The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland's Legacy of Silence
Author: Louise Brangan
Date: 2026-04-30 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: History; Religion; Feminism
Description: A haunting and brilliantly researched history that interrogates the culture of shame in Ireland and tells the full story, for the first time, of the women confined within the walls of the Magdalene Laundries in the 20th century Everyone familiar with Ireland’s history has heard of the Magdalene Laundries, places where “fallen” women were sent for reform, but few understand that the Laundries were part of a larger carceral system in Ireland. There were prisons and also asylums, industrial and reformatory schools, Mother and Baby Homes, and County Homes, each of which operated alongside the Magd
Publisher: Vintage Digital

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In some instances one may not talk of forgetfulness, for one cannot forget what one has never attempted to know.

Gordon Horwitz, In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen

What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.

Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie

List of Illustrations

1. Prologue: An Post 5p stamp with the Madonna and Child, marking the Marian Year 1954

2. Introduction: Galway Magdalene Laundry paper bag

3. Chapter 1: Waiting suitcase from “Echo of a Silent Cry” by Dianne Whyte

4. Chapter 2: Faithfull Place, Dublin, adjacent to Gloucester Street Laundry, 1913

5. Chapter 3: “A million people kneel in worship,” O’Connell Street, Dublin, 1932

6. Chapter 4: Sunday’s Well, Good Shepherd convent, Cork, c.1969

7. Nuns and two auxiliaries at Good Shepherd convent, Wexford, c.1901–1954

8. Folded shirt in protective plastic wrapping from Galway Magdalene Laundry

9. Chapter 5: Sunday’s Well, stairs leading down from dormitories to corridor leading to Laundry, c.1994

10. Motivational poster on the wall of Seán McDermott Street Laundry

11. Chapter 6: Sunday’s Well, stairs leading to front door, c.1994

12. Christening robe given to Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy, made by the women in the Limerick Magdalene Laundry

13. Connacht Tribune advertisement for a runaway penitent, 1928

14. Chapter 7: Sunday’s Well, office, c.1994

15. Chapter 8: Crowds outside Sisters of Mercy Magdalene Laundry, Forster Street, Galway, during the car rally, 1973

16. Chapter 9: Magdalen Laundry, Washing Book, Terms and Conditions, 1972

17. Chapter 10: Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry, ironing room, c. 2021

18. Conclusion: Sunday’s Well, Magdalene Laundry, c. 2024

Author’s Note

The unsettled and contested history of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries is most immediately apparent in the spelling. Or to put it more precisely, that there are two ways to spell Magdalene. When they were in use, Magdalene institutions were spelled without the second e: Magdalen. This remains the favored spelling of the nuns who ran them and the Irish government today, as well as a handful of academics who prefer the historical accuracy. Activists began using a different spelling more recently, around the late 2000s, when the second e was added: Magdalene. This latter variant quickly became the mainstream spelling and is the one used throughout this book, unless there is a direct quotation from a historical source with the original spelling.

I refer to the entire institution—the dorms, the refectory, the infirmary, the corridors, the chapel, the factory floor—as a Magdalene Laundry. When, however, I refer to the specific labor of washing or sorting, or the specific room known as the laundry, I spell this with a small l.

Inevitably, in writing on a period of history that spans a hundred years, words appear that will likely offend contemporary sensibilities, such as simple, illegitimate, and, not least of all, fallen women. Some activists say that the term fallen should not be used anymore as it wrongly ascribes sexual transgressions to the lives of the women and girls before they entered the Laundries. That these women were not the fallen, and yet came to be misunderstood as such, and remain so, is a central concern of this book. I use this term not to reinforce it, but to interrogate it, and to try to understand its lingering appeal.

Prologue

Fifteen-year-old Eileen disappeared on a quiet Sunday evening in February 1954. She was at work when it happened. Eileen was a maid at a bed-and-breakfast in a large Georgian townhouse in inner-city Dublin, where she remade the crumpled beds, bundled the laundry into bags, ready to be collected, and smoothed the white linens across the breakfast tables. Each week she was paid ten shillings, and she lived in the small maid’s quarters located in the attic of the B&B. This was not just a handy living arrangement but a necessary one. Dublin was not Eileen’s hometown; she had arrived in the capital the year before as a runaway, escaping a life that she could not bear.

Eileen was born in 1939 at a Mother and Baby Home. These Homes were clandestine institutions run by Catholic nuns, places for women and girls who had had sex outside marriage, and found themselves pregnant, which was a catastrophic social taboo. Ideally, after the baby was born, the mother would leave them behind. She then returned to her normal life carrying her private shame, but with her social standing intact. The nuns then took it upon themselves to make arrangements for the illegitimate child.

Illegitimacy is an ugly word, but in Ireland at the time it was a legal category assigned at birth. For most of the twentieth century, the Irish government counted the number of illegitimate babies and tracked their year-on-year growth or hoped-for decline. They scrutinized this in comparison to the levels of illegitimacy in other countries, particularly their close neighbor, Britain, which was also doing the same dismal demographic calculus. The size of Ireland’s illegitimate population was lamented in government like an ill-gotten underclass. By the time Eileen was born, the matter of illegitimacy was a permanent social anxiety.

Eileen’s mother had been working as a live-in domestic maid for a well-heeled family when she found out she was pregnant. The father of her baby was the husband, the man of the house. So this problem—and certainly no one was saying that this pregnancy was anything other than a problem—was hers alone. When Eileen was born, her mother did as was expected and left her at the Mother and Baby institution, where Eileen stayed until she was four years old. Eileen hadn’t been adopted, and so either a family member would have to come and retrieve her, or she would be sent to the industrial school—a dire place for poor orphaned children, also run by religious orders. Eileen’s mother was by then working elsewhere in the country, so in the end it was her married sister, Sheila, who came to collect the little girl. Auntie Sheila said she would raise Eileen alongside her own, older stepson.

