Behind the Bastards hosts dissect Ireland's 1,300-year history of foreign domination and the 1937 Constitution that outsourced social services to the Catholic Church. They detail how industrial schools and Magdalene Laundries functioned as profit-driven penal institutions where children and "fallen women" faced starvation, forced labor, and sexual abuse under British-style models. Survivor testimonies reveal mass graves covered up by nuns, while the hosts argue this systemic trafficking of babies and state complicity constitutes genocide comparable to totalitarian regimes, leaving deep societal trauma. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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English Oppression of the Irish00:15:17
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
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What's hurting my ears?
My new Zoom.
This meeting is being recorded, boys.
I'm Robert Evans, host Behind the Bastards.
And if you are a user of Zoom, which hopefully less people are because the world is in some, well, parts of the world are slightly better than they were a couple of months ago.
I don't know.
I don't know how to phrase this adequately.
But fucking Zoom just put in a new change where this horrible woman tells you that you're being recorded in a voice that makes me want to either die or do violence.
And I don't like it.
I don't prefer it.
And then the next thing she says is she's like, blue lives matter.
Yeah.
And then she's a short person.
She even asked you about that.
She starts talking about white farmers in South Africa.
And yeah, it gets like really weird how blonde people are going extinct.
It's bizarre.
I don't understand why Zoom put all that in.
She asked me if I knew how to spell eugenics the last time.
Wow.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That makes sense.
Seems out of place.
Yeah, she actually poses the old SS racial heritage questions to make sure that you're legally allowed to be in a relationship with your significant other.
That's Zoom.
That's the Zoom lady.
Yeah.
Actual Nazi, the Zoom lady.
The urban legend of the Zoom lady.
Biggest Karen of them all.
We have Sophia Alexandra here.
Sophia, we have you.
This is a podcast about bad people, the worst in all of history.
And we have an especially dark episode today.
Today, we're going to be talking about one of the darkest chapters in Irish history.
Now, if you know anything about the Irish, you know that that's saying something when you're like, this is one of the worst things that ever happened in Ireland.
Like, you're already, you're already, you're getting, you're on the top of a mountain, and maybe there's like two or three other mountains.
There's like, there's like indigenous American history.
There's like Ukrainian history, you know, one or two other mountains that you can see peaks above you when you're on top of the Irish history mountain.
So this is going to be a bad one today.
Going to be a real bad one today.
And I know that since I am here, there's going to be piles and piles.
Yeah.
I mean, of tons of piles and piles of babies who are deceased.
Yeah.
And that is my calling card.
The working title for this episode is how the Catholic Church Killed All of Ireland's Babies.
So yeah, we're going to fucking zoom in on that.
And obviously, as that probably keys you in on, the villain of today's episode is primarily the Catholic Church.
Children.
Yeah, that's how the Catholic Church saw.
We got to deal with all these fucking kids.
I am starting to think I'm misunderstanding who we're cheering for in this podcast.
This is a very pro-killing babies podcast.
This is Behind the Baby Killers, a podcast that celebrates reducing the surplus population.
Look, I'm just excited to get drunk at two in the afternoon.
That's the behind the bastards here and there's the content of this.
Sophia's getting drunk and I'm yelling about, are there no workhouses?
Are there no prisons?
I'm Ebenezer Scrooge.
That's the long frame of the show.
Are you married to the Zoom lady?
I am.
I am.
We're very happy.
We're having our wedding at a plantation, several plantations.
We're plantation hopping for the wedding.
May I ask the color of the skin of the people that will be attending your wedding?
Well, I mean, servers are attending, right?
Yes, that's what I meant.
Attending to your white guests.
Yeah.
Sophia, what do you, know about Ireland?
Well, um, I do consider them a sister country to my Eastern European ass because we do worship the potato as well.
You worship the potato?
And you also worship hardcore drinking.
So hardcore drinking.
And I think very, very close to my heart, Ireland.
In both Ukraine and Ireland, the hardcore drinking is driven in part by the fact that you are the two most colonized countries within Europe.
Both Ukraine and Ireland were victims of colonization.
Look, oppression will drive you to drink.
It absolutely does.
And there's some, you know, we had everything exploding in Gaza and in Palestine recently and some reminders that like the Irish are some of the most within sort of the Western world, probably the most consistent allies of the Palestinian cause, as they were consistent allies as a nation of the indigenous American cause.
Because they've, you know, they've been through some of the same shit.
And a story that's dropping that's just dropped this week is about the residential schools in Canada, which we covered.
One of them was found to have a mass grave with 215 children in it.
And we're talking about a very similar story today, but it's, of course, within the context of Ireland.
Now, before we get into what exactly happened that led to the mass graves, we're going to be talking about today mass baby graves, good times.
We have to talk about about roughly 1,300 years of Irish history, which we're going to do in like a page, which is, I think, responsible and good.
So strap in.
Here's 1,300 years of Ireland.
So Ireland's history of foreign domination started around the 700s when Scandinavian Vikings started to raid monasteries and towns for precious gold.
Over the next 200 years, they settled in several cities, including Dublin, and dominated the island until 1014, when an Irish king named Brian Baru beat a Viking army in battle.
Now, this only brought the Irish about a century of independence because in 1166, a war between two Irish kings ended when the defeated king invited the Normans to invade the Normans who had taken over what is today like England.
This Irish king who loses a war invites them to invade Ireland in 1169.
And his plan is like, this is going to lead to me being in charge.
Of course, it doesn't.
It backfires and the Normans take over Ireland.
And this begins 700 years of direct domination of Ireland.
I'm picturing a bunch of people named Norman.
Yeah, just a bunch of, it's just Norm McDonald.
You know, thousands of Norm McDonald's with axes just taking Ireland.
Of course, and I think Norm McDonald is probably Irish or Scottish.
I don't know, whatever.
Fuck him.
He's an asshole is what he is.
The Normans is the mascot of Beverly Hills High School.
That's what I was picturing, which is awesome.
Is that right?
Which is very some colonizer ass shit.
Yeah.
I don't know what the origin is, but I'm assuming it's not great.
It's not great.
Now, over the following centuries, there were a bunch of different like subsequent English invasions of Ireland and people will quibble that like, oh, I shouldn't call them whatever.
It's people who live in where the English, like, fuck it.
They're the English.
I don't care.
