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An inquiry last year into Ireland's Magdalene laundries, where for decades thousands of women were forced to work by nuns, found no evidence that workers were abused. But those who experienced life inside laundry walls angrily reject this, and are insisting that the nuns be held accountable.

"Oh my God! You know what? This brings back so much memories," 65-year-old Elizabeth Coppin says as she pushes open the door to the Convent Church next to the Magdalene laundry where she was sent to work for the nuns when she was 14.

"We used to have to go to confession once a week," she says, as we pass the confessional box. "The priest would sit in here and we would go in here to tell him our sins. But what sins did we have? We were working all the time. They were the sinners, not us. They were torturing us."

For decades, Ireland ignored the stories told by the former Magdalene laundry workers. After all, weren't people told by the priests that they were just fallen women, or the criminally insane, who deserved to be locked up for most of their adult lives and work, without pay, to atone for their sins?

Coppin had been abused by her stepfather and sent to an orphanage - one of a number of welfare institutions run by the church on behalf of the state. From there, still a child, she was passed into the network of Magdalene laundries and forced to work from eight to six every day except Sundays and bank holidays.

In one of these, in Cork, she was wrongly accused of stealing sweets and held for three days in a punishment cell, without a bed or mattress. But that was nothing compared to the punishment she faced for trying to run away. She was sent to another laundry, with an even stricter regime.

"They changed my name to Enda, a man's name. They shaved my head and I had to wear a uniform. So straight away your identity is taken because my name is changed, my hair is cut and I'm not wearing my own clothes," she says.

"And I'm stuck in there and I have to answer to the name Enda, which is a man's name. How do you cope with that at that age?"

Find out more

Elizabeth Coppin and Mary Merrit share their stories in Our World: Ireland's Hidden Bodies, Hidden Secrets on Saturday 27 and Sunday 28 September at 21:30 BST on BBC World News, and today on Newsnight on BBC2.

It was not until Coppin and others went to the United Nations Committee Against Torture (UNCAT), which in turn put pressure on the Irish government to investigate, that Senator Martin McAleese, a former member of the Irish Senate and a devout Roman Catholic, was asked to head an inquiry into what exactly had happened behind the convent walls.

Survivors were astounded to read in his report that "ill treatment, physical punishment and abuse... was not something experienced in the Magdalene laundries".

The government has now called another inquiry into what happened at another church-run institution, the Mother and Baby homes for unmarried mothers, after it was revealed earlier this year that nearly 800 young children had been buried in unmarked graves from 1925-1961 at a convent in the west of Ireland. Some remains were found in a concrete tank.

So the Magdalene laundry survivors are asking for this latest inquiry to have a wide remit, and to investigate the laundries again.

"I would love them to get to the real truth, but they won't," says Coppin. "They won't inquire properly because I know what the government are like."

Eighty-three-year-old Mary Merritt is a survivor of both a Mother and Baby Home and a Magdalene laundry. Born in one, to a single mother, she ended up in a laundry after years in an orphanage - all three institutions run by nuns.

"I was in one of the orphanages, which they called industrial schools in those days. I was so hungry that I stole some apples from the orchard. The nuns told me that they had found a 'situation' for me and sent me to the High Park Laundry in Dublin and told me that I had to stay there until I learned not to steal. They kept me there as an unpaid worker for 14 years. You don't even get that for murder these days."

She remembers that the work was so hard and the regime so cruel that she broke a window and ran away in to the town where she asked a priest for help. The priest raped her. The nuns did not believe her when she was picked up by the police and returned to the laundry.

She was put in the windowless punishment cell, a room two metres square. "One of the nuns came down there and she cut my hair to the bone and then I was taken up and I was made to kneel in a room with all the women there, kneel down, kiss the floor and say I was sorry for what I did and promise not to run away again which I didn't promise, of course."

The McAleese report concludes that the median stay for women in the laundries was seven months. "Nonsense!" says Mary as we go together to visit a mass grave of former Magdalene High Park Laundry workers at Glasnevin, the main cemetery in Dublin.

