Revisionists Run Rampant with Leaving Cert History Syllabus

In his far-ranging Gript essay castigating the proposed new Leaving Cert history syllabus, the Iona’s Institute’s David Quinn posits that the syllabus carries an explicit anti Catholic agenda, where the students are shoe-horned into believing that the Catholic Church and groups like the Sisters of Mercy must be cast as the irredeemable villains of Irish history to better accommodate the supposed mores of today’s multi-ethnic society.

In the course of his essay, Quinn tells us that students will first of all learn how history is gathered, analysed and interpreted, that students will be taught ‘Critical Inquiry and Interpretation’ and that those skills will be used to examine “industrial schools, asylums, prisons, Magdalene laundries, and Mother and Baby homes”.

The students will then be expected to rehash their accumulated knowledge in a series of exam answers, each roughly the size of Quinn’s essay, which goes on to question why some broad social movements are included in the curriculum and others are not.

If we pre-empt the Leaving Cert students and consult Wikipedia’s relevant Magdalene Laundries entry, we will see an essentially anti-Catholic, pop sociology bibliography appended to it and Catholic protestations lost in the meat of it. We can expect much of that nonsense to appear in future exam answers to what will essentially be loaded questions.

The best place to begin to deconstruct today’s Magdalene poppycock is not with Wikipedia but with a conference held in Dublin’s Gresham Hotel on 21 September 1917 to discuss the various challenges confronting Ireland’s commercial laundry industry.

Although industry representatives pointed to the impact on workers’ wages arising from competition from laundries run by charitable institutions, their emphasis was on trying to stabilise the pay, conditions and tenure of their workforce rather than on the marginal market forces the nuns represented.

The Magdalenes were, at best, minor commercial irritants in a city awash with contagious diseases. Contrary to Hollywood’s claims and the claims of the compensation vultures, the relevant accounting bodies have confirmed the common sense stance that the Magdalene laundries were never a money-making venture. The laundries were a niche the nuns spotted between the impoverished washerwomen Brendan Behan scoffed at and the more high tech operations that eventually out paced the Magdalenes and made their business model obsolete.

The nature of the nuns’ problem can be seen by looking at Henrietta Street, a once beautiful road of Georgian houses that came to epitomise Dublin’s slums. The much maligned Sisters of Charity had a laundry in no 10, where they also housed 50 single and otherwise destitute women. As the nuns lived, worked and died of typhoid, diphtheria and cholera along with those fallen women their betters impregnated and abandoned, the nuns are heroes in my subjective book, as they should be to all other objective observers.

The prevalence of laundries was a function of the manual work done in those halcyon, Joycean days where overalls, uniforms and aprons were worn daily in factory, shop and bakery. When Bloomfield Laundry lost a military contract and 25 jobs to the Magdalene Asylum in April 1941, it was only a hiccup as war time overtime had not only kept employment in the sector buoyant but led to a pivotal strike in 1945 when the IWWU’s members won the historic Laundry Strike, which earned for all Irish workers a second week’s annual holidays. Though jobs were plentiful, conditions and pay were both dreadful and the nuns and women of the Magdalene laundries had nothing to do with either. “Laundry work”, said the IWWU in a statement intended to make the case for additional time off, “is performed standing in a heated atmosphere causing, in hot weather especially, great fatigue, excessive perspiration and blistered feet….laundresses often worked from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. in order to meet demand”. Far from Magdalene scab labour being the issue, the IWWU’s priority was the dreadful conditions made the IWWU women worked in. After 14 hard weeks, the IWWU women won their strike and the Magdalene laundries warranted hardly a footnote in their epic struggle for real women’s rights.

Although there was obviously money to be made from the laundries, the nuns’ entrepreneurship was stymied by their social commitments, which would have offset their wages’ advantage. A quick contemporaneous survey of the USA’s laundry industry supports this contention. Because discrimination, lack of English-language skills, and lack of capital kept the Chinese out of more desirable careers, in 1900, around 25% of ethnic Chinese men in the U.S. worked, typically 10 to 16 hours a day, in laundries for very low wages. Following the Wall Street Crash, New York City’s Board of Aldermen passed discriminatory laws clearly intended to drive the Chinese out of the laundry business and to close down the more than 3,550 laundries they ran. Because the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and the openly leftist Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (CHLA), tried to oppose this commercially driven racism, the FBI targeted the CHLA during the 1947–1957 Red Scare.

As in Dublin, so also in Seattle, where women who worked in the laundries during the World War I period endured long, hard hours and were forced to work faster to receive less pay for their work. The laundry plants used a system of “splitting shifts”, of making the women work to clear the work in hand, before stopping until the next workload was ready and not paying them for the hours they were idle in between. They were paid a pittance and the Magdalene Laundries had little to do with it.

Although the last 700 words relate to the Magdalene laundries and I could easily add 7,000 more to put further depth on it, Quinn’s concern is that the curriculum lacks objective focus and that issues like the laundries cannot be explored in sufficient depth to allow the student to expound a worthwhile anwer.

This conflict between depth and breadth is also a feature of the British A level history exams and it is a circle the Irish examination board have also unsuccessfully tried to square by including broad brush topics like democracy versus dictatorship on the one hand and more niche areas like Hitler’s Nuremberg Rallies, Stalin’s show trials and the Jarrow marches of 1930s England on the other.

As regards dictatorship versus democracy, Seán Delap has not only penned the standard school text book on the topic but he and Dr Deirdre MacMathúna who appears with him in this RTÉ interview on the curriculum, have, together with UCD’s Dr Conor Mulvagh and Dr Sandra Scanlon, been at the heart of developing and revamping the curriculum, where such partisan groups as the ASTI and TUI have also had significant inputs.

Although large elements of the ASTI and TUI will automatically brush Quinn’s protestations aside for their own sectarian reasons, Quinn is not their sole critic. In his seminal “Is Leaving Cert history fit for purpose?” article, student Oliver Eagleton argues that it prioritises rote learning over genuine debate, penalises subversive ideas such as Quinn displays, is ideologically biased and that it is, in short, an “exam-focused treadmill,” Patrick Pearse’s Murder machine, if you will.

Some 12,000 students, or one in five of the entire cohort, take the Leaving Cert history exam every year, with over 90% of them taking the higher level paper. Although history is not the easiest of Leaving Cert subjects, for those with strong writing skills, a strong grade should be easily attainable.

But not for the likes of David Quinn if our metric is this model 1062 word broad brush answer on Church-State relations under Hitler and Mussolini, which is necessarily full of gaping pedagogical holes. But not only for Quinn and Eagleton, as anyone sitting the exam will have to tailor their answers to suit the Zeitgeist’s biases.

And, as for doing a research project, not only were we discouraged from taking that road in our fourth year in Trinity, but of the hundreds of Masters theses I have subsequently supervised or the thousands I have examined, as very few of them brought anything substantially new to the table, it is very unfair to expect Leaving Cert students to surpass that, and, whatever about the ASTI and the TUI, UCD’s Dr Conor Mulvagh and Dr Sandra Scanlon should know that very well. And David Quinn, for his part, should be congratulated for bringing much needed attention to the disservice this ahistorical pig in an educational poke does to all current and future Leaving Cert history students, teachers and examiners.