In 1171, King Henry II landed a huge army at Waterford to fuck up some of his own nobles who had taken over chunks of Ireland and were getting too rich, oppressing the Irish without him.
So like other English people are oppressing the Irish and the king is like, but I'm not getting enough money from fucking up the Irish.
So he invades them.
I never want to be left out when people are oppressing other people.
No, why would you?
Like that you're just leaving money and bodies on the table.
If I found out Sophie was oppressing you without me, you know how hurt I'd be?
I know you would be.
I would never be.
I would never be.
I know that's why that's why you both have access to the online trigger for the shot collar that I wear constantly in order to stop me from doing bad things.
That's only partly a joke because Twitter's kind of a shot collar.
Now, in the 1530s, King Henry VIII, you know this guy?
Have you heard of this guy?
Hey, hey, Mark Marin Voice, who are your guys?
So King Henry VIII, real piece of shit.
He's the guy who invented the Church of England and like made his country leave the Catholic Church because he wanted to fuck more ladies, but that meant divorcing and marrying more ladies.
It was a whole thing.
There's a song about it.
Anyway, well, it's not about that, but it has the name Henry VIII.
Anyway, it's very funny.
So he decides the Church of England is going to be a thing now because I want to be able to get divorced and marry new women.
The Irish were committed Catholics.
And some of their commitment to Catholicism came from the fact that the English, who they hated, were like, we're not Catholics anymore.
This led to a series of what you might call race kerfuffles with the English that ended with the Irish population devastated and the mass confiscation of Irish land by English colonists.
Now, in the 16th century, the Spanish, near the end of the 16th century, the Spanish briefly show up to help the Irish rebel against their masters, but that ended disastrously.
This happens a couple of times in history.
The Spanish and the Germans on a number of occasions try to help the Irish for their own purposes, and it never really works out for the Irish.
In 1649, a noted piece of shit, Oliver Cromwell, invaded Ireland yet again to destroy Catholic Irish power.
By 1652, he held most of the country, and he launched a vicious counterinsurgency to wipe out the remaining guerrilla resistance to his reign.
Cromwell's campaign in Ireland was absolutely an act of genocide.
He may have wiped out fully 50% of the population, which is again, the Holocaust in Europe kills about 50% of the Jewish population.
Yeah, I was going to say that's a really high level of official.
That's a pretty, pretty, pretty genocidey genocide, right?
Like when we talk about the Irish's genocide victims, we're not exaggerating here.
And around 50,000 Irish laborers were also deported as indentured laborers to the Caribbean, which was a step up from slavery, but not a giant step.
It's bad.
So we could do a whole podcast on the mountains of shit the Irish have had to endure over the last three quarters of millennia in particular.
Probably the best known chapter in this shit history was the Irish Potato Famine or the Great Hunger.
This kicked off in 1845 when a fungus killed half the year's potato crop and then three quarters of the crop over the next seven years.
Because the Irish were a colony of England.
The whole population were tenant farmers.
All power on the island came from English landowners.
Catholics were prohibited from owning or leasing land, voting or holding elected office until 1829.
So this is an apartheid state as well.
So by the time the famine started, the island's politics were still dominated by absentee British Church of England landlords.
Tenant farmers owed food as rent to their landlords, and potatoes were supposed to help them subsist.
But when the crop started failing, they didn't have enough food to pay their debts to their landlords, who again didn't live in Ireland generally, and to also eat.
Roughly 1 million Irish people starved to death during the famine.
Another million were forced to flee their homeland, often leaving for the United States.
This was out of a population of a little over 8 million.
So between death, so they lose half their population in the 1600s under Cromwell.
And then in the fucking 1800s, a quarter of the population either is killed or forced out of the country by famine.
Pretty rough millennia for the Irish, all things told.
So given all this, it's not hard to understand why the Irish wanted independence from Great Britain.
In 1916, with World War I and Media Res, a group of Irish revolutionaries tried to overthrow their colonial oppressor.
They succeeded in taking over a chunk of Dublin and declaring an Irish republic for like a couple of days before the British sailed in a battleship and pounded the city with naval guns from the sea.
As tragic as the Easter Rising was, it played a key role in leading to a treaty settlement in 1921 that brought the Irish some manner of independence.
Basically, it's carved into, you got your Northern Ireland, which is still a part of the UK, but you got your Republic of Ireland now, which is, you know, the capital is in Dublin.
And it's like the bulk of the island, which is not, again, still a lot of people angry about the partitioning of Ireland, but it's a better situation than had existed before.
So the modern Republic of Ireland comes about as a result of this process.
Child Prison in Reformatory Schools00:13:34
And in 1937, the Irish government drafts a constitution.
Now, if you've been paying attention through this very brief overview of Irish history, you'll note that the Catholic Church, pretty important to the Irish who want independence, right?
Kind of a big, big deal for them.
And for most of the history of like the Irish independence movement, the Catholic Church has been kind of a countercultural and liberatory force.
Being Catholic was a symbol of resistance to the crown.
Now, in 1937, when they're making this new constitution, the Republic of Ireland is completely fucking broke.
They've got no goddamn money because the English had spent 700 years or so robbing them blind.
And they especially did not have money for social services.
What they had was the goodwill of the Catholic Church, who they wrote into their first constitution as the primary provider of social services, particularly education for children.
Now, that constitution did note that the rights of children were, quote, inalienable and imprescribable, but the rights of children were also subsumed within the rights of the family, which is not necessarily the best thing, because it means kids don't have independent rights on their own.
That's generally how this was translated.
So I'm going to quote from a write-up in the Child Abuse Review by Claire McLuhan Richards.
Quote, it, it being the Catholic Church, is major role in the education of children was accepted, and the acknowledgement of the good works of the religious orders in the care of the sick, poor, and needy was considered to be of benefit to wider Catholic society, which was the dominant sector of the population.
The opportunity to formalize and secure the power of the Catholic Church over its people without the impediment of British rule was critical.
The church is the true religion of the people, would exercise its authority and status in negotiations and agreements with the state.
The expectations of the state were to, quote, safeguard and uphold religious interests.
It is bound to extend protection and all reasonable assistance to the Catholic Church in the exercise of her own proper functions.
So you see the budding issue here, right?
Ireland is finally a free state.
