observed that this amounted to ‘‘asking the girl to place
the stigma on herself’’ (Oireachtas, 1922-2014).
The state at the time had no of?cial power to commit
anyone to the care of religious orders. As noted by the
Irish Minister for Justice in a Seanad Debate in 1960:
‘‘Remember that I am in the hands of the ecclesiastical
authorities in this matter of remand institutions. I cannot
just say that we will remand girls to this convent, that con-
vent or some other convent’’ (Oireachtas, 1922-2014).
There was, however, a largely unarticulated arrangement
in place under which the institutions agreed to accept the
women, and the state expressed its gratitude to the eccle-
siastical authorities for the service rendered. This charac-
terised the arrangement as a gift from the religious orders
to the state, a service freely provided for which no payment
was demanded, and no accountability expected. It also
allowed the detention of the women in the Laundries to
be framedas voluntary onthe part of the womenconcerned.
Acommentator in the conservative Irish Catholic newspaper
quotes one of the religious orders as observing that ‘‘in past
decades, admission to Magdalene Laundries was seen as
appropriate refuge’’ (Kelly, 2013). The institutions were
describedin RTE (2012) as ‘‘prisons to some women. . . shel-
ters to others,’’ re?ecting even at that late remove fromtheir
operation, an on-going ambiguity about their nature.
Nevertheless, the Laundries were experienced by most
of the women who were detained there as ‘prison-like,’
an impression backed by high walls, locked doors and
penal conditions. Anna-May Gill who worked as a teenager
as paid staff in the Galway laundry recalls in a 1992 radio
documentary ‘‘I worked with those lovely girls, and the
sorrow in their face, like. And the bewilderment. And we
were locking doors . . . and every door you went through,
you had to lock it behind you’’ (RTE, 1992). The ‘‘voluntary’’
characterisation of detention in the Laundries is also
undermined by accounts of failed attempts to escape, and
the prison-like elements of the institutions, attested to by
observations from both members of advocacy groups and
survivors: ‘‘The [police] were involved in returning
women, and that meant that everybody knew that it
wasn’t possible to escape’’; ‘‘You looked out a window,
and all you seen was barbed wire and railings. No way
you could get out anyway’’ (RTE, 1992, 2012).
Through the twentieth century, at least 10,000 women,
ranging in age from 9 to 89 years old, passed through the
Irish Magdalen Laundries. Some of these detentions were
short-term, with a third of women being released within
three months. However, thousands were held for years,
with the median length of stay being seven months; many
were detained more than once, and hundreds of women
died in the Laundries and were buried in the institutions’
grounds (McAleese, 2013). It is important to note that the
?ndings of the McAleese Report, while detailed, are con-
tested by several advocacy groups representing women
who spent time in the Magdalen Laundries. As noted by
McGettrick (2014), ‘‘The [McAleese] Report unquestionably
re?ects the information provided by the religious orders,
and only that information.’’ This concern was echoed by
Felice Gaer, the Vice-Chair of the UN Committee against
Torture in RTE (2012).
The factors that caused the Laundries to close remain as
unclear as the detail of their operation. McCarthy,
Kennedy, and Matthews (1996) make the case that the
Kennedy Report had a very positive impact on the number
of children held in institutional care, but Milotte (2012)
notes a series of contemporaneous social changes that
combined to reduce the numbers of mothers and children
in the care of the state or religious institutions. While the
impact of an individual report is always dif?cult to deter-
mine, the suppression of the Carrigan report and the subse-
quent change in the operation of the Laundries and their
relationship with the state begs the question of how differ-
ently they may have evolved had that report become pub-
lic, and had its key recommendations on a formalised
borstal system been implemented.
24 S. Killian/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32
The logic of the price
The way in which the basic relationship between the
new Irish state and the Laundries was established, allow-
ing their use as an unof?cial system of containment, depri-
oritised the economic and promoted the symbolic. This
framed the ‘‘service’’ provided by the religious orders as a
gift immune from the logic of the price; this character-
isation of the exchanges between the state and the institu-
tions had lasting consequences within and around the
Laundries themselves, for the women who spent time
there and for the state.
This section explores these issues under three headings:
the ?rst part explores informality in the relationship
between the state and the Laundries. Next, the way in
which this non-economic, symbolic relationship was mir-
rored within the Laundries, dictating the way in which
the women were ‘‘accounted for’’ within those closed sys-
tems is examined, with an emphasis on how this precluded
them being ‘‘accounted to’’ in any meaningful way. The
next part examines how the structure served the state,
allowing it to rewrite social records and to orchestrate a
collective habitus for the new state, and how these
relationships, set up almost one hundred years ago and
maintained by a long social silence continue to serve the
interests of power.