Eileen’s mother visited whenever she could get leave from her domestic duties. Eileen remembered how she adored her mother and loved to see her arrive at the house, but also how quickly she learned that she was expected to contain that feeling. During her mother’s infrequent visits, Eileen was to treat her with no more than polite formality. Recalling these years, she said, “I was never allowed to speak to her alone when she came to see me.”

As Eileen was illegitimate and a source of great shame for the family, her aunt tried to muffle signs of her presence. When the family traveled by horse and carriage through the town, Eileen was made to curl up in the footwell, where she was covered by a blanket. She was not allowed to attend the local school and was made to travel to a school in another town where her family was not known.

Home life was where the danger lay for Eileen. Auntie Sheila’s stepson was vicious and sexually predatory. Eileen hardly knew what was happening to her, but she came to dread whenever her aunt announced that she and her husband were heading out, leaving Eileen alone with her step-cousin.

“That cruel life,” as Eileen described it, went on until she was thirteen, when she was taken out of school, her education over. Auntie Sheila had arranged for Eileen to be sent to work as a domestic for a local farmer who had a gaggle of children and endless errands to be done. The life of live-in servitude flummoxed Eileen, who said that her “blood ran into water.” She became lifeless. Within months, she was back with Auntie Sheila, laid out in bed for days on end, trying to recuperate.

What Auntie Sheila seemed to learn from this episode was that the demanding combination of children and the farm had pushed Eileen too far. Once she was upright again, Eileen was sent to one of the nearby big houses, the stately-looking homes of the landed gentry or respectable and monied classes—the doctors, the vets, the big farmers. There, she had no lands to tend to and no children to monitor and feed. Instead, Eileen spent day after day down on her knees scrubbing that grand house until she felt something in her yield; she was fourteen and a half when she ran away to Dublin. She said that she “loved” the bed-and-breakfast; she liked the two other girls who worked there because they were from the country as well, and that the owner, Miss Mullins, was usually milling about the place too. If her dream had been to live a life of her own making, she seemed to have succeeded.

Then, on that Sunday evening in February, Miss Mullins was out. With her gone, the other two girls vanished up the stairs as they hurried to dress for a dance in town that evening, Eileen recalled. Since she wasn’t joining them, Eileen found herself alone in the bed-and-breakfast.

Two unremarkable-looking middle-aged women came in from the street and approached Eileen at the front desk. She did not know them, and they were not guests. Many years later she would find out that they were members of the Legion of Mary, a volunteer organization whose lives were devoted to the veneration and imitation of Mary, the Mother of God and Blessed Virgin, who exemplified purity and a sinless life. The Legion of Mary saw themselves as an army engaged in a perpetual “warfare” against “the world and its evil powers”; their only mission was to guard Ireland’s moral boundaries. In their self-appointed position as neighborhood apostles, their members pounded the pavements, identifying people who might need to be saved from vice, from sin, from potential proselytism by Protestant charities. They set about “influencing every home, shop, factory, office, and every other place its members might be set by circumstances.” In this wide-reaching role, they sometimes sidled up to young girls on the street whom they suspected of wayward tendencies, who exhibited signs of what they described as “pre-delinquency,” whose downfall seemed dangerously imminent, and to whom they must issue their warnings about evil. People sometimes gently mocked them and their small intrusions by dismissing them as “Holy Joes.”

There were numerous similar groups devoted to the Virgin Mary, but the Legion of Mary was the most prevalent. From their foundation in 1921, officials in the Irish Catholic Church treated the Legion with caution, but they quickly earned enormous popularity with diehard Catholics. They held public meetings that were attended by ever-increasing crowds, and their membership grew exponentially into a “Legion of Mary frenzy.” One mother had written to the Archbishop in the 1920s, not long after the Legion of Mary was founded. This woman was worried about her daughters who had become swept up in this obsessive new group. Despite rearing them as “good Catholics,” this desperate mother wrote, since her daughters had joined the Legion of Mary, they had been treating her and her husband as though they were “no longer good enough Catholics in their estimation.” Their concerns faded into a minority view. By the 1950s, the Legion lived up to their name and had garnered a twenty-five-thousand-strong membership.

The Catholic Church eventually came to share the Legion of Mary’s outlook, and the Pope had declared that 1954 was going to be the Marian year. The Virgin Mary and her immaculate conception were to be celebrated, and perhaps no other nation threw themselves into the veneration of Mary that year quite like the Irish. The post office issued a series of special stamps to mark the occasion, while people painted the entirety of their houses, inside and out, in bright shades of “Marian blue.” A new statue-building craze saw Marian grottos erected across the country, tucking figures of the Mother of God into rockfaces and roadsides. On desolate rural strips or town squares, Mary is always the same. Hands clasped, head bowed, blank and fair of face. Each statue the perfect epitome of silent, mothering, virginal womanhood that Ireland had come to worship. Apparently, Protestants looked on and thought the Catholics, and maybe the Irish in particular, were hardly Christian at all, as they obsessed so over Mary. In Ireland, Christ sometimes had the appearance of a second-tier messiah in his own religion.

It was this kind of obsequious zeal that possessed the two women now standing before Eileen in 1954—Holy Joes that had been roving the city’s streets in search of women and girls in imminent moral danger, and believed that they had found one in Eileen. They immediately pursued a peculiar, almost personal, line of conversation.

“You are far too good to be working here.”

“And too nice.”

“We could bring you to a nicer place to work, with more money.”