And since Catholicism has been punished for so long, it was seen as inextricable from Irishness, which leads to the enshrining in law of the Catholic Church's dominance in social services, particularly childcare.
It was believed that Ireland, as an independent nation, should be a holy and pure state.
And part of ensuring that purity was punishing people who violated Catholic morality.
You see, we're going to have a problem here.
I don't know what you mean because I feel like deciding who is moral or not is always great.
It's always great.
I don't really think it ever leads to any problems.
I love it.
And I absolutely think I have the right to decide whether you're moral or not.
I agree.
And I think even better than you, Sophia, is a completely unaccountable group of old rich men who never fuck.
That's who I want deciding how we get to live our lives is a bunch of weirdos in Italy who don't fuck.
But that's also essentially, you know, our government too.
Still.
Oh, they fuck.
Look at Matt Gates.
Is it fucking when it's not consensual?
Well, I guess it's fucking when it's rape.
You know that image macro of the two hands clasping in the middle?
It's like Matt Gates, the Catholic Church, fucking children right in the middle.
100%.
I think they speak for all women and say we would like to not look at Matt Gates.
Yeah.
And I think there's, I'm not enough of an expert.
I'm not an expert at all in Irish history.
I wonder how much of kind of the Catholic Church's dominance after 1921 has to do with the fact that, so a lot of these Irish revolutionaries in 1916, these guys are socialists.
These guys are anti-colonial.
They're left-wing.
They have a, their idea for how the government should be is kind of a radical and socialist one for the time.
They all get massacred by the British.
I wonder how much that had to do with kind of the fact that I mean, honestly, just based on sort of culturally where the church was, it probably still would have owned a dominant.
I don't know.
It's probably something someone with more knowledge of the history than I could could weigh in on.
The Easter Rising is an interesting bit of history.
Those guys were fucking rad for the most part.
So anyway, the Catholic Church gets the gig in the Constitution, basically, of legislating morality, particularly when it involves children.
Now, when Ireland was founded, the age of criminal responsibility was seven years old.
So that's when you're capable of being so you can get the chair or some shit at some point.
Well, I don't, I don't think they're doing the chair, but um, you can't go to life.
Yeah, you can go to prison for crimes.
And it's actually much worse than that, Sophia.
Much worse than a normal prison system.
Well, what we're about to detail.
I feel like the normal prison system is already inappropriate for people.
So it'd be appropriate for children.
When I say this is worse than our prison system in a lot of ways, I mean it.
It's bad, not to minimize ours.
But so at the start of the Irish Republic, age of criminal responsibility is seven.
It eventually rose to 12.
You want to guess what year they increased the age of criminal responsibility to 12?
No.
2006.
Oh my God.
Which I think is also when Ireland legalized the blowjob.
Like, I'm not joking about that.
It was illegal to give blowjobs in Ireland until more recently than you'd expect.
Hey, everybody.
I actually got this wrong.
It was not 2006.
It was 1993 when Ireland made sodomy, which included like oral sex and stuff that wasn't, you know, procreative heterosexual sex, was made legal.
So Ireland, 1993, not 2006.
Apologies for slandering the Emerald Isle.
So children convicted of crimes in this period became the responsibility of the Catholic Church.
So the good thing is they're not putting them in adult prisons.
They're not trying them as adults.
If you're a seven or an eight or a nine or a 10 or whatever, if you're a child who commits a crime, you're handed over to the Catholic Church in a lot of cases.
I don't think we should judge how hot children are.
Okay, well, yeah.
So this is important for the science.
Now, the average, no, I'm not, that's not a joke.
That's not a joke lane we should go down.
We're into Matt Gates territory here.
We're into average Catholic priest territory here.
We're into Dennis Haster, longest serving Republican Speaker of the House territory here.
We're into probably Bill Clinton territory here.
Anyway, let's Rainieri.
Yeah, we're definitely in Ranieri, Terran.
Rainieratori.
Rani Natori is merch.
I'm sorry.
So despite all the de-Anglis Anglicization sentiment, reformatory schools, you know, the anti-British sentiment or whatever, anti-English sentiment, I don't know.
Fuck it.
Like everybody keeps yelling at me about that.
To hell with all of them, I say.
Reformatory schools were still based on a British model that had originally been established to deal with all the thieving orphans and street urchins that Charles Dickens novels harbor over.
Now back in 19.
Again, if you can send children to prison and you're a healthy society that deserves to rule the entire world.
But if you have the laws on the books and they're all thieving, just send them to prison.
Send them to prison.
Well, send them to a reform school that is worse than most prisons today.
Just send them to child prison.
All right.
Stop writing these novels about them.
I mean, glorifying the orphan, children.
Don't glorify the orphans, Dickens.
Give them the chair.
Yeah, fucking noted leftist Charles.
But you're hungry.
You want some more.
You think children should be fed, you cook?
Oh, are you simping for kids, you fucking loser?
So back in 1908, when perfidious Albion still ran things in all of Ireland, the government had instituted a set of laws designed to protect the well-being of children.
Since this was at that moment the UK, protecting children meant incarcerating them if they were caught begging or homeless, or if they were found to have been neglected, skipping school, or who had like stolen something as well.
All right, all right, all right.
All of these are evil.
Come on, Santa Monica.
Let's do this.
All of these kids.
Exactly.
Well, everyone's, that's, that's the big, now that Biden's in charge, we're, we're just going to criminalize being poor as hard as we can.
And people will continue to go to brunch.
It's going to be great.
So these kids, and this is back, again, we're talking about this is in the UK, this is in Ireland, this is before independence.
Kids are being sent to these English reformatory schools, which are also called industrial schools.
Now, under the English government, under the Crown or whatever, these schools are run independently.
Most of them were religious in nature, but they were monitored by the state.
When the UK left most of Ireland and the Republic took over, these industrial schools were officially managed by the Department of Local Government and then by the Department of Justice and then by the Department of Education.
But the church did all of the actual work.
Since the state was broke, they were more than happy to let the church take care of their social services.
The church considered this a worthwhile expense.
Historian Dythy O'Carain, I'm so sorry, Gaelic is a beautiful language.
Irish is a beautiful language.
I'm going to butcher it every time I try to say one of these names.
It is beautiful.
It sounds like mermaids talk.
Yeah, it's gorgeous.
I've spent a lot.
Ireland's the first place I ever traveled outside of the U.S. I've been back seven or eight times.