The ‘‘happy relationship’’ between state and the Laundries
The logic of the price here applies in the state’s framing
of its relationship with the Laundries as a service freely
provided and rewarded only in an ad-hoc manner: almost
as an exchange of gifts. It is this framing that matters; the
?nancial idiosyncrasies that characterise the relationship
are a consequence rather than a cause. This suppression
of the ?nancial arguably allowed the symbolic to ?ourish:
‘‘the economy of symbolic goods rests on the repression or
the censorship of economic interests’’ (Bourdieu, 1998:
120). It also removed an imperative for accountability,
and permitted the Laundries to develop as secretive, self-
contained institutions.
The McAleese report examined the remaining records of
the religious congregations and all relevant records in gov-
ernment departments and state agencies to determine the
extent and nature of ?nancial ?ows between government
and the Laundries over the full period of their operation
since the foundation of the state. The scope of their exam-
ination included capitation payments and other subven-
tions (chapter 13), contracts for laundry services, tax and
social insurance payments, and commercial rates. Two
things are remarkable given this unprecedented access to
records: the lack of clarity around the criteria for admis-
sion to the Laundries, and the ad hoc and ex gratia nature
of payments to the institutions from the state, which were
made ‘‘in certain cases and from time to time’’ (McAleese,
2013: 597) by local authorities in cases where the
Laundries took in women who would otherwise have been
in the care of the health service.
The criteria applied in deciding which women to send
to the Laundries, or in which cases a capitation would be
paid were by no means clear. McAleese (2013: 607), for
example, records that South Cork Public Assistance Board
in 1952 tended to send ‘‘certain classes of girls whose
admission to County Homes as inmates, or whose board-
ing-out with foster-parents was not considered advisable’’
to ‘‘certain schools for maintenance and instruction’’. In at
least some cases the children were passed either to the
nearby Magdalen Laundry or to the associated industrial
school once they reached the age of 16 because ‘‘their dis-
charge from the school, owing to the circumstances of their
cases, is considered to be highly undesirable in their own
interests’’. Neither the circumstances nor the names of
the girls in question were recorded, nor was the rationale
by which their incarceration in an adult institution was
decided. A Department of Health memo from June 1973
cited in McAleese (2013: 623) describes the population of
the Magdalen Laundry at Sean McDermott St., Dublin as
comprising ‘‘OAPs, mentally or physically retarded women,
mildly handicapped and delicate women and women who
are unstable for social or moral reasons.’’
The ‘‘voluntary’’ nature of some of the admissions to the
Laundries, discussed in the previous section, clouded the
role of the state in detaining young women who were
charged with minor offences, and introduced both ambigu-
ity and additional stigma to the Magdalen identity. The fact
that some women were referred by their families, or by
priests and other non-governmental authority ?gures, dis-
tanced the government bodies from the institutions.
However, that the Laundries ?lled a gap in state services
is clear from notes and minutes around the approval of
ad-hoc payments from state bodies. For example,
McAleese (2013: 619) quotes an internal Department of
Health memo from 1970 as follows: ‘‘the Health
Authority would, of course, have responsibility to provide
maintenance for these persons, were it not for the
Convent.’’ However, even where women were admitted
to the Laundries, the level of subvention was erratic. In
June 1973, for example, approximately 100 women were
resident in the Sean McDermott St Laundry and capitation
payments were made for less than half of these. These pay-
ments were made almost as a token; the tone of internal
government department memos re?ected a state that
was grateful to the religious orders for taking on the care
and containment of these young women who might other-
wise present a challenge. McAleese (2013: 609) quotes the
following comment from an internal government memo
recording a decision in 1964 to provide ?nancial support
to a Magdalen Laundry that had taken in a 16 year old girl
suffering from epilepsy: ‘‘I do not think they should be at a
loss as a result of their efforts to help out in the case of this
dif?cult girl.’’ The ‘charitable’ aim of the Laundries was pri-
oritised over the economic; the ad-hoc payments made by
the state were founded on the former basis, and on the
suppression of any recognition of the latter. This duality
of purpose echoes Bourdieu’s ‘double consciousness’ when
he described the Catholic Church as an ‘‘enterprise with an
economic dimension founded on the denial of the econ-
omy’’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 112).
Even in cases where a capitation payment was made to
the Laundries from a health authority in respect of women
who would otherwise have been cared for in hospitals or
S. Killian/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32 25
county homes, McAleese (2013: 620) explains that in gen-
eral, independent medical exams were not carried out,
being considered‘‘dif?cult inpractice.’’ Ambiguity persisted
around the precise numbers of women involved. These
practices reveal a certain comfortable informality about
the relationship between the department and the state,
and an almost explicit acknowledgement of the ?nancial
saving involved in sending ‘dif?cult’ cases to the
Laundries. Perhaps this is what the Minister for Health
and future President of Ireland referred to in a 1970 speech
as ‘‘the happy relationship between the health authority
and the Sisters.’’
