Magdalene Laundries: Bizarre Opening

It is a bit late in the day to catch up with the film 'Magdalene Laundries', but as it has just been broadcast on Channel 4 on 30 November it has been my first sighting of it. It is a powerful film which portrays the sheer awfulness of treatment issued to 'errant' women in Catholic Ireland in the 1960's - although such treatment isn't confined to Ireland, or to Catholics, nor to the (not so distant) past. Young women and girls who had illegitimate children, or who were thought to be morally at risk were sent to institutions run by nuns - portrayed in the film as cruel and sadistic, but who were probably in reality as much victims of a harsh moral climate as the inmates themselves.

The film began badly; there is a wedding scene with Irish music playing but a sinister note is introduced by a priest singing the song 'The Well Below the Valley' which tells of a girl who has had illegitimate children and will have to pay penance in purgatory for her sins. The scenes then show a girl being raped by her cousin while the wedding celebrations merrily continue.

BUT - and this reveals huge difficulties. The song 'The Well Below the Valley' had a reputation as an unlucky song as the full version describes incest and infanticide; by the 1960's hardly anybody in Ireland sang it except a few among the travelling community. No priest would have sung it. It would never, ever, have been sung at a wedding. ( I shall pass over the sheer anachronism of the highly decorated bodhran the priest is seen to be playing.)

The song was popularised in the 1970's by the Irish folk band Planxty who had learned it from the recording of an Irish Traveller, John Reilly, who had died from malnutrition in 1969. But its theme ensured that it is still seen as a 'difficult' song and other recordings of the song are still relatively rare.

Above all it isn't a song for a social occasion and it is this inability to understand cultural contexts that grates so much that for me it undermines the truth of the rest of the film.