Eileen was not sure what it was these two women were really talking about, but she did not ask them to clarify. She had been raised in the traditional Irish way, in which deference and obedience to your elders were paramount—she knew that she was not meant to ask questions, especially of people who possessed an air of authority, as these two women did. But even in her silence, Eileen did not feel a warning sense of suspicion, or recognize the sinister edge to this confrontation. She had kept a secluded schedule, unlike her workmates, Eileen said; as she “never went out and never done anything wrong,” she had nothing to fear.

The two women insisted that there was no time to waste, and that Eileen should come with them immediately. “I didn’t know what to do,” Eileen said. “I was reared up very strict, and you didn’t say no in them days. In the fifties you didn’t say no, you’d be afraid to say no. So, I said okay.” Fifteen-year-old Eileen followed them out of the bed-and-breakfast and got into their car, which was parked just outside. Eileen sat in the back seat as they drove her to O’Connell Street, the city’s main thoroughfare. They crossed the bridge over the River Liffey, and went out the other side of town.

Did she begin to wonder if she ought to have waited to tell Miss Mullins? She hadn’t so much as left a note; presumably Eileen believed she would return. It didn’t take long before they were in a part of Dublin Eileen did not know. They passed salubrious redbrick houses with long gravel driveways set in off the road. The car slowed as it reached a lively street, and when the traffic eased, they pulled right and went through a gate with an arched metal sign above it: SAINT MARY MAGDALENS ASYLUM. This was not hidden or tucked away; it sat among the row of ordinary local businesses: butcher, dairy, post office, pub, Magdalene Laundry.

They led her up a set of shimmery limestone steps. A nun in pitch-black robes appeared at the door, who showed them through to a parlor, a grand and dignified room where the nuns received guests and hosted events. Whatever task these two women had set out upon was now complete, because they turned to leave. Before they did, one of them paused and looked back at Eileen, who was still standing in obedient silence, and said, “We’re putting you in here for your own safety.”

Finding Eileen gone, the girls she worked with did not call the police. It is likely that the Legion of Mary returned and explained matters to Miss Mullins. Maybe, like Eileen, Miss Mullins knew not to ask questions either. Perhaps privately she felt annoyed about the inconvenience of having to hire another girl, but thanked them nonetheless. We will never know exactly what occurred in the wake of Eileen’s absence. There is no archive for quiet moments of compliance and inaction. Something along these lines must have happened, because no one came looking for Eileen.

Later that evening, the nun took Eileen’s clothes, then cut off her hair and changed her name. She was no longer Eileen; she was to be designated by a number. From that moment on she was to be known only as “60.” In the days that followed, everything else was stripped from her.

Where she was and what was happening would take her weeks to figure out. Why it had happened, that would take decades to be revealed.

Introduction Forgetting

For most of the twentieth century, it seemed that the Irish lived in simple serenity. Large families resided in rural towns, which gave way to a patchwork of small farms, tilled and tended with an old-world rhythm. Academics interested in such pastoral societies looked at Ireland during this period and marveled at how peaceful it was. In their dispatches, they concluded that it was among a rare cohort of nations “not obsessed with crime,” and if the paltry number of people in prison was anything to go by, “neither was it obsessed with punishment.” Scholars reflected that Ireland was a “policeman’s paradise”: harmonious, practically utopian. In 1958, one admiring commentator wrote that “the morals of the country are, by modern standards, almost irreproachable.” These descriptions piqued my interest as I am also concerned with justice, particularly what societies see as good order and how far they will strive to maintain it. I too ended up being one of these academics, writing about the casual humanity of the Irish prison system during the twentieth century. But I had grown up in Ireland. I am Irish. I knew a shadowland existed.

People who might undermine that tranquil way of life, who scuffed the pristine surface of the national image, had to be removed. There were of course prisons, but also psychiatric hospitals (known then as mental asylums), industrial and reformatory schools for poor orphaned children, county homes (formerly workhouses that were rebranded after Irish independence), and Mother and Baby Homes, where women and girls who were pregnant outside marriage were sequestered. Then there were Magdalene Laundries.

While the prison population was meager, there were more children in Ireland’s industrial schools than in all the industrial schools in England and Wales combined; there were more people in Irish asylums than anywhere else in the world. By the 1950s, one in every seventy Irish people over the age of twenty-four was confined in an asylum. Taken together, these institutions held over 1 percent of the Irish population (more than one person for every one hundred people), a staggering rate that outstrips even such outliers as the current rate of mass incarceration in the United States—a little over 0.5 percent of the population. These institutions formed a web of social security in which people became ensnared rather than supported.

In a regime distinguished by its excessive inhumanity, the Magdalene Laundries were its deep end. In 1951, when the Laundries were at their height, for every one hundred thousand males, twenty-seven were in prison, of which there were only five. While for every one hundred thousand females, seventy were in a Laundry. These were not peripheral: They were Ireland’s main carceral institution. The Laundries were employed for those women and girls considered to be beyond the help of the Mother and Baby Home, beyond the industrial school, beyond the prison, and beyond the pale of normal life. The Laundries were the end of the line, the termini.

This had not always been the case. These institutions had initially been benevolent refuges run by ordinary people who were both Catholic and Protestant. The first opened in 1765, a Protestant Magdalene asylum established to undertake a program of reform with prostitutes and other “fallen women,” as well as the homeless and alcoholics—all of whom were deemed in need of moral and spiritual recovery, heroically described as “rescue work.” By the end of the eighteenth century, there were at least forty-one of these refuges. Catholic nuns also opened Magdalene refuges, though these were usually larger enterprises than the ones operated by laypeople. The days in the convent Laundries were regimented and religious—there was prayer and silent contemplation—but they were not punishing places, and they had not been established for profit. Nor was their purpose detention; women and girls could leave, and often, in trying times, they came and went.