5
These internal notes and correspondence also make it
clear that the Laundries were an important source of
income to the convents, in some cases perhaps supporting
those women in the care of the religious orders who were
unable to work there. ‘‘There are 32 permanently disabled
or subnormal unemployed females amongst the inmates
maintained in the Convent of St. Mary Magdalen,
Donnybrook, which is run by the Irish Sisters of Charity.
The main source of income is from the operation of a laun-
dry staffed by other inmates.’’
6
The fact that the Laundries,
in part staffed by women for whom capitation was paid by
the health authorities, were a source of income to the con-
vents seemed to remove from the state the obligation to
pay the congregations the minimum of?cial level of cap-
itation. A 1973 Department of Health memo calculates the
of?cial payment that would have been due to one Dublin
Laundry at £23,658 before going on to say ‘‘In view, how-
ever, of the fact that the institution has up to now been to
a large extent self-supporting due to the laundry industry
which they are running it would be worthwhile considering
?nancial support ..[instead] .. by way of a section 65 grant to
?nance the annual de?cit in the running cost.’’
7
This was a
‘‘more economical method’’ for the state, with the payment
pitched to meet the de?cit of the convent rather than based
on the number or circumstances of the women. The pay-
ment becomes a donation to running costs, one step
removed from an acknowledgement of the women them-
selves. As a corollary, the state’s duty of care to the women
seemed to end with the ?nancial support provided to the
nuns. There was a sense in which the religious orders had
‘taken on’ these women, and so as far as the state outside
the convent walls was concerned, they could simply be
disregarded.
McAleese (2013: 754) notes that the Magdalen
Laundries, unlike many other trades operated by the reli-
gious orders, were granted charitable status by the revenue
commissioners, effectively exempting the pro?ts from
income tax and the fees from VAT. The status of the appli-
cation of commercial rates to the buildings in which the
Laundries was found to be ‘‘inconsistent’’ even within a
single local authority, while the investigation into whether
or not the women were in insurable employment was ‘‘not
straightforward.’’ This was due not only to the absence of
social security numbers on which to base a search in the
relevant government department, but to an almost com-
plete lack of records for the Laundries themselves
(McAleese, 2013: 770). The only record uncovered by the
McAleese report was a letter dated 12 February 1969 from
the Department of Social Welfare to the Good Shepherd
Convent, Limerick responding to a query about a named
inmate, con?rming that her employment with the
Laundry was not, in fact, insurable. The signi?cance to
the congregations was that this relieved them from an
obligation to pay any social insurance contributions on
behalf of the women who worked in the Laundries, and
this could be considered to be a form of indirect ?nancial
subvention from the state. It also meant that fewer records
needed to be maintained on the numbers of women
involved.
The fact that the women were paid neither wages for
their work nor the social welfare to which they may have
been entitled from the government seems to have offered
the State a way to resist a rights-based approach to their
accommodation. As long as they were regarded as ben-
e?ciaries of charity, the state could disclaimits responsibili-
ties to themas citizens. As long as no price was attributed to
their labour, it could be systematically devalued. In a gra-
phic illustration of the ‘‘gift’’ characterisation of their
reward for labour, McAleese (2013: 626) recounts a discus-
sion in the Limerick Health Authority in 1970 about how
some women would have directly quali?ed for payments
had they not been accommodated in the local Magdalen
Laundry. The response of the authority was to request the
Good Shepherd congregation who ran the city’s Magdalen
Laundry ‘‘to agree to the giving of some pocket money to
the women concerned.
8
‘‘This example illustrates the com-
plexity and informality of the relationships, and the discom-
fort of some of the state actors about not making payments as
of right to these women, instead requesting that a token pay-
ment be made on its behalf by the religious orders.
The question of the pro?t motive of the Laundries
themselves is contested. While Finnegan (2001) argues
that the network of Laundries ran successfully ‘‘until cheap
washing machines destroyed its ?nancial basis, and dwin-
dling vocations its power to control’’ (Finnegan, 2001: 2),
the McAleese report concluded that the Laundries ‘‘were
operated on a subsistence or close to break-even basis
rather than on a commercial or highly pro?table basis’’
(McAleese, 2013: 993). These positions appear contradic-
tory but are not actually mutually exclusive. The income
generated by the Laundries appears to have supported
the convents attached to them, but this pro?t motive
may be subsumed within the broader mission of the reli-
gious orders. Beyond that, any pro?t generated reduced
the costs of providing for the women, effectively reduced
the amount of state subvention (formal or informal)
required, and so indirectly but clearly provided a ?nancial
bene?t to the state.
5
Address by the Minister for Health on the occasion of his visit to the
Monastery of Our Lady of charity, High Park, Drumcondra on Monday 22
June 1970, cited in McAleese (2013: 630).
