Religion and Irish Cinema

Pat Brereton

Issue 387, vol.97, Autumn 2008

The Magdalene Sisters is based on the historical fate of over 30,000 young women who were disowned by their families for various reasons – including falling pregnant outside marriage – and were despatched into the care of nuns. There, their utmost physical exertions were mobilised (up to the end of the 20^th century) for the running of a number of commercial laundries: the rationale was that such hard labour would help them repent of moral transgressions. The film didactically explores how such religious authorities progressed to criminally abusing the weakest, most vulnerable in society. For today’s post-religious audiences, such a story can be most easily comprehended as a prison drama: the only way out for an inmate lay in escape, or in some form of rejection, or in total conformity.

In an era when corporal punishment was the norm in most Irish schools, Song for a Raggy Boy documents the extreme violence inflicted upon boys who were unfortunate enough to have been confined in ‘industrial schools’ run by priests and religious brothers until the 1970s. The camera zooms in on drudgery – cleaning an open yard – and on boys being formally paraded, boot-camp style. When a minor rebellion breaks out, Brother John, the fanatic disciplinarian, ends up beating the ring-leader to death.

It could be argued that the State was the primary culprit in all this, having, with the consent of the people, sub-contracted the official church into providing various services – and having then failed in its duty of supervision. In Song for a Raggy Boy, however, it becomes clear that it is ultimately the local bishop who quashes any liberal initiatives harboured by the institution’s director.

Films made decades earlier had featured clergy as idealised and benevolent social mediators embodying the dominant religious ethos. But these recent efforts present clergy as entrenched and didactic figures, seeking to maintain their power and influence at all costs – and gripped by a pathology more toxic than that to be expected in the normal register of individuals jostling for factional power.