By the early twentieth century, the numbers of women going to the smaller lay Magdalene refuges began to wane until they were abandoned completely, leaving only the larger religious institutions in operation. When Ireland became independent from Britain in 1922, there were only ten Catholic Laundries across the country.

There were thirty-five orders of religious nuns running hundreds of institutions and facilities, such as hostels, hospitals, convalescent homes, emergency night shelters, hospices, youth clubs, Mother and Baby Homes, and all kinds of schools—secondary, primary, and boarding schools, along with industrial schools. Four of these religious orders operated the ten remaining Magdalene Laundries: the Religious Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, and the Good Shepherd Sisters.

Located close to the island’s edges, these ten institutions encircled the new nation. On the east coast in the capital, Dublin, there were four Laundries: High Park, Gloucester Street (which was renamed Seán McDermott Street in 1933), Donnybrook, and Dun Laoghaire. As one traveled southeast, hugging the coastline of the Irish Sea, there were two more: one in New Ross in Wexford, and not far into the next county, Waterford, there was another Good Shepherd Laundry. The Laundries were not hidden or tucked away but embedded in the infrastructure of Irish life. They were established along main roads in major cities and busy towns. Two Laundries were founded in Cork, Ireland’s southernmost city: Peacock Lane and Sunday’s Well. Traveling back north along the west coast there were two more Laundries, one in Limerick city and another in Galway city. On occasion, the nuns would take women and girls over the new border into one of the three Good Shepherd Laundries run by their sisters in the North of Ireland, which had remained part of the United Kingdom.

Once inside, these women and girls were put to work in what were, effectively, industrial-sized commercial laundries. Whose washing were they scrubbing? Everyone’s. Priests and prisoners had their vestments and uniforms treated alike. The linens of hotels, restaurants, and family dining rooms passed through these women’s hands. They endured Ireland’s stench and dirt, the stains that wanted removing, to be made pristine and professionally transformed. They did this from morning till evening, Monday to Saturday, for weeks, months, and years on end.

We now think of Magdalene Laundries as an Irish phenomenon. However, they operated throughout the Western world from the eighteenth century, across the US, Canada, and Britain to Australia and France. As we will see, some aberration after independence in the 1920s caused the Irish Laundries to grow in scale and expand in use, becoming more exclusionary and punitive. The Laundries became a place for irretrievable women and girls, the fallen, who were believed to have engaged in sexual misconduct so egregious that they had strayed dangerously, irrevocably, beyond the lines of what was acceptable.

The nuns who ran the Laundries were not autonomous. They answered to the local bishop, who in turn was a member of what was known as the Catholic Hierarchy, a ruling congregation made up of bishops. And atop this pyramid of power was the Primate of Ireland, who was chosen from one of Ireland’s four archbishops. While the Church operated the Laundries, when they are reported on and written about today, the Magdalene system is repeatedly said to be a product of the collusion between Church and State. Together, they took a conniving and calculated approach toward their goal of controlling Irish women.

So it went on, until the final Laundry was closed in 1996. When the gates were locked for the last time, it was with a whimper, not a bang. The secrets were sealed off, and the nation moved on; history fell silent, or so it seemed. The ghosts of this shameful past have come back to haunt the present. Mass graves of unknown women and babies have been unearthed, and civil society has in turn woken up to the many injustices that occurred. What happens next in places such as Ireland, where we are confronted with such a dark and troubling inheritance? How do we begin to excavate the memory of the Laundries and grasp all they once did and represented?

From the mid-2000s, a growing number of activists and survivors tried to salvage the Laundries from the realms of the overlooked and forgotten. They wrote to newspapers, held press conferences and public events, demanding that this culture of containment be confronted. Their campaigns convinced more academics and researchers and, latterly, the Irish government that the matter of the Magdalene Laundries was a national scandal, that it was a history that could no longer be ignored. In winter 2013, the Irish government produced a report on the Laundries, providing a bedrock of facts and statistics that helped people grasp the scale of the Laundries. Following this, a slew of artists produced important works that have helped further illuminate this part of Irish history for the public.

At last, we can name them for what they were, because while they were in operation they were not known as Laundries. There was always something enigmatic about them when they were in use, not least of all because the Laundries didn’t have a single term or name. They were called homes, penitentiaries, asylums, refuges. And what went on there was spoken about in taut euphemisms—charity, redemption, salvation. Whoever was there either deserved it or needed it. The term Magdalene Laundries is a recent innovation, reclaiming and renaming the past for what it was. These women were not cared for; they were not rescued or given asylum. They were detained, removed, and enslaved.

Why write a history of the Laundries, then? Especially if that history is already known.

Perhaps any historian embarking on a study of national horror or atrocity soon finds that they are working as much against the mysteries of the past as they are writing against the myths of the present. All societies operate with some tacitly settled-upon account of their national biography, and perhaps those peoples that are stricken with dark and troubling histories have an even more pronounced need for narrative neatness. A coherent story with goodies and baddies, a beginning, middle, and end, can help make sense of who they are today, who they wish to be, and what disquieting past activities they wish to reinterpret or distance themselves from. Yet there seems to be something strangely incomprehensible about the awfulness of the Laundries. In the recent rush to recover that story, to reassemble it, there has also been a tendency to reimagine it, leveling the facts until they are but a speck on the landscape that is the history of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries.