"I was in the laundry for 14 years and I know at least one woman, my best friend, buried here who was there for more than 50," she says pointing to the name Mary Brehany who is among 160 names on the slabs of granite.

Researchers from the Magdalene Names Project told us that according to their research into a 10-year period (1954 to 1964) at the High Park Laundry, most women were there for at least eight years.

The McAleese report also claims that the laundries never made a profit - another idea treated with derision by the women. "It was slave labour," says Coppin, who spent four years in three laundries.

"The nuns had contracts with all the local hotels and businesses as well as all the convents and seminaries." It is hard to check the "not for profit" assertion because the accounts submitted to the inquiry by the religious orders, prepared by their own accountants, are not open to public scrutiny.

However, we found a ledger belonging to the High Park Laundry in the Little Museum in Dublin, dating back to 1980. Meticulously kept accounts show that their clients included convents and restaurants as well as the airport, the main railway station in Dublin and government ministries. No wonder Trade Unions and commercial laundries complained at the time. They were having to compete for business with the nuns who could rely on free, forced labour.

The Irish Examiner newspaper, which has investigated the finances of the religious orders involved in running the laundries, says they owned assets in 2012 of 1.5bn euros ($1.9bn, £1.2bn).

I want somebody to tell the truth... to apologise to me before I die
Mary Merritt

The wealth of the nuns is a running sore, not only with the survivors who feel they have been so unfairly exploited, but increasingly with the Irish taxpayer. Despite the shortcomings of the McAleese report, the government has apologised for the suffering of the women and appointed much-respected Judge John Quirke to implement a compensation scheme. He has won favour with the survivors who say that at least he listens to them.

The final bill for compensation is likely to exceed 150m euros ($190m, £120m) and yet the religious orders have refused to contribute. I asked the Deputy Prime Minister, Joan Burton, why the government was not putting pressure on the nuns to pay up.

"There is a conversation ongoing with the religious orders to make contributions appropriate to the total amount of money that has been spent by the state," she said. So she will be putting on pressure? "That's a continuing conversation, yes."

No-one is holding their breath. The government has made four formal requests for contributions to the four religious orders involved in running the laundries and they have not been forthcoming.

Will the government listen to the grievances of the laundry survivors and broaden the new inquiry to include them? "Well it will include relevant elements," says Burton, "but, we haven't finalised the actual terms of reference yet."

The Magdalene laundry survivors are not optimistic. "Nobody talks about the violation of women here, the religious ideology is so ingrained in Irish society," says Elizabeth Coppin
Find out more in Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox. Our World: Ireland's Hidden Bodies, Hidden Secrets on Saturday 27 and Sunday 28 September at 21:30 BST on BBC World News, and today on Newsnight on BBC2 .
"I want somebody to tell the truth and to apologise," says Mary Merritt, "the nuns, the church, the priests... just somebody to apologise to me before I die."

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Demanding justice for Irish abused by nuns

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An inquiry last year into Ireland's Magdalene laundries, where for decades thousands of women were forced to work by nuns, found no evidence that workers were abused. But those who experienced life inside laundry walls angrily reject this, and are insisting that the nuns be held accountable. "Oh my God!

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Article on woman who's child was taken from her

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Article on woman who's child was taken from her

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It began with a chance encounter at a New Year's party in 2004. I was trying to leave, but a woman said she had a message for me. She knew I had been a journalist and she had a friend who wanted my help to solve a family mystery. I agreed to a meeting, and found myself embarking on a five-year quest for a man I had never met.

The woman's friend was called Jane, a financial administrator from St Albans. She was in her late 30s and had been through an emotional experience. Just before Christmas, her mother, Philomena, tipsy on festive sherry, had revealed a secret she had kept for 50 years - she had a son she had never mentioned to anyone.

Jane said her lost brother would be in his early 50s and probably living in America. The reason for the secrecy was that he had been born outside of marriage in Ireland at a time when such things were considered shameful.