I love listening to the children.
I took an Irish literature class in college, and since then, I've been like so in love.
And like, I saw a lot of the similarity of the depression and the good writing really also resonates.
It's a like saying and all that.
Wonderful place.
It's my mom's side of the family from Ireland.
That's good.
So this historian whose name I've butchered explains, quote, that social service provision is designed to propagate the Catholic faith.
So that's why the Catholic Church is willing to go out of pocket.
At least they're framing it as like, we'll pay, since the government's broke, we'll pay for your social services because we see this as helping to expand the Catholic faith, right?
That's why we're going to cover social services for the country.
And while the wording of all these laws talked about criminal children, it's worth noting that, again, most of them had not committed anything we would recognize as a crime today.
In fact, the most common crime for which children were put in these facilities was that they were born to single mothers.
Now, no, me too.
No.
Yeah, no, you're a crime baby, throwing you in baby prison.
As one researcher wrote in 1998 of the church in Ireland, quote, the body was seen as a major source of evil.
This was particularly true for women, whose proper role was to become mothers in a good Catholic family.
Any alternatives to this Catholic ideal were a threat to the status quo.
As a result, the church and state worked together to heavily police children born out of wedlock, unsupervised and unkempt children, poor children, and children in any other living situation that didn't seem Catholic enough.
So when I talk about criminal behavior from children, this is what the church considered criminal.
Being born to a single mother, having ADHD or something that made you misbehave in school, or coming from a family without much money.
Claire McLuhan Richards describes this as pathologized Catholicism.
Basically, religion that has turned any behavior that descents from the religious mainline into an illness or a crime.
When the British left the church, when the British left Ireland, sorry, the church saw the departure of that state as a way to legislate Catholic ideas about proper behavior.
From a write-up in the child abuse review, quote, the children of poor or inadequate parenting were deemed to be in moral danger as the abused or neglected child was contaminated by adult knowledge.
He argues that children were responded to and treated by the church and state, not in terms of what they were, but what they were going to be.
This may explain why so many boys who had committed petty crime or who were seen at risk of committing crime were placed in reformatory schools.
And why so many girls, although having committed no crime, were placed in industrial schools because of the perceived risk of their sexual immorality.
The pathogen.
Crime Volva.
It's a crime.
Get us that Banksy drawing, but instead of a dude, it's a girl in a dress.
And instead of throwing a molotov with like a flower in it, it's a Vulva just hucking a Volva.
What I want to know is, could we just get like so?
Obviously, we're making tiny handcuffs for all the babies we're putting around.
Oh, no, regular handcuffs don't work.
No, are we also finding a tiny single handcuff for the Vulva for the cervix?
Are we throwing it over the cervix?
What are we doing?
The good news.
So they're not handcuffing these kids.
They're not putting them behind bars.
They're just putting them in what I might call a rape factory.
So that's good.
Oh, they're not locking them up.
They're not locking them up, though.
You know, other than when they lock them inside the rape factory with the rapists.
Anyway, is it like the CNC or CNO Music Factory?
What was that?
Yeah, it's exactly.
That's actually what the CNC Music Factory is based on, which is why they're banned in Ireland.
The CNC Music Factory Ban00:05:02
Okay.
You know who is not banned in Ireland?
I don't think.
Hopefully not.
Maybe.
Probably not the products and services that support this plan.
But you never know.
Yeah, because the EU has some laws and stuff.
And I don't know.
We might get an advertisement from my favorite gun manufacturer, Sig Sauer, in which case probably isn't legal in Ireland.
Dick pills might not be either, you know?
They let us know.
Yeah.
Correct us.
Here's ads.
Dick pills.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene from iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey, who did it?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chambers ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry, each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Pathologizing Single Mothers00:09:39
All right, we're back and we're thinking about the concept of dick pills and the Irish, who until fairly recently could not legally perform or receive blowjobs.
I'm going to continue that quote from the Child Abuse Review, which is talking about how children are being pathologized as a thought that they might commit immoral, sexual, or other type of crimes.
Quote, the pathologizing of these children may well have been because they were seen as undesirable and uncomfortable reminders of the lack of sexual control or moral values of their parents, particularly their mothers who were deemed as sinful or unchaste.
The rigors of discipline, enforcement, and punishment under repressive practices driving Catholic doctrine at that time may have granted an entitlement to cure the social ills, problems, and products of sexual immorality as manifested by the children in these institutions.
This entitlement and authority, which were endorsed by the silence and collusion of the agents of the state, sealed the fate of thousands of children.
So wait, it's kind of dope, though, that if you are having sex with your Catholic wife, the children that you have after somehow do not change the fact that you're chased.
But if you are not in a Catholic marriage and you have a child, that is evidence of you not being chased, even though any children are evidence of you not being chaste.
Not chaste.
Yeah, no, if it's within a Catholic relationship, it's fine.
If it's not, the children are guilty and need to go to prison.
Yes.
So, the question now becomes, as we've alluded to, what were these schools like in practice?
Well, if you know anything about the Catholic Church for the last, I don't know, 2,000-ish years, you've probably assumed that it involved a lot of child molestation.
Sophie, can we get an air horn for child molestation?
Oh, no.
Yeah, like a solemn.
No, I like that.
Like a solemn, mournful air horn.
Like an air horn of the house.
No, no, no, no.
You want like a sad trombone.
You want like a it actually seems more disrespectful to do the moi, moi, moi than um than an air horn.
And the air horn.
Yeah, when we're talking about child molestation.
Um, you are broken, okay?
Yeah, that's the theme of the show.
I think it should just be like one of those like, like, crash sounds.
Like, you know what I mean?
What if we like sing a little?
What if we're like, let's talk about rape, baby?
Let's talk about the Catholic church.
Let's talk about rape.
All the babies.
Let's talk about nuns and priests.
Let's talk about rape.
I think there we go.
I think it works.
I think we got an album.
I think we got an album.
I once again think I don't get paid enough.
Wait, how about this one?
It's a cath flick summer.
Don't leave your kids with a priest.
It's a cath lick summer.
I don't know.
I don't know how to continue it, but you know, we've got enough.
This is the song is that the cruel summer.
It's a cruel summer.
Is that Taylor Swift?
No, that's not Taylor Swift.
He's not thinking about that.