6
Letter dated 5 January 1968 from Dublin Health Authority to the
Department of Health, quoted in McAleese (2013: 613).
7
Cited in McAleese (2013: 622).
8
Letter dated 28 October 1970 Limerick Health Authority to Department
of Health cited in McAleese (2013).
26 S. Killian/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32
Bourdieu notes that ‘‘To refuse the logic of the price is to
refuse calculation and calculability’’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 97).
It is apparent that pro?t was not the primary motive of
either the religious orders operating the institutions or of
the state. Applying the logic of Bourdieu, we can see that
in averting their focus from matters of money, they could
unconsciously avoid the ‘calculability’ that would require
them to regard the women as workers in a commercial
operation, a process that would expose the dependence
of the Laundries’ operations on a form of forced labour.
This echoes Bourdieu’s further description of the Church
as ‘‘an economic enterprise that can only function as it
does because it is not really a business, because it denies
that it is a business’’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 113). This is charac-
terised by Bourdieu not as a conscious untruth or ‘‘cynical
lie,’’ but rather as a gap between the truth of the economic
and the ‘‘lived truth of practices’’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 114),
something that is believed by the speaker, as an
‘‘institutionally organised and guaranteed misrecognition’’
or ‘‘sincere ?ction’’ (Bourdieu, 1990b: 112). In a sense, the
prioritising of symbolic capital and the complicit excising
of the economic produced a kind of blindness around the
commercial purpose of the Laundries, that simultaneously
devalued the labour of the women who worked there and
permitted the ?nancial relationship between state and
religious order to remain ?rmly in the economy of the gift
and donation, rather than ruled by the logic of the price.
Within the Laundries
This section discusses howthe relationship between the
state and the religious orders was reproduced within the
Laundries themselves as an informal one, with labour
‘‘freely’’ given, and rewarded only by gift, and how this
was given effect in the way in which the women were ‘‘ac-
counted for’’ as children or penitents, rather than as citi-
zens. As previously noted, almost everything about the
women was rede?ned by their entry into the Laundries.
They were recorded in the ledgers as penitents, or children,
and issued with uniforms that are reported as ‘‘drab and
shapeless’’ (Finnegan, 2001: 26; Humphries, 1998), and in
most cases the women’s names were changed on arrival.
Mary Merritt, for example, describes how on her admission
to Hyde Park Laundry ‘‘they told me your name now, from
now, will be Attracta. And your number will be 63’’ (RTE,
2012). Those with long hair often report having it cut short.
Close friendships were frowned upon, and in any case dif-
?cult to form as the women worked for long periods in
silence (Finnegan, 2001; JFM, 2011; O’Beirne, 2006). The
women were in general cut off from all previous ties, and
any contact between them and relatives or friends outside
of the institution was heavily discouraged. Letters, for
instance, were censored, and visitors were often turned
away. The sense of isolation was succinctly expressed by
a paid worker from the Galway Laundry, ‘‘They had no
one standing beside them’’ (RTE, 1992). A new symbolic
capital dominated this strange new ?eld, and the immedi-
ate imposition of its doxa disoriented and effectively
imprisoned thousands of women whose embodied habitus
left them completely unprepared to challenge a power that
seemed self-evident.
Raftery (2011) describes the experience of Mary Norris
who was sent to the Magdalen Laundry as a teenager for
disobeying an order in her role as servant. ‘‘When I went
in there,’’ recalls Mary, ‘‘my dignity, who I was, my name,
everything was taken. I was a nonentity, nothing, nobody’’
(Raftery, 2011). The social capital of the women was deci-
mated as they were reduced to members of an underclass
with little by way of individual identity, limited
opportunities to forge new friendships and no access to
their former lives. They were not paid for the work done,
other than perhaps receiving some pocket money: ‘‘We
got a bar of soap and a half a Crown at Christmas’’ (RTE,
1992), and so they were also deprived of economic capital,
with no means of saving or providing for their own
futures. This made them far more dependent on the insti-
tution than would otherwise have been the case, and may
partially explain why so many women remained there for
the rest of their lives. In general, they did not receive an
education, despite some women reporting promises to
the contrary, and so they had no opportunities to acquire
cultural capital. Instead, the only opportunity for advance-
ment open to the women was that of making progress
along the religious scale from penitent, to Child of Mary,
to the status of consecrated. This privileged the symbolic
as a scale of authority, reinforcing the religious orders’
own position as the only authorities in this closed ?eld.
The limited symbolic mobility of a small number of the
women also reinforced the idea that the Laundries had a
rehabilitative function, which in turn supported their
legitimacy internally.