A little later I met Philomena herself. She told me she had given birth in a country convent at Roscrea in County Tipperary on 5 July 1952. She was 18 when she met a young man who bought her a toffee apple on a warm autumn evening at the county fair. "I had just left convent school," she said with an air of wistful regret. "I went in there when my mother died, when I was six and a half, and I left at 18 not knowing a thing about the facts of life. I didn't know where babies came from ... "

When her pregnancy became obvious, her family had Philomena "put away" with the nuns. After her baby, Anthony, was born, the mother superior threatened Philomena with damnation if ever she breathed a word about her "guilty secret". Terrified, she kept it quiet for more than half a century. "All my life I couldn't tell anyone. We were so browbeaten, it was such a sin. It was an awful thing to have a baby out of wedlock ... Over the years I would say 'I will tell them, I will tell them' but it was so ingrained deep down in my heart that I mustn't tell anybody, that I never did."

I was intrigued to know why the nuns had been so insistent on the importance of silence and secrecy. The answer, almost certainly, lay in what had happened next.

Philomena was one of thousands of Irish women sent to convents in the 1950s and 60s, taken away from their homes and families because the Catholic church said single mothers were moral degenerates who could not be allowed to keep their children.

Such was the power of the church, and of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, that the state bowed before its demands, ceding responsibility for the mothers and babies to the nuns. For them it was not only a matter of sin and morality, but one of pounds, shillings and pence. At the time young Anthony Lee was born, I discovered that the Irish government was paying the Catholic church a pound a week for every woman in its care, and two shillings and sixpence for every baby. And that was not all.

After giving birth, the girls were allowed to leave the convent only if they or their family could pay the nuns £100. It was a substantial sum, and those who couldn't afford it - the vast majority - were kept in the convent for three years, working in kitchens, greenhouses and laundries or making rosary beads and religious artefacts, while the church kept the profits from their labour.

Even crueller than the work was the fact that mothers had to care for their children, developing maternal ties and affection that were to be torn asunder at the end of their three-year sentence. Like all the other girls, Philomena Lee was made to sign a renunciation document agreeing to give up her three-year-old son and swearing on oath: "I relinquish full claim for ever to my child and surrender him to Sister Barbara, Superioress of Sean Ross Abbey. The purpose is to enable Sister Barbara to make my child available for adoption to any person she considers fit and proper, inside or outside the state. I further undertake never to attempt to see, interfere with or make any claim to the said child at any future time."

Philomena says she fought against signing the terrible undertaking. "Oh God, my heart. I didn't want him to go. I just craved and begged them to please let me keep him. None of us wanted to give our babies up, none of us. But what else could we do? They just said, 'You have to sign these papers.'

"I remember it was a Sunday evening ... I'm so sorry, I'm crying now when I think about it ... "

Philomena cried when Anthony was taken from her at Christmas, 1955. She was not told he was going or allowed to say goodbye, but she spotted him being bundled into the back of a black car. When she shouted to him, the noise of the engine drowned out her voice, but as the car pulled away she is convinced that he stood up and peered through the rear windscreen looking for her.

Afterwards, her father would not take her back because of the shame: he had told friends, neighbours and Philomena's sisters that she had gone away and no one knew where she was. So in the end the church dispatched her to work at one of its homes for delinquent boys in Liverpool.

Philomena trained as a nurse, got married in 1959 and had two more children. She longed to tell them about their lost brother, but couldn't. She kept her secret but never forgot her son. "Oh he was gorgeous," she told me. "He was a lovely, gentle, quiet lad. All my life I have never forgotten him. I would so often say, 'I wonder what he is doing? Has he gone to Vietnam? Is he on skid row?' I just didn't know what had happened to him ... "

Finally, without telling anyone, Philomena embarked on a lonely, desperate search to find him. She went back to the convent in Roscrea several times between 1956 and 1989 and asked the nuns to help her. Each time they refused, brandishing her sworn undertaking that she would "never attempt to see" her child.

When I agreed to help look for Anthony in 2004, we had little to go on. We knew his date and place of birth, but his name would certainly have been changed by his adoptive parents. Philomena had been told her son would be taken to the US, but little else.