That's older than that.
No.
Okay, sorry.
How many cruel summers are there?
There's a couple.
Anyway, let's talk about one of the inmates in one of these industrial schools.
Des Murray arrived at the Artain Industrial School in Dublin when he was 12 and a half years old.
He'd been born in 1941, the son of angel.
Yeah, prime hard time.
That's 12.
12 and a half.
You ready?
A 12 and a half year old man.
Get him in here.
He'd been born in 1941, the son of an unmarried mother, and was almost immediately taken from her and thrown into the system.
We discussed in our Georgia Tan episode how up until like the 70s in the U.S., it was very common for single mothers to have their children taken from them straight away without any kind of recourse.
That happened here to God knows how many women.
Yeah, and in the Georgia Tan episode, you were saying that there were like a lot of fake signings away where like, you know, that's what you were signing at all.
And that was happening when like Carter was in office, not that long ago here.
In Ireland, it was worse because not only were children separated from their mothers, but both were put in church-run prisons.
So here's Dess's experience of this system from a write-up in the Irish Examiner.
Artain was a concentration camp, he says quietly.
I was singled out by two brothers, two sadists.
My biggest regret is that I didn't kill those two bastards.
One was particularly savage.
One fellow I knew had a rheumatic heart, but Brother B used to make him fill a wheelbarrow with stones and wheel it around the yard three or four times.
The Artain school was run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, a worldwide religious community founded in Waterford, Ireland in 1802.
Their goal was to educate poor Catholic boys, and as you'd expect, they have a long history of allegations of sexual abuse.
I'm going to quote again from the Irish Examiner here.
Des witnessed sexual abuse in Artain, but did not encounter it directly himself.
I remember seeing a brother on the landing, and he was spotting the boys, he says.
They carefully chose their victims.
You wouldn't see the boys going into the brothers' room, but sometimes you'd see them running out, screaming.
They chose the vulnerable ones.
Valentin Walsh was not as fortunate, and he went to St. Joseph's Industrial School of Tralee, County Cary.
So while Des just witnessed sexual abuse, Valentin was sexually and physically assaulted at St. Joseph's from the ages of nine to 13.
Valentin.
Yeah.
In the article, Valentin shows a photograph of himself as a little kid.
He's seven.
It's the day of his first communion.
And yeah, he's a nice little boy in a suit with his hair and tie all done up, but he's very much not smiling.
From the article, he doesn't ever remember a reason to smile.
All Valentin remembers is the terror, a locked door, a darkened room, and three Christian brothers who sexually and physically abused him.
This is the world that lay in wait for the little boy in the communion group of 1960 in St. Joseph's Industrial School.
The first memory I have of being sexually abused by Brother D was when I was nine or ten, says Valentin.
He would take me into his own classroom in the evening when it was empty.
He would lock the door behind me.
He recalls how it happened and how Brother D prepared the room for this hell.
I remember the blackboard in the classroom had used by Brother D to block off the windows.
Other clippings and newspaper were on the windows and blocked off any sight into the classroom.
The clippings and the blackboard prevented anyone from the outside looking in.
We were locked in and they were locked out.
So that's what happened to the boys in this was a mix of physical abuse that kid recalls, like a kid with a bad heart being forced to wheelbarrow around rocks just because one of the brothers is a sadist and like mass child rape.
That's what happens to a lot of the boys in these schools.
Now, what happened to Valentine and Deza's mothers?
You know, they're both taken from their mothers, their single moms at an early age.
They don't know.
They have no idea where their mothers wound up because the Catholic Church considered their mothers to be dangerous criminal influences.
There is a fairly decent chance, though, that both mothers were sent to what were called the Magdalene laundries.
Now, officially called them...
That sounds sinister as well.
Oh, it's about to be.
It's about to be.
And it's also about to involve the game mousetrap, oddly enough.
So officially called...
Yeah, just wait, Sophia.
Oh, you're going to have a good time with this one.
So officially called the Magdalene Asylums, these were essentially prisons for unwed mothers.
They had their roots in the mid-1700s in a campaign by the church to put so-called fallen women who were often sex workers to work.
Now, this was actually a rare joint Catholic and Protestant effort.
Okay, really quick, though.
It's in the name sex workers.
What do you mean, put sex workers to work?
Honest, God-fearing work.
Yeah, but not God-fearing.
Giving him another job.
That's fucking rude.
Yeah, I mean, this is a pretty rude religion.
Now, I should note that when the Magdalene Asylum started, because this kicks off in the 1700s, Ireland's still under the UK, this starts as actually a very rare joint Protestant and Catholic effort, which tells you how much about Irish society at all levels despised single mothers and English society.
The first of these institutions was actually run by the Protestant Church of Ireland, the Magdalene Asylum for Penitent Females in Dublin.
Now, there was a worry on the time that prostitution was on the rise.
Wayward women who were willing to have sex outside of marriage and get pregnant outside of wedlock were thought to be in danger of becoming sex workers.
So when I say these fallen women were sex workers, often they were just women who wanted to have sex with people they weren't married to.
That was the same thing at the time.
Fearing this, parents started sending their unwed daughters to the Magdalene asylums because they were worried, like your daughter looks at a boy, you send her there, or your daughter gets pregnant, you send her there.
Either way, you're worried your daughter might fuck, you send her to the Magdalene Asylum.
Now, the goal here was twofold.
First, it was to hide the shameful fact that a woman in the family had gotten pregnant or had been having sex without a husband.
And second, it was hoped that time in the asylums would rehabilitate sinful sex and baby havers.
Initially, inmates were only meant to be incarcerated for limited periods of time.
They would be sentenced to several years, during which they would learn a respectable profession so that when they left, they'd be able to avoid the horrific sin of having consensual sex for money.
However, the work they did at the Magdalene Asylums made money for the church.
And as decades and eventually centuries passed, the Magdalene Asylums became institutions within the Irish Catholic Church.
From a write-up in history.com, quote, the stints, the prison sentences, grew longer and longer.
Women were sent there, were often charged with redeeming themselves through lacemaking, needlework, or doing laundry.
Though most residents had not been convicted of any crime, conditions inside were prison-like.
Magdalene Asylum Profits00:08:06
Redemption might sometimes involve a variety of coercive measures, including shaven heads, institutional uniforms, bread and water diets, restricted visiting, supervised correspondence, solitary confinement, and even flogging, writes historian Helen J. Self.