In 2024, a much-anticipated film called Small Things Like These was released in cinemas, based closely on the best-selling novella of the same name by the celebrated Irish author Claire Keegan. The story follows one man in an unremarkable Irish town, which has a Magdalene Laundry sitting on its outskirts. The film is quiet and meditative—that is until our protagonist, in the course of his work, reaches the Laundry. Once there, the volume is turned up. We see a girl dragged in, kicking and screaming. Inside, tinny, disembodied cries of newborns seep from the walls. The baleful-looking Mother Superior appears enrobed in black. She speaks with an unsettling echo that feels as though it is intended to convey her deeper, altogether unhuman, malevolence. Our protagonist turns out to be a lone hero. He braves the wrath of the nuns and saves a girl from her cruel incarceration. Both the book and the film were praised for sensitively recreating a strange time and an unfathomably frightening practice and reminding us, still, that good can prevail.

The film, like the book, is set in 1985 at the New Ross Magdalene Laundry, though that particular Laundry had closed almost twenty years prior, in 1967, and by the 1980s, the remaining Laundries were no longer the busy places they had once been. Across the decade, only 147 women and girls entered the Laundries, the majority of whom were on remand from the courts. A paltry number compared to the staggering 7,039 women who had been admitted to these places between the 1920s and 1940s. By the 1950s, Ireland had no stand-alone female prison, and so some of the Laundries also became remand centers, used by a government too impoverished to build a women’s prison but still required to legally detain young women. Beside these 147 mostly young women, the Laundries were also populated by elderly and frail women, still languishing there after many decades.

Of course, we can justify most of this as artistic license, until the film ends—which is where it departs from the book, and when the lines between fact and fiction were egregiously blurred. The screen goes black. Now, the audience is to be given the stark smack of historical reality. But we are given the wrong information. The film was “Dedicated to the more than 56,000 young women who were sent to the Magdalene Laundries… And the children who were taken from them.”

The Irish government’s official calculation that 10,012 women and girls were sent to the Laundries is rightly contested as an underestimation, but 56,000 dramatically upped the ante. The filmmakers had not simply made this number up; it was the headline figure from an official State investigation into another dimension of twentieth-century Irish ignominy—one that had nothing at all to do with the Magdalene Laundries, however. It was exclusively concerned with Mother and Baby Homes, which had held 56,000 women and girls across the twentieth century.

Upon seeing that erroneous fact projected on a big screen in a packed cinema, I felt my mind listing, as if I had vertigo. It was not the first time I had felt this.

In the process of my research and writing, when I told people of my undertaking, I was surprised to find how many said that they already knew of the Laundries—in Ireland and beyond. Where once there had been silence, there now seemed to be ceaseless objection. Countless people I spoke to repeated the same vehement mantra: It was awful what the Church and State did to those women and their babies. My interlocutors wanted to state their allegiance to the common sense of the present and establish their revulsion at this terrible history.

The problem with this fact is that it is not true: No babies were born in Magdalene Laundries. There were no rows of cribs for infants, no children scuttling below everyone’s knees. There were no pregnant women or girls there. I had also started out with this vague assumption, that these were ghoulish prisons for women and girls who had become pregnant outside marriage. It quickly became clear that the Laundries were something else entirely. If these women and girls were the fallen, it was only because for much of the twentieth century, almost anyone could fall.

This revealed to me the strange terrain that I was on. I was writing a history that was supposedly hidden, though apparently now known, but most predominantly by powerful misconception. I was not writing to reveal the Laundries, but writing in the wake of their being exposed, and with everyone feeling quite settled that they knew what had happened and why it was obviously wrong.

Wittgenstein once wrote that “all I know is what I have words for.” In today’s secular society, what language do we really have to describe this kind of theocratic, extra-legal mass detention? Ireland has been a democratic state since independence in 1922, and when contemporary campaigns wish to raise public awareness of the Laundries, they are judged as a part of this democracy. Using the most denunciatory legal weapons of our era, the Laundries are assessed within the purview of human rights infringements, as a failure of good government, as human trafficking, and as an unjust use of detention. All of that is entirely right, and while those legal ideas can help us prosecute the past, they can’t help us understand it.

How could the Laundries have operated exploitation on an industrial scale but also go unnoticed? Even basic questions, such as who was sent there and why, are clearly still perplexingly ambiguous. What was an ordinary day like in a Laundry? How did it feel? How did women and girls get out? And what happened when the Laundries came to an end? In fact, how did such a vast and abysmal system cease altogether? If the Laundries had been mired in myth and silence, then it seemed to me that we still hadn’t found a language that could describe why, for a time—in fact, for a long time—the Laundries were once an ordinary way to deal with an assortment of everyday disorder and social discomfort.

These are questions for which I have long yearned for answers, and I don’t think I am alone in that need for clarity, as a new generation has been forced to grapple with the legacies of the Laundries. This book is not concerned with anything nearly as tidy and definitive as blame. I wanted to write the history of the Magdalene Laundries from the perspective of the women and girls who had been subjected to it. Who were these women who had lived through this system, and how had they lived through it? I was equally curious about the nuns who oversaw the Laundries and their journeys into the religious life. I wanted to know what it was they thought they were doing with these women, and why this regime seemed not only justified but necessary.

In undertaking to find the answers to these questions, this book is an attempt to comprehend the Laundries on their own terms, using archival material, photographs, video footage, blueprints, contemporaneous newspaper coverage, unpublished letters, and government reports. The various orders of nuns who ran the Laundries kept logbooks of who was there, why, when they left, and when they died. The sisters maintained accounts, with budgets, lists of customers, and tabulations of their profits and losses. Despite the Catholic Church’s extensive entanglement in the Irish State, the Church is not obliged to make its records open to the public because it is, technically, a private organization. Historians lament that this part of Irish history can never be known without this primary source material. Activists justifiably bristle at the nuns’ continued grip on what can be said and known about the Laundries. Yet it is entirely possible to reassemble their mindset. The nuns wrote about the value of their work, about the aspirations that compelled them. The Laundry nuns ran regular radio and newspaper advertisements calling on the public to make donations to support them. They penned letters justifying the use of Magdalene Laundries; they implored others to use them. They believed in what they were doing, that their work was vital to secure a good Catholic society and to save the souls of those who had fallen far from grace.