Facilitated by their initial habitus – an acceptance of the
role of authority ?gures and of the place of women in Irish
society at the time, the perceived ‘wrongness’ of single
motherhood and their development of a complicit habitus,
the women were effectively entrapped in a ?eld whose
doxa left them ‘‘as a ?sh out of water’’ (Vvacquant, 1989:
43), unable to defy an unarticulated power and imprisoned
by the lack of openness and accountability about their own
status. Effectively, they were unable to challenge a dom-
ination they misrecognised and internalised due to what
Bourdieu called ‘‘. . . deeply buried corporeal dispositions,
outside the channels of consciousness and calculation . . .
this doxic submission of the dominated to the structures
of the social order of which their mental structures are
the product’’ (Bourdieu, 1990b: 55).
The closed ?eld prioritised symbolic capital over all
other forms, and so the ‘legitimate’ culture of the
Laundries was experienced as ‘the only game in town’, a
fait accompli. This echoes Bourdieu’s description of the
‘‘mental structures’’ which govern exchanges and of all
kinds, even symbolic ones, as mechanisms ‘‘excluding the
possibility of thinking otherwise’’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 95).
Alternatives such as education, ?nancial progress, growing
social capital etc. were systematically excluded. Within the
Laundries, the women were infantilised and disempow-
ered by the roles created for them, which permitted no
progress or change that was not mandated by the holders
of the symbolic capital. ‘‘In the Home of the Good
Shepherd the one [the nun] is ever the ‘Mother’, while
the other [the penitent] is always the ‘Child’’’ (Kerr,
1931:11).
S. Killian/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32 27
In this context, it is clear that the barriers to the
women’s freedom were more than physical. The women
were unaware of their rights, and the system assaulted
their sense of themselves, changing their roles and identi-
ties. Martha Cooney, a former inmate of the Magdalen
Laundry in Galway interviewed for a Channel Four TV
Documentary observes ?atly ‘‘We were caged. And we
were powerless to do anything about it. We had no recre-
ation . . . just silence, and atoning for the sins, and how
wicked you were’’ (Humphries, 1998).
The act of ‘‘accounting for’’ the women in a symbolic
frame rendered the notion of ‘‘accounting to’’ them, or
externally accounting for their welfare, unthinkable. The
women were cast as objects of some greater service being
provided to society, rather than as employees, or as users
of a service of rehabilitation or education, and so did not
need to be considered as stakeholders. The paucity of
?nancial record within the Laundries is demonstrated by
the note in McAleese (2013: 642), that ‘‘a single hard-
backed accounts book records income and expenditure
for all activities of the Good Shepherd Sisters in Limerick
(Convent, Magdalen Laundry, Industrial School and
Reformatory School) from December 1920 to 1992.’’ For
the women, the lack of social insurance contributions
meant that their rights in the social welfare system were
severely curtailed in later life, and the lack of public
records of such payments made it more dif?cult for them
to establish their rights under the compensation scheme
eventually established by the Irish government.
This lack of ?nancial accounting at least in the early
years of the Laundries’ operation is perhaps to be expected
given the historical and social context. Oakes and Young
(2008: 775), for example, note that ‘‘There is little evidence
that Hull House viewed ?nancial reports as important
ways to report their activities in its early years.’’
However, unlike the Irish Magdalen Laundries, Hull
House produced monthly bulletins from 1896 through to
1905, gradually replaced by yearbooks that came to
include ?nancial reports. These and other more narrative
forms of reporting were characterised by an accounting
for the developing mission of the institution, self-critique
and consultation with the wider community, all elements
missing from the Magdalene Laundries, which remained
largely inscrutable to the public beyond their walls. In
Hull House, accountability was conceptualised as an on-
going, self-critical internal dialogue that was open to out-
siders (Oakes & Young, 2008: 786). No such process pre-
vailed in the Laundries. Instead the suppression of the
?nancial prioritised the symbolic, and the women were
‘‘accounted for’’ only within the closed system in symbolic
terms as penitents, or children.
A dramatic illustration of the disregard for external
records came to light in 1993 when the Sisters of Our
Lady of Charity sold development land that had been
attached to a Magdalen Laundry. Because the land to be
sold included a graveyard, they applied to have the
remains of 133 women exhumed and reinterred.
However, as highlighted by Raftery (2011), ‘‘it emerged
that there were 22 more bodies in the grave than the nuns
had listed when applying for permission to exhume. Over
one-third of the deaths had never been certi?ed.’’ Many
of the bodies could not be identi?ed, as their real names
had not been recorded. ‘‘They’d become simply
Magdalens’’ (Raftery, 2011; RTE, 2012). The Laundries in
Ireland therefore failed to come close even to the historical
accountability standards of Hull House or of the Edinburgh
Magdalen Asylum as described by Evans and Pierpoint
(2015). There is no evidence of any attempt to provide an
account to the state or to society, and scant evidence of
such an account being demanded. Instead the complicit
silence surrounding the women’s welfare seems to have
been embedded in the function of the Laundries, almost
as part of the service provided to the state, in removing
the women’s perceived transgressions from of?cial and
public records.