So that's good.
I love a casual flogging you didn't expect.
Yeah, yeah.
An adult ass woman living your life.
Getting flogged for not washing clothes fast enough because you winked at a boy when you were 15.
Yes.
Also, like, so fucked up.
You were just like, maybe giving like blowjobs and shit.
And now you have to learn how to needlepoint.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not great.
I don't want someone to force me to do that.
Like, those are really different skills.
They are very different skills.
Both can involve needles, but only if your partner is into sounding.
So honestly, I mean, hand eye coordination is important in both.
It is.
Yeah.
But that's probably where the similarity ends.
They're both like basketball in that, both needlepoint and blowjobs.
A lot of similarities to basketball.
Yeah.
Which is why NBA players give such famously good blowjobs.
Yeah.
So that's why they call LeBron King James.
King James, because he's the king.
I will not allow that.
King of blowjobs.
I will not allow that.
That's what that documentary song, My Milkshake Brings All the Boys to the Yard, was about LeBron James.
I will not accept it.
He's so good at blowjobs.
And you know what else?
That's the reason that, you know, he has a little bit of a bald spot on the top of his head.
Oh, come on.
Let me see.
See, this is what he was doing.
I was letting the blowjob happen.
Don't come for his hairline.
I'm not.
But when he's blowing and he's on his knees, he's so good.
People literally rubbed the hair off his head.
Yeah.
That's a compliment.
That's, yes, that's all I'm saying.
That's evidence of how skillful he is.
I will not accept this slander of LeBron James.
Famously Jerry West, hella jealous, hella jealous of LeBron's sucking skills.
I just, I have to put it out there.
I'm so sad.
Yeah.
Why?
I think he was.
We're just talking about fun, consensual sex with an NBA/slash blowjob star.
That's fine.
It's not like putting children in prison or putting children and their single mothers in prison slash rape factories.
Now, Sophia, initially, most of the inmates at the Magdalene laundries.
They came to be known as that because doing laundry for money was one of the most common things that they would have these women do.
Initially, most of these inmates went voluntarily and the focus was on rehabilitation.
But over time, these grew into penal institutions.
As this happened, their scope changed.
From providing rehabilitation to fallen women to taking in women who had been admitted to psychiatric institutions, women with special needs, victims of rape and assault, and girls deemed too flirtatious or tempting to men.
So if you're a girl who's afraid of the- Pregnant teenagers continued to be sent to the laundries as well, but by the early 1900s and the coming of the Independent Republic of Ireland, things had reached a point where large numbers of women were being incarcerated for no clear reason at all.
While the laundries were run by various Catholic orders, they also received support from the Irish government, who paid the church for laundry fees.
Since the church didn't pay incarcerated women, this was basically free money.
And what was it like to live in the Magdalene laundries?
Well, we don't have a whole lot in the way of detailed testimony from the 1700s and 1800s, but we know a lot about how they were in the middle of the 20th century.
I'm going to quote again from that write-up in history.com.
Nuns ruled the laundries with impunity, sometimes beating inmates and enforcing strict rules of silence.
You didn't know when the next beating was going to come, said survivor Mary Smith in an oral history.
Smith was incarcerated in the Sundays Well laundry in Cork after being raped.
Nuns told her it was in case she got pregnant.
Once there, she was forced to cut her hair and take on a new name.
She was not allowed to talk and was assigned backbreaking work in the laundry, where nuns regularly beat her for minor infractions and forced her to sleep in the cold.
Due to the trauma she suffered, Smith doesn't remember exactly how long she spent in Sundays Well to me, it felt like my lifetime, she said.
Smith wasn't alone.
Often women, women's names were stripped from them.
So you survive rape and then someone fucking puts you in prison for it.
That's for life.
For life.
Crazy.
Yeah.
Smith wasn't alone.
Often women's names were stripped from them.
They were referred to by numbers or as child or penitent.
Some inmates, often orphans or victims of rape or abuse, stayed there for a lifetime.
Others escaped and were brought back to the institutions.
Another survivor, Marina Gambold, was placed in a laundry by her local priest.
She recalls being forced to eat off the floor after breaking a cup and getting locked outside in the cold for a minor infraction.
I was working in the laundry from eight in the morning until about six in the evening, she told the BBC in 2013.
I was starving with the hunger.
I was given bread and dripping for my breakfast.
So pretty horrible.
Bad shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pretty bad shit.
Pretty not good shit.
And the Magdalene laundries really came into being into their modern form in the 1920s.
This was the first decade of the Irish state's existence, but it was also a time when rates of illegitimate childbirth started to rise precipitously.
This sparked panic among moral ninnies like the Catholic clergy.
Initially, they'd worried that single mothers would become prostitutes.
Somehow, locking these women up hadn't stopped prostitution or unwed motherhood.
So they decided the solution to the very real struggles faced by poor single mothers was to separate them from their children and incarcerate them for life.
Mother and child were kept together until the moment it was possible to semi-safely separate them.
Starting in the 1950s, when adoption was legalized in Ireland, that became the standard for newborn children who were in reasonably good health.
Historian Dythy Ol Corain told the BBC: There was a viewpoint, perhaps, that by facilitating adoption or putting them into an industrial school, that those children were being given a chance at a better and more stable life.
It's kind of wild that these are named after Mary Magdalene when the whole thing was totally Jesus was like pretty good friends with her.
Yeah.
For sure wasn't punishing her for being a sex worker.
That was kind of the whole thing.
And pretty positive, the vibe wasn't like, fuck you, Mary Magdalene.
Yeah, that's absolutely.
Started these places that were like, fuck you, women.
Yes.
And then they named them after her.
Like the audacity.
It's bizarre.
Cause like, yeah, the whole, if I am understanding that part of the Bible right, the whole thing is that like she was a quote-unquote fallen woman, but Jesus was like, I don't give a fuck.
I'm Jesus.
Like everybody's shit.
I still love you.
Was his attitude, right?
Yeah, I think his whole vibe was like, I don't care.
You're not any better than this woman just because she's a prostitute.
You got shit.
You're going on too.
It's whatever.
Like, I'm Jesus.
I don't care.
I think was his attitude.
But yeah, they take this as like, let's make a prison for women and their children.