Early on in the search I realised that the Irish Catholic hierarchy had been engaged in what amounted to an illicit baby trade. From the end of the second world war until the 1970s, it considered the thousands of souls born in its care to be the church's own property. With or without the agreement of their mothers, it sold them to the highest bidder. Every year, hundreds were shipped off to American couples who paid "donations" (in reality, fees) to the nuns. Few if any checks were made on the suitability of the adopting families - the only condition laid down by Archbishop McQuaid was that they should be practising Catholics.

When rumours of the church's role began to emerge decades later, much of the incriminating paperwork disappeared in unexplained circumstances, and even today the church guards its adoption archives fiercely. It took a painstaking trawl through passport records and the piecing together of fleeting references in old newspaper articles to discover what had become of Anthony Lee ...

Doc and Marge Hess from St Louis, Missouri fulfilled the McQuaid criteria - they were good Catholics, a professional couple in their early 40s, and Marge's brother was a bishop. The Hesses already had three sons, but they wanted a daughter. In the course of my research, I came into possession of Marge Hess's diaries and was able to trace her innermost thoughts as she flew to Ireland in August 1955 to scour the church's mother and baby homes for a little girl. I read her first impressions of the shy three-year-old, Mary McDonald, who was offered to her by the mother superior of the Roscrea convent. And I discovered the twist of fate that led her to adopt Anthony Lee.

When Marge leaned down to pick up her new daughter in the convent nursery, she was charmed to see Mary's best friend, a little boy in baggy trousers, come running to give her a kiss. She fell for him at once. That evening she called her husband in St Louis and asked if it would be OK to bring two children back instead of one.

Anthony's spontaneous show of affection for Marge changed his life. By the end of 1955, he and Mary had been transported from rural Ireland to a new existence and new identities. He was renamed Michael Hess and grew up to be an A student. He was physically attractive and gifted, ran cross-country and sang in school musical productions. But he was haunted by half-remembered visions of his first three years in Ireland and by a lifelong yearning to find his mother.

Separated by fate, mother and child spent decades looking for each other, repeatedly thwarted by the refusal of the nuns to reveal information, each of them unaware that the other was also yearning and searching.

Michael became a successful lawyer. As a rising star of the Republican National Committee, he masterminded the party's electoral strategy, brokering the redistricting (gerrymandering) reforms that kept them in power for more than a decade. When George Bush Sr became president, he made Mike his chief legal counsel.

But Michael Hess was gay. He was obliged to conceal his sexuality in a party that was rabidly homophobic. He was tormented by the double life he was forced to lead and by the fact that his work was entrenching in power a party that victimised his friends and lovers.

He was tormented, too, by the absence of his mother and by the orphan's sense of helplessness: he didn't know where he came from, didn't know who he was or how he should live. He felt unloved by his adoptive father and brothers; he felt guilt over his sexuality and he had a series of stormy relationships. A spurned lover burned himself to death because Mike rejected him.

But he was loved by his adoptive mother and by the little girl who was plucked with him from the Roscrea convent who became his lifelong friend and sister. He found some happiness in a long-term relationship with a caring, loving partner. But he could never be at peace. He went back to Roscrea, first in 1977 and again in 1993, to plead with the nuns to tell him how to find his mother. They turned him away.

On his return to the US, he plunged into alcohol, drugs and unbridled sexual indulgence. His behaviour brought with it the terrible fear of exposure that would destroy him as a senior Republican official, but he could not stop himself. On one of his lost weekends he became infected with HIV.

He and Pete, his long-term partner, agonised over their future. Pete stood by him, but Michael's health began to deteriorate. Fearing the worst, they flew to Roscrea in 1993 to make an emotional appeal to the nuns ... but still they refused to tell him where he could find his mother, or indeed that her sisters and brother - his aunts and uncle - were living just a few miles down the road.

In desperation, Mike asked the mother superior if he could at least be buried in the convent if he were to die: he would put enough information on his gravestone to help his mother find out about his life "if ever she comes looking for me". As we know - but Mike did not - Philomena was looking for him, returning to Roscrea, seeking traces of her son ...

