Long prior to public revelations of institutional abuse, novelists such as Kate O’Brien and Edna O’Brien portrayed the realities of institutions such as Magdalene Laundries, Industrial Schools, and Mother and Baby Homes. Works such as The Land of Spices and the Country Girls trilogy examine private and individual experiences of these institutions, and their effects on the subsequent lives of women. Catholic institutions in such fiction are populated by abusive clergymen, cruel nuns, and exploited chidren. More recent fiction has adjusted its focus to scrutinise the enabling role of the public in institutional abuse. Claire Keegan and Emma Donoghue are among the authors who remind us that Catholic institutional cruelty has been facilitated by society economically – by use of Magdalene Laundries, for example – and by wilful obliviousness to inconvenient truths.

Religious identity and material culture intersect in Irish society and literature. Churcharchitecture, religious artefacts, and ritual paraphernalia find their origins in theDevotional Revolution, when under the influence of Cardinal Paul Cullen, IrishCatholic practices were standardised and aligned with Rome. During this period, thebuilding of outsized churches, along with the ritualized bodies of believers, becamesignifiers of an increasingly respectable and confident Irish Catholic identity. The1932 Eucharistic Congress illustrates the merging of church and state, and theutilisation of modern modes of production, dissemination, and consumption. VaticanII’s makeover of the liturgy allowed for modern designs in architecture and print totransform the experience of the Mass. Religion and nationalism increasingly sharedthe same iconography and cultural vocabulary in twentieth-century Ireland. Such aconflation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ finds another material counterpart in theMagdalene Laundries, which now stand as a symbol of the church/state institutionalabuse of Irish women and children.

Chapter 2 addresses early Christian justifications for organised violence and demonstrates the inherent risk of links between religion, politics, and violence. It then examines early justifications for colonisation, where conceptions of non-Christian inferiority justified expansion and transatlantic slavery. In that context, the chapter assesses the emergence of closed institutions run by church and state actors as a key development in how social orders responded to those individuals and groups that were deemed a problem, based on religious and secular motivations. The chapter concludes by documenting the available evidence and estimates of historical abuses available for harms that can today be recognised, if controversially, as gross violations of human rights.

The three Irish monetary redress programmes this chapter explores are a study in contrasts. The industrial schools programme (the RIRB) began in 2003. The cost of that large programme prompted the 2014 advent of Caranua, an ancillary programme redressing the consequences of injurious care. Caranua was preceded in 2013 by a programme responding to structural injuries suffered by survivors of the Magdalene laundries. The differences in costs and size, and the difficulties confronted in delivering these Irish programmes provide valuable evidence for comparative analysis.

The three Irish monetary redress programmes this chapter explores are a study in contrasts. The industrial schools programme (the RIRB) began in 2003. The cost of that large programme prompted the 2014 advent of Caranua, an ancillary programme redressing the consequences of injurious care. Caranua was preceded in 2013 by a programme responding to structural injuries suffered by survivors of the Magdalene laundries. The differences in costs and size, and the difficulties confronted in delivering these Irish programmes provide valuable evidence for comparative analysis.