And to be honest, the fact that they were finally adopting these children in the 50s is better than incarcerating them.
But that said, as we'll talk about, they were only adopting the marketable children.
So a big part of this story is like kids with physical disabilities, right?
Kids with mental disabilities, kids who just aren't attractive as adoption candidates for whatever reason by the standards of the time.
Those kids still stay incarcerated because you can't sell them.
And it is, they're selling them.
They're profiting off of the adoption of these children.
The Catholic Church is trafficking babies.
This is what this turns into, is a for-profit baby trafficking operation.
Even when you're getting abused, you have to be hot.
So, yeah.
I mean, it's like, God, can I just be ugly if you're going to fucking like steal my whole life anyway?
For-Profit Baby Trafficking00:03:25
Yep.
It's good stuff.
You know what won't traffic children for profit?
These goods and services.
That's the only promise we make about these goods and services.
They are not child traffickers, as best as we know from Googling them.
Once.
So far.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
Church Profit Over Social Services00:12:05
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back.
Oh, yeah.
Having a great time just talking about cool and fun things with my friends.
So from what I can tell, some of the women incarcerated in the Magdalene asylums were set free once their newborn child was taken from them.
And I don't have a clear rubric for when that was done and when they were kept in.
It was not, that was not always what was done.
It was not even necessarily often what was done.
A lot of women were incarcerated for life.
And this seems to have been about money as much as it was about anything.
Remember, the Irish state is too broke to fund any of their social services.
If we can even, like, this is, they're calling this a social service.
I would argue kidnapping and trafficking children and their mothers is not a service, but honest men can disagree.
The Catholic Church, the way this was framed is like, we, the church, because we so love faithful Ireland and want to facilitate the growth of our religion, will pay for the social services, you know, ourselves.
This is a service that we'll provide to the state.
The reality is that the Catholic Church was rich as shit and could have provided excellent social services to the entirety of the island of Ireland, but instead made a profit off of trafficking their bodies because they didn't get that rich by giving their money away to poor countries.
I think is the gist of the story.
Estimates of the number of women who went through the Magdalene laundries vary.
Getting an accurate count has been complicated by the fact that the various religious orders responsible for these particular crimes against humanity have a vested interest in refusing to provide archival information to historians.
As best as anyone can guess, around 300,000 women were incarcerated in the laundries over a 231-year period.
At least 10,000 of those inmates went through the system after 1922.
The Magdalene laundries operated without major criticism or controversy well into the 1990s.
It is well worth asking why and how this was allowed.
History.com writes, To start with, any talk of harsh treatment at the Magdalene laundries and mothers' homes tended to be dismissed by the public since the institutions were run by religious orders.
Survivors who told others what they had been through were often shamed or ignored.
Other women were too embarrassed to talk about their past and never told anyone about their experiences.
Details on both the inmates and their lives are scant.
Now, health care was obviously not great in the laundries.
The work was often unsanitary.
As we've heard from some of the eyewitness accounts I read earlier, women were often starved and beaten.
Some of them died from illnesses or as a result of the physical abuse they endured.
We have no idea how many perished, but we do know that in 1992, the sisters of our Lady of Charity decided to sell some of their land.
Sisters of Lady of Charity sold their land.
Anyway, but also what a cool name for a place that just fucking abuses women.
When the sisters of Our Lady of Charity sold some of their land that they had operated laundries on for profit, it was because they didn't need the land anymore.
The laundries were closing down at this point.
They weren't making money on the force.
They weren't because we had beaten the greatest number of women we could beat at this location and automatically.
And we weren't allowed to beat anymore.
We couldn't do our charity.
Yeah.
And also, like, when you reach, you know, iconic status, it's like, maybe it's time to hang up the paddle, you know?
Hang up the cat of nine tails.
Yeah, maybe you stop, you know, beating people for just a little bit to reset, you know, find out who you really would rather be beating.
Yeah, yeah.
And the sisters, they decide to do this.
They decide they got to clear out.
You know, they sell this land because they can't operate this laundry for profit anymore.
And when they sell the property, they apply with the government to have 133 bodies moved from unmarked graves.
Real sisters of our lady of charity stuff is unmarked mass graves.
So thankfully, this was the 90s.
And even though Ireland in the 90s, little bit of a shit show still, the government was like, wait a minute, how many bodies in a mass grave are we talking about here?
And so then they were like, wait a minute.
We could fit lots of infants in an adult sized grave.
You're not fitting nearly enough babies in these graves.
So the government quickly realizes that actually there were much more people in the unmarked grave than the sisters of our lady of charity had admitted.
They find the remains of at least 155 people there.
And I've got bonus dead babies in here.
That was an inappropriate accent.
Journalists dig into the matter and find only 75 death certificates that can be traced to this grave with 155 dead people, which means the sisters of our lady of charity were covering up an awful lot of dead people.
That's a lot of dead people.
It was a BOGO sale.
Yeah, it was a BOGO on corpses.
Bury one.
Report one for the deaths of two.
Yeah.
Now, the nuns claimed this was all just the result of an administrative error.
Then they burned the corpses and reburied the ashes in a mass grave somewhere else.
Oh my God.
Classic administrative error.
Classic nuns.
You know what they always say?
Babies don't stay buried unless you do it twice.
It's not nice.
It's one of those things.
You talk about, let's say, the Spanish Civil War and the anarchists who murdered a lot of priests and nuns in that war and who also would dig up graves of priests and nuns and incinerate the corpses.
And you're like, what a horrible crime.
And then you realize this shit was definitely happening in Spain, too.
And maybe people just had the church's fucking number because most nuns and most priests in the Catholic Church have been fucking monsters.
It's the SS with better branding is the fucking Catholic church in most of its history in most of the places where it's operated.
With the notable exception of liberation theology Catholicism in Latin America during this most recent century, which did some rad shit.
It's a big church, right?
But like this fucking shit happened all over the place.
It's not just Ireland.
Ireland's just where the documentation is best right now.
It happened everywhere.
Now, the women who survived and escaped often did so only after enduring profound abuse.
Mary Merritt was incarcerated by the Sisters of Mercy when she was 16.
She'd been born in a workhouse to a single mother, and her own entrance to the Magdalene laundries was assured when she was caught stealing apples from an orchard.
You got to throw that bitch in prison.
She's taking apples.