Obituaries in US newspapers after Michael's death in August 1995 provided vital clues in my search for him. The hunt for Michael took me through state and church archives, through adoption agencies, American university records and Republican party sources before it led to the end of the trail and the story's poignant, unexpected conclusion. It threw up a Hardyesque tale of coincidences and missed connections, and a powerful indictment of two historical eras: 1950s Ireland and 1980s America.

In addition to Mike and Philomena's quest, I discovered the thousands of other lost "orphans" whose lives were changed for ever by the greed and hypocrisy of church and state. Like Michael, many of them are still looking for their parents and, through them, for their identity.

Now in her 70s, and five years after visiting her son's grave for the first time, Philomena is remarkably devoid of bitterness. She has started to go to mass again. But she blames herself for everything, for giving her son away and for not speaking out about him earlier, when things could have been different: "If only, if only. I curse myself every time I think of it. If only I'd mentioned it all those years ago, maybe he wouldn't ... Oh Lord, it makes my heart ache! I'm sure there are lots of women to this very day - they're the same as me; they haven't said anything.

"It is the biggest regret of my life and I have to bear that. It is my own fault and now it is my woe."
The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith is published by Macmillan, £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

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Unmarried mother Philomena Lee was forced to give up her son to Irish nuns, who sold him on to rich Americans. For decades she tried to find him. A chance meeting with Martin Sixsmith eventually uncovered the truth

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Philomena Lee, whose search for the son sold by nuns to America when he was three years old inspired an Oscar-nominated film, has said that meeting Pope Francis has helped her find closure.

"I felt such a sense of relief yesterday for the guilt I carried and that I still carry a little bit today," said Lee on Thursday, a day after the audience. "Because you were made to feel so, so bad about having a baby out of wedlock.

"He really made me feel so good inside because I carried the guilt inside me for 50 years, without telling anybody."

Lee, 80, attended mass on Wednesday morning with her daughter, Jane Libbteron, before their brief meeting with the pope. Also with them was Steve Coogan, 48, who co-wrote, produced and co-starred in the film, which is in the running for four Academy Awards.

For Lee, said Coogan, the encounter was "part of a perfect catharsis", which few of her contemporaries at Ireland's mother and baby homes have been able to enjoy.

"She said everything right," he said. "Though at one point she did say - with humour - 'Those nuns would be so jealous of me now."

Coogan found Pope Francis, who has been in office for 11 months, "benevolent and approachable" with a "light casualness".

"He's a very attractive figure. He clearly has a charisma; he laughs a lot and smiles a lot and he has a thing on top of his cap so he can easily doff it."

Coogan also rejected accusations that their trip to Italy was in the service of publicity ahead of next month's Oscars. Speaking to the Guardian at the end of the 48-hour expedition, Coogan said: "Sometimes what is politically adept can also be the right thing to do."

The actor added that the meeting was not the brainchild of super-producer Harvey Weinstein. "Harvey was supportive but he didn't want to get involved. And we didn't really want him to because we wanted this to be a very pure initiative."

The audience came about through Lee establishing the Philomena Project, which lobbies for open access to adoption records, and that organisation teaming up with the Adoption Alliance in Ireland. It was they who put the wheels in motion, although the film's director, Stephen Frears, had been the first to suggest the pope should see the film. Any risk of such a move being seen as opportunistic, said Coogan, was worth taking. "The alternative is to do nothing. And if you do nothing no-one gets helped."

The meeting came less than a day after a Vatican spokesperson dismissed rumours it would happen. Said Father Lombardi: "The Holy Father does not see films, and will not be seeing this one. It is also important to avoid using the Pope as part of a marketing strategy."

Coogan reports that it was the pope himself who "gave the green light" for Lee to be invited. In conversation on Tuesday with Bishop Sanchez and the Pope's private secretary, Coogan was told that the film was "entirely in keeping with the tone of the Pope's approach".