While the orders as a whole have maintained a stately reserve, refusing to speak, there is a tiny handful of individuals who have given their accounts of the Laundries. This is a self-selecting group of former nuns who abandoned their vocations, and upon whom the Laundries made a disturbing impression. In interviews, memoirs, and reflective essays, they have tried to make sense of what happened.

Mostly though, the history of Magdalene Laundries is knowable because what we do have in abundance are eyewitness accounts—scores of them. The artist Evelyn Glynn, the Waterford Memories Project, and the activist group Justice for Magdalenes conducted interviews with survivors between 2009 and 2015. Dozens of women came forward to give testimony in the belief and hope that people would read them. Taken together, there is a tranche of roughly three thousand pages of transcripts, making it a considerable archive.

Memory is malleable and slippery, and that is often a charge against the validity of oral history to tell us anything tangible about the past. That is not a problem here. Across these thousands of pages there is an incredible unanimity in the testimony. By giving only their own story, each repeatedly corroborates others. Even if they were detained in different Laundries, in different eras, the details repeat themselves—making this a highly reliable source. While I also conducted interviews with the women who survived the Laundries, the words and memories and quotes that appear in this book are primarily drawn from those who committed their testimony to these archives. Most names are anonymized, and some small details have been changed to further protect people’s identities.

To try to pay respect to this archive and the many women who generously shared their life stories, there is a chorus of voices, names, and experiences throughout this book. In the foreground are the lives of six women: Carmel, Nora, Catherine, Brigid, Katie, and Eileen. I track each of their journeys in, through, and beyond the Laundry. There were thousands of women who were confined in a Laundry, and so there are thousands of experiences. Each woman’s story is her own. Through these six women, though, we are given a startling demonstration of what it is like to live in a society that sought to banish people. And if we are willing to listen to them, we will see that Irish women and girls did not need to do anything so egregious as become pregnant to be detained at a Magdalene Laundry. Women as old as eighty-nine, and girls as young as nine, were recorded as being received within their walls. The vast majority of them were no more than the wayward and unwanted: homeless, needy, abused, or rejected. It was their very existence that was treated as offensive.

Everywhere the women are, so are we. A book about the Laundries is also inescapably a book about Irish society, its culture, and the peculiar pattern of values, taste, and good manners that make up any society. In telling the story of the Magdalene Laundries, we often skew the perspective to reveal only a portion of the picture by keeping our eyes trained inside the building, but there was nothing impermeable about those Laundry walls. The public came and went, attending the chapels for Mass, visiting the nuns. Workmen, handymen, and electricians provided maintenance. And of course, Irish people dropped off their washing by the ton each and every week. The Laundries were a cog in the city’s economy and a banality of daily domestic life. Locals thought of the women in there, sometimes fueled by gossip, innuendo, and moral rectitude. Or they didn’t think of them at all. We also need to hear from those outside people who worked in the Laundry, and who used the laundry service, because without them, it would be impossible to explain what happened.

This book aims to give voice to the women who were silenced, those intent on controlling them, and the society that accepted the Laundries as a part of Irish life. These perspectives and experiences taken together show us how Irish society was put together, what cultural ideals mattered, and which kinds of people did not. We see how whole groups came to be dehumanized and vilified, dislocated from their lives, denied their futures, and, ultimately, cast out into exile.

This isn’t just history, though; it can’t be. Why do we continually take the worst cruelty of Mother and Baby Homes (the babies crying in the distance, the fresh pleading faces of innocent young mothers) and most tangible components of the Laundries (slave labor and incarceration) and combine them to create something that did not exist? Why do the women who endured the Laundries continue to be mispresented as the fallen? This situation tells us something about our connection to our pasts, especially when they are ugly and painful, and why achieving justice for the wrongs of our forebears is fraught and often truncated. It could be that, as the writer Richard Flanagan has put it, “The need to forget is as strong as the need to remember. Perhaps stronger.” Sometimes, it seems, the easier way to handle such devastating acts is to shift our relationship to them, to contain them as stories, as fictions, so that we absolve ourselves of having to confront that which feels unbearable. The Laundries become a historically sequestered event, one that took place far away, back then and over there, undertaken by people who were unrelatable in their cruelty. We in turn become voyeurs of this tragedy.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this history is to learn not that there was a cast of villains determined by a rapacious desire to hoard and abuse power. There was nothing inevitable about the Laundries. The 1920s and ’30s were a time of social change and political uncertainty. Secularism and democracy were becoming the norm in some places, while in others fascism and authoritarianism were taking over. Populism was on the rise, modernity was shifting norms, women’s rights were being debated, discussion of national purity and eugenics were becoming fashionable. As a precarious new nation, perhaps Ireland was buffeted more heavily by these forces. After the establishment of the new Irish Free State in 1922, many people—ordinary citizens, political parties, and public figures alike—became gripped by a fanatical right-wing zeal about how society should be organized and how citizens should behave. There was nostalgia for a traditional way of life that some felt was being lost because the nation was being invaded by outside ideas, and that Irish culture was being diluted and undermined. Fear of the unknown, economic despair, and suspicion of foreign influences gave way to a desire for control.