The impact for the state
From the suppression of the Carrigan report in 1931 and
1932 through to 2014, the informality and lack of account-
ability around the Magdalen Laundries allowed something
that the women seemed to represent to be erased from the
of?cial records of the state. Smith (2007) suggests that ‘‘the
sexually promiscuous woman, especially the unmarried
mother and her illegitimate child, presented a serious chal-
lenge to the economic stability of men newly converted to
the bene?ts of capital accumulation’’ Smith (2007: 28).
Similarly, the conditions and incidents that gave rise to
teenage pregnancies and juvenile prostitution did not have
to be addressed by the state as long as the women involved
were effectively removed from society to have their identi-
ties re-accounted for through the Magdalen Laundries.
Commentators such as Smith (2004) and Finnegan (2001)
have also noted that the mythologised place of Irish
motherhood in the new state’s identity was preserved by
an excision of the single mother from of?cial records.
Bourdieu describes how the founding or construction of
a state is based on the creation and reproduction of a set of
classi?cations that create ‘‘ the conditions for a kind of
immediate orchestration of habitus which is itself the
foundation of a consensus over this set of shared evidences
of (national) common sense’’ (Bourdieu, 1990b: 54). Earlier
in the same essay he refers to state bureaucracies as ‘‘great
producers of social problems’’ (Bourdieu, 1990b: 38).
Classifying the women of the Magdalen Laundries as aber-
rant and problematic rede?ned the notion of ‘‘normal’’ for
the emerging state outside of the Laundries. As long as
awareness of behaviour of a certain kind was removed
from society, society could accept a new sense of nation-
hood, tangibly different from what had gone before.
Bourdieu notes that ‘‘If the state is able to exercise
symbolic violence, it is because it incarnates itself simul-
taneously in objectivity, in the form of speci?c organiza-
tional structures and mechanisms, and in subjectivity, in
the form of mental structures and categories and percep-
tion and thought’’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 40). In this broader
sense, the state had ultimate responsibility not only for
the existence of the Laundries and hence the welfare of
the women therein, but also for the complicit silence and
acceptance of the public at large that allowed them to con-
tinue to operate. The degree of this lack of awareness is, by
its nature, dif?cult to measure. The ties between the
28 S. Killian/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32
Laundries and the state throughout the twentieth century
were many and undeniable. ‘‘The reality is that society –
the world outside – continued to furnish Magdalen
Laundries and their Convents with both penitents and
nuns’’ (Finnegan, 2001: 47). Maeve O’Rourke notes in RTE
(2012) that ‘‘the women in the Laundries were washing
army laundry, prison laundry, industrial school laundry’’
making the point that state bodies had commercial con-
tracts with the Laundries that did not reference their other
role as places of containment. Many women were commit-
ted to the institutions by their families, and as noted by
Raftery (2011), ‘‘Irish society was deeply complicit in the
incarceration of women and girls in the Laundries’’.
Among the population at large, however, awareness of
the Laundries seems to have been characterised by an
unarticulated sense of shame and stigma (McAleese,
2013). This is exempli?ed by comments from a woman
who grew up near the Galway Magdalen Laundry, and
describes playing in a nearby ?eld as a child. ‘‘I really had
no idea what the Magdalen was about. I had an idea that
maybe it might have been a school of some sort because
I was aware of all the ladies that lived in there. I never
actually would go near that place because there was some-
thing in me that knew that it was out of bounds’’ (RTE,
1992). The quote articulates both a lack of awareness and
an awareness of the shame and stigma surrounding the
institution, a Bourdieusian duality of misrecognition and
recognition, vividly described in terms of an embodied
habitus as ‘‘something in me that knew that it was out of
bounds.’’
The state had ultimate responsibility for the physical
barriers to the progress of the women of the Magdalen
Laundries. Beyond this, through the promulgation of its
new post-independence identity or national habitus it cre-
ated the psychological barriers not only within the
Laundries, but also in society at large that rendered the
topic of the Laundries taboo. This suppression of the sub-
ject extended in an unconscious way even within the
national parliament, and prevented the light of public
opinion from shining too brightly on what happened in
and around them.
The obscurity of the connections between the state and
the Laundries was used by the state even in the 21st cen-
tury to provide distance from responsibility. For example,
responding to the UN in 2011 the Secretary General of
the Irish Department of Justice said: ‘‘These alleged events
happened in most cases a considerable time ago in pri-
vately-run institutions and therefore the information avail-
able to us all is limited. However as far as we can establish
on the facts available, the vast majority of women who
went to these institutions went there voluntarily, or if they
were minors, with the consent of their parents or guar-
dians’’ (RTE, 2014).