So the nuns renamed her a tracta, and she spent the next 14 years of her life in a convent where she was regularly beaten and abused.
When she was 30, Mary managed to escape.
Unfortunately, the first person she went to for help was a Catholic priest who raped her.
She became pregnant and was taken back into the system because now she's a sinful single mother.
Her child was taken from her and given up for adoption without her consent.
The good news is that Mary did eventually escape forever.
She found love and was married for more than 50 years.
Mary's story makes the peculiar dimensions of incarceration in the laundries clear.
She was repeatedly told, you are free to leave at any time.
And in the legal sense of the word, that was probably true.
She was not legally incarcerated for life, but she was kept there much longer than she wanted to be because leaving was not really an option for her or most women.
Not only was there physical coercion, there was the fact that a lot of these women had no money, no family support, no way of supporting themselves outside of the church.
And if you leave the church and you have no money and you wind up on the street, where do you go?
A facility operated by the Catholic Church.
If you decide the only way I can make money is by selling my body on the street because I have no other options, where do you go?
You go to the again, it's this you're free to leave.
You're not free to leave.
Now, again, about 10,000 women, maybe much more.
We don't know.
There is no escape.
There is no escape.
Well, I mean, she did get out eventually, but it took her 30 years, you know?
Yeah.
And thankfully, you know, she seems to have found true love and was married for 50 years and had a good life after that, which is about the best case scenario you get for someone who has to go through this shit.
She doesn't find her kid.
Now, again, about 10,000 women were run through the laundries from about 1992 to the 1990s, but that doesn't give the whole story of the scale of church incarceration in Ireland.
The laundries were one set of institutions.
There were also workhouses for young boys and young adult men who'd been incarcerated as children.
There were asylums for people with special needs.
The Irish Times writes, quote, In the 1950s, this country locked up 1% of its population.
We incarcerated more people per head of population than Stalin did in Russia.
The Catholic Church, during the entirety of the Cold War, incarcerated a higher percentage of the Irish population for like stealing apples and shit than Stalin did in the USSR.
Not to whitewash Stalin, but let's keep in mind the scale of the crimes of organizations opposed to the Catholic Church.
Yeah.
That's putting up some serious numbers.
Like you come in here with a triple double when no one even knew you got it like that.
And one of the points a lot of people will rightly make is that the Irish, the Catholic Church in Ireland in its earliest decades of independence was a theocracy.
It was not a free nation.
They had fought so long for free.
And again, that's why I started with the English.
I don't want to just be harping on the Catholic, just be harping on the Irish government of the Catholic Church because part of this is inevitable just by how horrifically abused they are by the English, right?
That's how abuse works in societies as well as individuals.
If you don't actively attempt to reform it, it gets perpetuated down through the generations.
Yeah.
That's the truly the only trickle-down economics.
It's the peace.
Economics that really works.
So it's important that we note that, like, as much as we should be blaming the Catholic Church and the Irish government in this period, a decent amount of this is also on fucking Great Britain, right?
They start a lot of the, they start a lot of this cycle of trauma.
And in part, they start because the government has no money, has this need for the church to provide services.
And because being Catholic had been oppressed for so much, it had become part of the Irish identity of oppression, which led to people not being as sort of, you know, and they'd massacred a lot of the people who maybe would have fought for a more secular state.
You know, all of this stuff factors into it.
But Ireland is a fucking theocracy in this period of time with a brutal carceral state.
Free Fridge for Salem00:03:50
And yeah, it's, it's, it's cool.
It's cool and good, Sophia.
And on Thursday, we're going to talk about how the most popular board game company in the world tied into all of this.
But, Sophia, that's a story for another day.
Ooh, may I wear my Monopoly Man outfit for the next please?
Dress as the Monopoly Man, stick your fingers in the operation guy, and trap mice for episode two of How the Catholic Church Murdered Ireland's Babies.
Wow, murdered and raped.
Anyway, let's get an air horn or two here.
Really buck us up.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Sad air horns.
Sophia, you got any pluggables to plug?
Sure.
It's almost a year since I released my album, Father's Day.
Hell yeah.
You should definitely get it.
It was number one on iTunes.
It's stand-up.
It's fun and good.
You can get it anywhere that you get albums, but you can also get it at SophiaAlexandra.com.
And as always, you can catch me on my other podcasts for 20-day fiancé with Miles Gray about 90-day fiancé and private parts unknown about love and sex around the world with Courtney Kosak.
And we just went to Belize.
Hell yeah.
So yeah, check that out.
Do it, you cowards.
Listen, what do you want to do?
Well, I've been Robert Evans.
This has been Behind the Bastards.
If you want to read a book that doesn't involve mass rape by the Catholic Church, although it does involve Christian extremists, you can read my novel After the Revolution.
It's available online at atrbook.com.
And it's also available wherever podcasts are found.
If you just look up After the Revolution, so you can find the text online.
There's both an in-browser version and there's a free E-Pub.
No ads or anything.
You can just get it for free, read it on your ear reader.
And there's a podcast with sound effects and shit that's After the Revolution.
So check it out.
Athers every Monday, Tuesday, Friday.
And I don't know, tear up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live if you get the chance.
If you're on Saturday Night Live, do a Sinead O'Connor.
Based O'Connor.
All right.
Hey, everybody.
Initially, I was going to plug the GoFundMe for the sequel to my book, After the Revolution, which you can find at atrbook.com.
But here in the Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave and it's causing disastrous conditions, life-threatening conditions for a lot of houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning, particularly in the city of Salem.
Activists everywhere have been kind of gathering to try and mitigate, set up cooling stations, hand out cold drinks, do things to help people get their temperature down.
I want to try and raise funds for the Free Fridge of Salem, which are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem.
So if you go to Venmo at Free Fridge Salem, that's Venmo at Free Fridge Salem, and send them a couple of bucks.
They could really use it.
Local government has destroyed a number, like police particularly have destroyed a number of water and cooling stations they've set out.
It's, you know, we're not going to be in triple-digit heats for the next couple of days after I'm recording this on Monday, but it's still going to be very hot.
People still need this.
So please, Venmo at Free Fridge Salem if you have the wherewithal and the financial resources to do.
So one more time.
The Venmo is at Free Fridge Salem.
Thanks.
Venmo Support for Free Fridge00:02:23
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's gonna get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones's Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.