When societies strive for tradition and perfection and become intolerant of anything that slips beyond their restrictive outlook, depraved and dehumanizing penal regimes become not only plausible, but possible; banishment becomes de rigueur. In Ireland this change happened swiftly, and the temperature rose steadily until reasoned resistance became impossible. Those few who spoke up were ridiculed as irrational, ostracized for their sober calls for equality and fairness. There was nothing exceptional about the course of these events. In facing that, maybe we will find something close to empathy for the grievous errors made then, and hear the warning that comes in the wake of such understanding, as they are errors we could easily make again.

This is the story of the Magdalene Laundries, of what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. It is an act of recovery, to save the real history from being lost. The first step then is to look at the Laundries again, square on, from the beginning.

Chapter 1 Disappeared

In 1956, a hushed line of children made their weekly procession to the church in New Ross, County Wexford. They cut through the streets preceded by the rhythmic clop-clop of their hobnail boots. They were the Industrials. Off to dispense with their confessions, they descended upon the town from St. Aiden’s, an austere gray block with a pitched roof that was secluded behind the walls of the local Good Shepherd convent. When they set off on those weekly outings, the nuns warned them that they were never to look at the locals, as such an act was forbidden and punishable. Among this penitential pilgrimage was eleven-year-old Carmel. Even then, Carmel knew they were the unseen, the unmentioned children.

As they veered down a vertiginous street toward the church, they passed a row of terraced houses where two women were perched at their front doors, chattering away. Their conversation stiffened as the girls neared. With unspoken consensus, both women stared hard at them. One of the women was prim-looking, self-regarding, with her unwashed hair scraped back into a tight bun. Her next words were again addressed to her neighbor, but with a new volume and a directness that meant the children were her intended audience. “Look at them,” she said. “Look at the way they’re dressed. They’re in rags, and you can actually see the vermin on their necks.” She made other strafing jibes, but this was enough to make Carmel seethe. Vermin. Literally the living filth that spreads disease and makes people squeal and squirm, that must be quarantined and eradicated.

Often the children had to conjure up make-believe sins for confession. How much wrongdoing could a child rack up in a week of being totally confined? But not that day. Not after that encounter out on the street. Carmel sat quietly with the others as they bunched up along the pew, waiting, stewing over what had happened. Every few minutes, as another girl was finished and the next took her turn, those on the pew would bum-shuffle the few inches further along, closer to the confession box. When at last she was at the front end of the row, Carmel was ready to unload her sins.

The method of Catholic confession requires a strict prearranged exchange, preordained positions, and prescribed movements. Carmel entered the tiny confession box, leaving behind the grandeur of the church and enclosing herself in the dark as she pulled the wooden door behind her. A meek sliver of daylight slipped into the confessional from a tiny rose window high up in the damp stone wall; it was all that saved Carmel from being in darkness. She took to her knees and clasped her hands. After a few silent, suspenseful minutes, the little square wooden partition before her swooshed open, revealing the silhouette of the priest’s face on the other side.

So it began. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been one week since my last confession.” The priest asked her if she had anything to confess. “I do have a sin today, Father.” Still fuming with a sense of fresh injustice, Carmel told the priest what had happened. She confessed that now she had evil thoughts. Oh, she would love nothing more than to have snapped back at that judgmental rip. The priest in turn implored Carmel to “be a nice girl.” As her penance for this act of obtrusive thinking, he gave Carmel a few Hail Marys and sent her on her way. Returning to the pew and again taking to bended knees, she cycled through her Hail Marys. Whatever tempering effect they were meant to have on her mood had not worked. Carmel had no intention of being nice either. A fury had gathered in her.

After all the confessions and penances had been completed, the girls organized themselves outside the church in a line, ready to retrace their route back to the industrial school. As they rounded the corner from the church and began to make the ascent up through the steep streets of the town, Carmel hung back. The laces of her shoes had come undone, she said. That was her ruse. Crouched over her shoe, the little girl watched as the end of the line wended away into the distance. Now she had the space she needed. Carmel continued up the road and then she heard them, the same two women, still hanging over their doorsteps, cribbing and gossiping. She could not believe her luck: Everything was happening exactly as she had been imagining. No longer hemmed in by the line, Carmel strode over to them and looked right at the woman who had made her comment. “I heard what you said to me on the way down.” Carmel then called her a witch. But she didn’t stop there. It felt good, and she had found her tempo now. “Do you know something? Vermin only live in clean hair. That’s why you haven’t got any. Look at the state of your hair! You could fry the chips in it!”

The woman was aghast.

“You brazen little hussy!” she snapped. “I’m going to report you!”

“Would you like my name? Fiona!”

Her name was of course Carmel; that was what her mother had named her. But Fiona was her school name.

It was 1956, and the government was still trying to roll out phone boxes, so Carmel knew it wasn’t as if the woman was going to instantly call the convent from inside her house. But the women were swift enough in relaying the offensive incident to the Good Shepherd nuns. It was the head nun herself who delivered Carmel’s whipping that evening. Carmel didn’t care; unrelentingly violent beatings were often handed out to the children for no reason at all. The satisfaction she got from delivering the insult would last longer than the aches and bruising. Carmel also noticed that the woman was never brave enough to be at her door again when the children were on their way to confession. A small victory.

Moments like that were a rare thrill, as Carmel mostly felt that these must be the worst days of her life. She had spent a disproportionate amount of her youth in loveless institutions. Born in a county home in 1945, she lived there until she was three before being sent to live with her Auntie Anne. But at the age of five, for reasons that were never made clear to her, Carmel was made a ward of the court and sent to the industrial school. In those early years at the institution, Carmel’s mother paid her periodic visits. But her mother met the man she would marry, and they moved to England together to make a new start for themselves. For the second time in her life, Carmel became a motherless child. She kept a photo of her mother, though, and for a long time that photo was her only possession.