Financial responsibility continued to be evaded through
2014 by citing the paucity of records and blurring of
accountability. For example, the compensation payments
due under the recommendations of Quirke (2013) are to
be made ex gratia, a term that Ruadhan MacAoidhain on
RTE (2014) pointed out literally means ‘out of kindness’
or as a gift rather than as of right. The overall amount of
compensation due depends on the duration of the
women’s stay in the Laundries, and critically, the onus of
proof falls on the women as claimants. However, Stephen
O’Riordan of the Magdalen Survivors Together Group,
quoted on RTE (2014) argues that the lack of of?cial
records makes it all but impossible for claimants to provide
evidence of their stay. Not only are these records sparse
and poorly overseen, they are also obscure because the
women’s names had been changed on entry, and in some
cases the records show this given name rather than the
woman’s name from birth. In this way, the lack of account-
ing, records and accountability that served the state at an
early stage in dealing with a perceived social problem, con-
tinued to serve the state in 2014 in delaying and reducing
the ?nancial cost of compensation. In 2014, Irish
Taoiseach
9
Enda Kenny was quoted on RTE (2014) as asking
the religious orders who were unwilling to contribute to the
survivor compensation fund ‘‘to re?ect on the question of a
monetary contribution’’ pleading a powerlessness on the
part of the state to compel any action on their part. ‘‘I can’t
force them to do that. I can’t take away the charitable status
. . . This is an issue that they know about themselves, and
that’s the position’’ (RTE, 2014). This stance has the immedi-
ate impact of protecting the ?nancial interests of the reli-
gious orders. More fundamentally, however, it maintains
that distance between the state and the Laundries which
preserved the social silence around their operation. This bol-
sters the key elements of deniability on the part of the state,
and allows state actors to frame their response in terms of
compassionate concern rather than responsibility.
Discussion and conclusions
This paper examines the impact of a lacuna in account-
ing and accountability in a closed, non-?nancial setting,
that of the Irish Magdalen Laundries. The focus is on how
these institutions operated in Ireland through the twenti-
eth century in a very different way to their peer institutions
in the UK, marked by a deliberate lack of accountability that
was created by, and served the conservative state. The
government essentially used the religious orders as a
convenient support for its new identity and as a way of
re-accounting for aspects of the new state considered
troublesome to its emerging identity. It did so through a
complex but unarticulated set of relationships with the
institutions in which the logic of the price was consistently
denied in favour of ex-gratia payments, donations, top-ups
and pocket money. Artfully unsystematic arrangements
were put in place between private organisations and suc-
cessive governments, and these served the state in provid-
ing distance between the daily lived experiences of some
citizens and its responsibilities towards them.
The case has implications beyond the historic for the
outsourcing of the provision of state services to private
bodies. It illustrates how the framing of the relationship
between state and service provider impacts on the power
of those affected by the provision of the service, and on
the perceived location of responsibility for any harm done.
A blurring of ?nancial motivations leads to a blurring of the
9
Equivalent of Prime Minister.
S. Killian/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32 29
usual forms of calculative accountability that follow eco-
nomic relationships. In the absence of any counter-weight
of alternative forms of testimony or accountability, this can
facilitate an of?cial disclaiming of responsibility by the
state for its citizens. As this case shows, that disclaiming
of responsibility can extend far beyond the period of provi-
sion of the original service.
The case also indirectly highlights a nuance in the
relationship between price, value and rights. No price
was placed on the labour of the women in the Laundries,
and consequently that labour was not subject to scrutiny
from systems of taxation, social insurance, health and
safety, employment law, etc. This ultimately had an
adverse impact on the role and rights of the providers of
that labour. The absence of price led to a devaluing of the
labour, because the systems in place to protect and value
work and workers were all predicated on the ?nancial.
The gap through which the women’s labour fell was inevi-
table in a system that only recognised quantitative, eco-
nomic measures, and relied on these to trigger economic
and social rights, and state responsibilities.
Smyth (2012) has highlighted the challenges made to
the state by civil society in the context of what he calls
Critical Public Accountability. This can be dif?cult for users
of an outsourced service who lack the power either to
demand accountability, or to dictate the form of its prac-
tice. This suggests that while the prioritising of account-
ability is important in the formation of all state relations,
it is especially important when the users or objects of the
service are less empowered, or when the providers of the
service have a less overtly economic focus. This may apply
particularly to services provided by non-pro?ts. The mod-
ern equivalents to the Magdalen Laundries, services relat-
ing to mental health, direct provision for asylum seekers
or prison services, for example, may carry a moral hazard
under one or both of these criteria.
The paper employs a wider than usual range of concepts
from Bourdieu, focusing in particular on his work on the
economy of symbolic goods, his logic of the price, and his
work on the role and function of the state. The denial of
the economic is not new to religious organisations, or
unique to the Magdalen Laundries. The analysis, however,
highlights the way in which use of such an organisation
to implement social policy can predispose the relationship
to deprioritise the economic, and so, in the absence of
alternative, less quantitative forms of account-giving, to
downplay the need for oversight and accountability.
