Misery Literature

And while we're on the subject of larger-than-life caricatures: What about those nuns! The Magdalene Laundries closed down in Ireland in 1996 for any number of good reasons. Everybody ought to be glad to see the back of the whole enterprise. The 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters is pretty grim viewing by anybody's estimate.

Not everybody on the bandwagon, though, appears to be quite who they say they are. A subsequent 2005 book by Kathy O'Beirne entitled "Kathy's Story: A Childhood Hell Inside the Magdalene Laundries" (or "Don't Ever Tell", as it was marketed in the UK) has recently been decried as a work of fiction.

O'Beirne told of being tortured by her labourer father, experimented upon in a psychiatric hospital, and raped by no fewer than four priests and a policeman. Then there was her spell in a Magdalene laundry, one of Ireland's notorious Church-run homes for "fallen women", where, aged 14, she gave birth to a daughter.

Problem is that the story doesn't add up - the daughter doesn't exist - the sisters of the Magdalen Laundries were apparently very good at one thing at least - keeping records - and no records of Kathy O'Beirne can be found. Nobody at the laundries in those years can remember her.

Fiction is good. Misery fiction clearly occupies a place in the psyche of those who purchased one of the 400,000 copies of "Kathy's Story" which flew off the shelves. Their troubled lives seemed more manageable perhaps when compared to the life being described.

Or maybe it is just pornography under another guise.

The problem lies with the fact that real people are being implicated in these events.

...what makes the O'Beirne saga so troubling.....is that it fuels Ireland's obsession with clerical sex abuse, and the abuse-claim industry. O'Beirne herself accused Fr Fergal O'Connor, founder of the homeless hostel Sherrard House, of raping her in the 1970s. The investigation took a year, during which the 77-year-old University College Dublin professor was prevented from visiting his own workplace. Yet Fr O'Connor was virtually crippled by arthritis when the alleged crimes took place, unable even to shake hands because of the pain, according to a friend. The priest was exonerated two days before his death.

Charity workers and members of religious orders working in the 19th and early 20th century probably would have the right to demand that stories about their misdeeds be subject to a modicum of scrutiny. They are people, after all, and not merely monsters.