There are many striking moments in Testimony, the recently-released documentary from director Aoife Moore, that centres the voices and experiences of people affected by Ireland’s systems of institutionalisation and forced family separation. The testimony from women who spent years imprisoned and working for nothing in Magdalene Laundries or who were forced to give up their children for adoption, linger in the body and the mind of the viewer. One moment in particular remains with me. In the film, Carmel Cantwell recalls looking for her new home as she planned a move to Cork from the UK. She did not have many stipulations; just somewhere peaceful and near the city. Carmel describes how, soon after she settled in her new house, her mother, Madeleine, told her that she had a baby boy at Bessborough Mother and Baby Home. This was the first time Madeleine had ever told anyone about her time in Bessborough. William Gerard Walsh, was born on October 26th, 1960. In the film, Madeleine recounts how, although born healthy, after a few days William deteriorated. Madeleine was rarely allowed to spend time with her son. She recalls sitting in a freezing corridor trying to warm his tiny feet. When William was taken to hospital, Madeleine was told she couldn’t visit him. He died at six weeks. She was not allowed to see his body. 60 years later, Madeleine is still searching for William’s final resting place.
As the camera pans over a field bordered by a wood, we learn that Carmel’s house, the home she bought before knowing anything about her connection to Bessborough, overlooks Carr’s Hill. According to the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, it is “plausible” that the 859 Bessborough babies who died without any burial records, are buried at Carr’s Hill, a burial ground that dates back to the Great Famine. However, the Commission couldn’t confirm this, because the organisation that ran the home, the Congregation of Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary, had no testimony to offer on this question. The Commission stated in its interim report that it was “very difficult to understand that no member of the congregation was able to say where the children who died in Bessborough are buried.” Meanwhile, Madeleine and Carmel continue to come to Carr’s Hill, still hoping for a sign.
The strange coincidence of the location of Carmel’s new home made me think of haunting. Of the haunting nature of grief, suffered by Madeleine, and Carmel too, I imagine. I thought also of the past calling on the present to listen, to search for the answers denied survivors and their families for decades, for truths that continue to be suppressed, about the system of coercive confinement, about our shared histories of forced work, incarceration, family separation, illegal adoption, child trafficking, and medical experimentation.
Almost everyone in the country has heard of the Magdalene Laundries, but few are aware of the team of volunteers who made them into a national and international issue. The film shows how Justice for Madgalenes worked to put the State in the dock. For the first time, we hear the story of how Marie Steed, Angela Newsome, Claire McGettrick, Katherine O’Donnell, Maeve O’Rourke and James Smith worked to make plain the truth that the Irish state facilitated and supported grave human rights abuses in respect of children and women in institutions and through the intricate systems of forced family separation. It shows how the group documented survivors’ experiences, and then used this testimony to demonstrate that the State was in breach of its own commitments under international human rights law (and constitutional law). This is taking individual experience seriously as testimony, recognising accounts of loss and suffering as evidence of human rights violations. Academic research, painstaking historical inquiries, legal expertise and journalistic nous all combined to create a creative, exciting and unstoppable movement for justice.
The film brings us right up to the present and the work of Justice for Magdalenes Research. The work is still vitally important, as survivors still search for their own records, of vaccination, of institutionalisation, of their own birth and, like Madeleine, for information about the location of their child’s body. As Special Advocate Patricia Carey notes
Access to the records relating to their experience in institutions and forced family separation is the issue which is most frequently raised by Survivors and Affected Persons with the Special Advocate. The rights of Survivors and Affected Persons to their information is key to an open, transparent and respectful response to institutional incarceration, confinement and abuse and forced family separation. There is an urgent need for full access to records and files, with many Survivors having spent decades already searching for information, and in some instances have died before gaining access to their records.
Irish people are in the throes of what Katherine O Donnell calls a “constant forgetting” of what is our shared history of institutionalisation and human rights violations. Testimony shows the power of testimony and collective action to counter forgetting. It demands we listen to the people with knowledge of our collective history and that we call on the State act to vindicate their right to access all information about their own histories. As long as survivors and their families are kept in the dark about their own loved ones, about their own pasts, their mourning will be continually deferred, and the past will continue to haunt our collective present.
Sinéad Ring is an Associate Professor in Law at Maynooth School of Law and Criminology. Sinéad’s research explores legal and institutional responses to sexual violence. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and is lead author of Child Sexual Abuse Reported by Adult Survivors: Legal Responses in England and Wales, Ireland and Australia (Routledge, 2022; 2024).
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