A more forthright response from the Vatican condemning the actions of the nuns was, he thinks, not a possibility. "They've got to be politically adept. There are clearly lots of nice, benign, kind nuns who'd be a bit miffed to be lumped in with all the others."

Yet they were left in no doubt, says Coogan, that the pope's sympathies lay with the film-makers. "When I mentioned some of the attacks from the church in America to Bishop Sanchez he didn't seem at all bothered. With a wave of his hand he made it clear they were not relevant. This wasn't nebulous chit-chat; it was quite substantive.

"We'd been saying: 'How will this change things in Ireland?' They said: 'The very fact we're having this screening in the Vatican is significant. Don't underestimate that.'"

The frank criticisms contained in Philomena, which traces the journey of Lee (played by Judi Dench), to track down her son with the help of journalist Martin Sixsmith (played Coogan), made the Vatican's willingness to embrace it more striking. "This wasn't a man-the-barricades kickback. It was like: 'That's fair enough.' There's an old-fashioned mindset that criticism of anything religious is by definition insulting. That's changed."

Coogan first learnt of Lee's story through an article by Sixsmith about the investigation. At the time the actor was in New York shooting cop comedy The Other Guys. "I keep thinking of myself sitting at that table looking for anything of substance."

That the film which resulted has now triggered real-world change has been an unanticipated bonus. "I'm glad to find cinema can still affect things."

The Magdalene Sisters, Peter Mullan's acclaimed 2002 film, afforded similar subject matter less mainstream treatment. "It's a very powerful film, but neither the people who agreed with its premise nor the people who saw it as an affront had their minds changed," says Coogan.

"I think Philomena was angry in the right places. I want films that in some way say something positive. I'm bored shitless by nihilism and post-modernism. It's a busted flush. Every kind of media is just drowning in its own irony."

After serving as an altar boy, Coogan, whose parents are still devout, moved away from Catholicism. A return to faith is unlikely, he thinks. "But the empowerment and enfranchisement of the poor - all those things Jesus Christ stood for - are values I share."
Topics

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Philomena Lee on meeting the Pope: 'Those nuns would be jealous now'

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Philomena Lee, whose search for the son sold by nuns to America when he was three years old inspired an Oscar-nominated film, has said that meeting Pope Francis has helped her find closure. "I felt such a sense of relief yesterday for the guilt I carried and that I still carry a little bit today," said Lee on Thursday, a day after the audience.

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Talar Baranian, Angelina Grego & Mikki Pittman

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Talar Baranian, Angelina Grego & Mikki Pittman

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Philomena was invited to the Vatican for a screening of the movie “Philomena”

The Pope was unable to attend the screening, but sent his private secretary (Monsignor. Guillermo Karcher): this is a signal from the Church that they are really listening to the issue

The Catholic Church has a project called The Philomena Project that intends to open the adoption records in Ireland, the Pope is very involved in this process

Pope Francis wants healing

The church is really listening

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Cases of children who were adopted from the orphanage and grew up in America began to develop

These children would try to find out who their parents were and the mothers would try to find their children, such as in the case of Philomena

Cathy (one of the children taken from her mother), who was adopted “through a catalog” as her parents told her, discovered that her parents contacted the orphanage in Ireland who sent her to the U.S. in exchange for payments

The orphanage was guilty of selling children and especially internationally to the U.S, which is illegal

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Unwed pregnant Catholic women had their children taken away from them by nuns apart of the Catholic Church

The children were abused by the nuns and then given away to another family in the United States

This was done without the consent of the mothers and the excuse was that the women had the children outside of wedlock therefore they needed to be punished.

The mothers were then forced to live in a convent because of their sins and impurity

The children were stolen from the mothers without warning and were never to be seen again

Irish nuns killed some of the children in response to overpopulation

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Real-Life 'Philomena': Journey to the Vatican

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Subject of the Oscar-nominated film reflects on giving up her son for adoption and forgiveness.

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Real-Life 'Philomena': Journey to the Vatican

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Subject of the Oscar-nominated film reflects on giving up her son for adoption and forgiveness.