When morality becomes law: The parallels between modern oppressive Iran and Ireland’s past

FOR MANY PEOPLE in Ireland today, the realities of life under the Islamic Republic of Iran can feel distant. Something that belongs to another culture, another history, another world.

Reports of women being stopped in the street, detained for how they dress, or punished for behaviour deemed “immoral” are often received with shock, but also with a quiet sense that such things are difficult to fully imagine in a modern society.

But they are not as unimaginable as they seem.

In recent days, much discussion has taken place across Ireland after the release of the 1926 Census. A welcome look at the country’s history. And some of that census has brought stories of an Ireland of the past that we have come to understand as one that operated a very different system. A society where religious authority defined morality, often controlled behaviour and enabled the punishment of those who did not conform.

The high-walled institutions of Old Ireland, like the Magdalene Laundries, were not simply places of ‘care’. They were buildings where women — often unmarried mothers — were confined, silenced and forced into manual labour because they were judged to have failed a moral standard set by the Church.

The litany of cruelty and abuse that was perpetrated against the victims of these institutions is now well documented in Ireland. These women were not criminals in the legal sense. Their “crime” was social and moral. Yet they were removed from society, sometimes for years, sometimes for life.

They worked without pay, lived under constant supervision and had little or no ability to challenge their situation. Their voices carried no weight against the authority of the institutions that controlled them.

What made this system possible was not only the power of the Church, but its alignment with the wider structures of society. Families sent daughters to these institutions. State bodies referred women to them. Public contracts supported their operation. Oversight was limited. The system was not hidden; it was normalised.

Old Ireland, modern Iran

It is from this point that we can begin to understand Iran under the Islamic Republic, not as something entirely foreign, but as something structurally familiar.

Iran’s trajectory, however, also reflects a different kind of rupture. Prior to the 1979 revolution, the country had already undergone significant social and educational transformation. 

It was by no means perfect, but Iran’s urban centres were increasingly outward-looking, women participated in public and professional life with greater autonomy and debates about modernisation and identity were actively unfolding.

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Religious institutions existed within society, but they did not hold direct political power. The revolution, in part, was driven by a desire for change, including calls for justice and political reform. Yet the system that emerged did not accelerate plurality; it re-centred authority within a religious framework, reshaping both public life and personal freedoms.

In this sense, the shift was not simply a continuation of tradition, but a reconfiguration of power that altered the direction of a society already in transition.

For an Irish reader, the scale of this shift might be understood as if, at the moment Ireland was opening itself to Europe and a more plural society, religious authority had instead moved to take direct control of the state, reversing social freedoms and redefining public life according to a single moral code.

Iran’s cruel Republic

The Islamic Republic of Iran operates on a principle in which religious authority is embedded in the structure of the state. Morality is not left to the individual; it is defined, legislated, and enforced. One of the clearest examples of this is the regulation of women’s dress and behaviour.

Laws require women to adhere to specific standards in public, and failure to do so can lead to intervention by enforcement bodies often referred to as morality police.

These encounters are not theoretical. They happen on streets, in public spaces, in everyday life. A woman can be stopped, questioned, detained or punished for how she appears. The justification of those in power is moral. The enforcement happens every day, and it’s institutional.

For many in the West, this is where understanding begins to falter. It feels too extreme, too visible, too far removed from contemporary European life. But the difficulty lies not in the nature of the system; it lies in the scale.

In Ireland’s past, some of the cruel enforcement of moral standards happened in institutions such as the Magdalene Laundries, behind closed doors, where the system targeted a particular group of women. In Iran, the same underlying logic has instead operated in plain sight, extending across an entire society and out into public space. What once happened within walls now unfolds in the open.

The mechanism, however, is familiar. Behaviour is measured against a prescribed moral code. Deviation is identified as a failure that must be corrected. Authority is justified not through debate or consent, but through reference to a higher moral or religious order.

Oppression in different forms

There is one crucial difference that must be clearly understood. In Ireland, while society lived with tight rules around bodily autonomy and social structures, the system of moral control and incarceration was directed at a specific group, women who were judged to have violated social and religious expectations.

In Iran, the reach of religious authority extends far beyond any single category. It shapes not only personal behaviour but the structure of everyday life: what people wear, how they speak, what they can say publicly and how dissent is treated.

Economic life, too, is affected, as systems built on ideological loyalty rather than accountability can produce instability, corruption and limited opportunity. Those who challenge these structures do not simply face social stigma; they may face arrest, imprisonment, or severe consequences. For many Iranians, the result is not only restriction, but a gradual erosion of agency – expressed in exile, silence, or the constant negotiation required to live within such a system.

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Societies rarely move in a straight line towards openness and plurality; the path is often uneven, shaped by periods of control, resistance and gradual reform. This broader scope is often difficult to convey, particularly to societies where similar mechanisms once existed but were more limited in reach. Yet it is precisely this expansion — from targeted control to societal framework — that defines the difference.

One parallel lies in the question of accountability. Institutions like the Magdalene Laundries persisted in Ireland for decades in part because those who operated them were not meaningfully challenged. The authority of the Church was rarely questioned, and those inside the system had little power to speak up in ways that would be heard. It took many years before the full extent of what had happened became widely acknowledged.

In Iran, accountability is complicated by the structure of the state itself. When the authority enforcing the rules is also the authority defining them, the space for challenge becomes extremely limited. The system sustains itself not only through brutal enforcement but through the legitimacy it claims through religion.

These systems also depend on something less visible but equally powerful: social reinforcement. In Ireland, stigma around “fallen women” helped sustain the existence of the laundries. Families often felt they had no alternative but to comply. Society, in many ways, looked away. In Iran, social norms and expectations continue to play a role in maintaining the system. Behaviour is not only regulated by institutions, but also shaped by the awareness of being seen, judged and reported.

This is not to say that Ireland’s past and Iran’s present are identical. Ireland was not a theocracy, and over time it developed the capacity to confront and reckon with these injustices. Iran’s system is more deeply embedded in the structure of governance and operates on a broader scale. The forms of punishment, the legal framework and the political context are all different.

But acknowledging these differences should not obscure the underlying similarity: in both cases, religious authority moved beyond personal belief and became a mechanism of control.

The Magdalene Laundries are now widely recognised as a failure of both Church and state in Ireland, a moment when the protection of institutional authority came at the cost of individual dignity and freedom. That recognition did not come easily. It required listening to those who had been silenced and accepting that something deeply unjust had been allowed to continue for far too long.

When we look at Iran today, the challenge is not only to observe or to feel sympathy, but to understand. And understanding often begins not with what is unfamiliar, but with what we already know.

The question is not whether such a system can exist in the modern world. Ireland’s own history shows that it can. The question is whether we are able to recognise its patterns while they are still unfolding elsewhere, and what we choose to do with that recognition when we do.

Samieh Hezari is an Iranian-Irish citizen and the author of the book Trapped in Iran. 

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