While Bourdieu did not mean the logic of the price solely
in an economic sense, there is a sense in which the eco-
nomic will always trigger a form of accountability, at least
in a limited and calculative form. Even in circumstances
that might be expected to lack formality (see, for example,
Neu, Everett, Rahaman, and Martinez (2013) on accounting
and networks of corruption), the ?ow of money drags
accounting in its wake, and accounting in turn facilitates
a certain kind of quantitative accountability. Perhaps
because money is an instrument of power, it demands
the creation of structures to allow its movements to be
both controlled and inscribed. Because it is valued, it is
curated, and so organisations and institutions are sup-
ported by its structuring power. This architecture
functions, more or less, not only to support the state and
other institutions, but also to provide, even if only as a side
effect, a measure of accountability about the function
served by the ?nancial ?ows.
If, however, the ?nancial ?ows between the state and a
private body are purposefully ad-hoc and informal, they
may not automatically trigger the creation of such numeric
and measured accountability structures. This is dangerous
because ‘‘accountability has from its very inception been
dominated by calculation and quantitative practices’’
(McKernan & McPhail, 2012: 178). Unless an alternative
form of accountability or accounterability (Kamuf, 2007)
is deliberately designed into the relationship, it is unlikely
to develop organically in a system weighted towards the
calculative. The logical result, as illustrated by this case,
is a system so reliant on calculated and economic indica-
tors that it will not recognise or automatically respond to
the informal.
The implications for accounting and accountability are
indirect but signi?cant. This paper highlights informality
as a gap through which the ‘usual’ mechanisms of account-
ability can fall. This is perhaps as much an indictment of
what is ‘usual’ in terms of accountability as it is a criticism
of the informal. The systematic devaluing of the women’s
labour, highlighted above, is a vivid illustration of this
effect. In the absence of wages, those systems designed
to record or tax or protect the rights of workers failed to
recognise the women’s work as labour in the ‘usual’ sense.
Their work was rendered invisible to the system simply by
removing the ?nancial, because the systems themselves
were so myopic in their interpretation of what they should
record and ‘account for.’ Without a calculated, formal and
?nancial value to represent the work, it simply disap-
peared from of?cial records, and thus fromthe set of things
for which the state saw itself as having a direct and
obvious responsibility.
Of course merely recording a ?nancial value for the
work of the women would not have addressed the prob-
lems of power around the Magdalen Laundries, even if that
value were externalised through the tax system and so
became transparent. ‘‘Transparency becomes problematic
only when we believe in its perfection; when we believe
or act as if all there is to accountability is transparency;
that transparency is adequate and suf?cient as a form of
accountability’’ (Roberts, 2009: 968). In the Irish case,
unlike contemporaneous equivalents such as the Scottish
Laundries (Evans & Pierpoint, 2015) or Hull House (Oakes
& Young, 2008), there were no narrative or even ad-hoc
forms of account-giving in place. The informality was not
accidental. The lack of enquiry and response, the dec-
ades-long parliamentary silences all point to a deliberate
framing of the role of the Laundries so as to avoid any
demands for accountability of any kind to the state, to
the women, or to wider society. This is more than a lack
of ?nancial record-keeping. If we frame accountability in
the broadest terms ‘‘as talk, listening, and asking ques-
tions’’ (Roberts, 2009: 967) or in the broadened sense con-
sidered by Kamuf (2007) as ‘‘a counter-practice to the
numeric evaluation’’, it simply did not exist in the Irish
Laundries. The problem was not accidental opacity, but
deliberate silence.
30 S. Killian/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 43 (2015) 17–32
This underlines the importance of carefully building an
architecture of accountability in the widest and most
inclusive sense into all state relationships, particularly
where services are delegated or outsourced, and doubly
so when the services are targeted at groups who lack a
clear voice. A system based on curated informality has a
dangerous potential to alter the identities of those (un)ac-
counted for, and these altered identities shift power. The
state as instigator of this informality is rewarded with a
convenient distance from these negative outcomes, and
the people who enter the system without power ?nd no
means to progress, no familiar structure to navigate. Any
accountability or accounterability practice, even one that
falls short of the ideal, even one that reduces to the
numeric, creates a structure which can be contested. Its
absence generates an obscure and ill-de?ned space whose
boundaries are unarticulated, providing no traction for
protest or resistance.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Philip O’Regan, Ileana Steccolini and
John Lannon for helpful comments on earlier versions of
the paper, as well as to participants at the 2014 Critical
Perspectives on Accounting Conference in Toronto, and
the Irish Accounting & Finance Association Conference in
Belfast, as well as two anonymous referees. All remaining
errors are my responsibility.
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