Industrial schools were founded in the nineteenth century for orphaned and abandoned children, and by the time Carmel was there they were run by religious orders and financed by the Department of Education. This was no school, however: There was no education, there were no books, no teachers, and the girls were referred to as inmates, not students. There were no clocks in the industrial school, nor were there mirrors or birthdays. There was a farm with cows to be milked, a kitchen with fish to be gutted for tea, and younger children to care for, and of course the whole institution needed to be cleaned. They were domestic servants of their own confinement.

The violence and neglect in the industrial schools were among the most heinously excessive of all these institutions: regimented beatings, force-feeding, sexual abuse. But the girls were made aware that something worse awaited them—there was further still that they could fall. The nuns would threaten them with the Laundry if their behavior did not improve, if their obedience continued to weaken, or if they slackened in their chores. St. Aiden’s industrial school, where Carmel lived, was part of a convent complex that included St. Mary’s, a Magdalene convent—what the girls knew only as the “penitent side.” They were aware of two things: that it was where they sent their threadbare sanitary napkins to be laundered, and that the penitent side was something to be feared.

The cruelty of using the prospect of expulsion like this is obvious, but it was not a stick that belonged exclusively to the nuns. In homes across Ireland, this web of institutions was the ultimate threat. Brassy children might get told something like, “More of that lip and you’ll be sent to Goldenbridge,” or Letterfrack, or Artane, or any one of the fifty or so industrial schools. Older girls, teenagers really, who lived with their families could also be threatened with the Magdalenes: “Mind now, or so help me, I will have a good mind to send you to the Good Shepherds,” or the Sisters of Mercy, and so on. Carmel had avoided this fate for a while at least.

As per the regulations, all children had to leave the industrial schools at sixteen. The girls were mistrusted, however. The fear that they might relapse into whatever misdemeanor it was that caused them to be confined in the first place, or follow in the steps of their mothers and become pregnant outside marriage, meant that their freedom was conditional and could be rescinded. Unbeknownst to the girls leaving the industrial schools, they were then on license, the same as long-term prisoners who are released today. Their behavior as free girls was being monitored by everyone around them for signs of dangerously immoral behavior.

When Carmel turned sixteen, the nuns found her a job and accommodation as a domestic, an all-purpose role where she tended to all the womanly work of a house. This was no well-to-do family she had been sent to. The convent at least had electricity and running water, while the toilet at Carmel’s new home was a bucket during the night and then behind the trees in the nearby woods during the day. The relentless drudgery of it left Carmel miserable and unsettled. She returned to the nuns and asked for a different job. They sent her to more domestic work, but in another county entirely.

This might seem strange, but for Carmel, these women had brought her up, and she said, “I looked on them as my parents that I never had.” Some might take young Carmel’s parental attachment to the nuns as evidence of the good care the nuns offered. Others might want to disregard it, to rationalize it as a delusional false consciousness, but often any mother is better than no mother. Even if Carmel held animosity toward the nuns and was glad to be away from them, she had no one else to turn to for help when she needed it. Carmel returned to the Good Shepherd Sisters not because she loved them or they loved her, but because they were there. Ultimately, she was “hoping for a new beginning,” she said, and she had known these nuns all her life and understood their system, or so she thought.

It was 1963, and Carmel, eighteen by then, was back at the convent in New Ross asking the nuns once more to arrange different employment. Again, the nuns said they would see what they could do. With easy familiarity, they sent Carmel to a room at the top of the stairs, away from the school and the dormitories, where she resided for an uneventful week.

The atmosphere then took a strange turn. She recalled an accelerated series of events from a patchwork set of scenes. A packed suitcase was presented to her. Her suitcase. A car came; she was told to get in. Wordlessly, she did so. One of the school’s nuns, Sister Imelda, sat beside her. No one explained to Carmel what was happening. Nor did she ask. There were no rewards for curiosity in Catholic Ireland. This was a culture where people, least of all children, were not meant to ask questions, and certainly not of the nuns. Holy sisters and the other religious elicited much of their power from the silent deference of those around them, who had been taught it in their homes, in their schools, or, like Carmel, had it beaten into them in the industrial schools.

So when Carmel was told no more than to take her belongings and get into the back of a stranger’s car, she did as requested. Trundling along the rural roads for the next several hours, they passed in and out of towns. Eventually the car slowed as it drove up a leafy avenue. Tired, Carmel emerged at a grand four-story redbrick Victorian building adorned with crosses and other religious icons and motifs. If Carmel had turned around, she would have seen a city spread out below her. But she was not invited to take in the view. Sister Imelda ushered Carmel along, and she was brought into the parlor. Standing silently now beside her suitcase, she tried to deduce what was going on, what was happening. Carmel said that she knew she was no longer in Wexford—the journey had taken too long, she realized. “I still didn’t know where I was, what county I was in.”

At that moment, four nuns in heavy bright cream robes entered the parlor. Only their faces were visible, as their heads were each covered by a cowl, a crisp cotton balaclava-like hood that nipped together at the chin and then flowed onto their shoulders, over the tops of their arms, and around their chest and back. It was as if they had no necks at all. Atop the stiff cream layers of their habits, they wore jet-black veils that hung to their elbows. Carmel recognized them immediately from these distinctive habits: These were Good Shepherd nuns. They looked at Carmel and then at each other and said, “Now, what shall we call her?”

Nora was from a comfortable middle-class family in a city on the west coast. Her parents owned a hotel and as a result enjoyed a certain standing within the community. She was, she said, aware that there was another side to society, for those who were forgotten and rejected. Nora had grown up in a town with an industrial school and remembered seeing, but also not really seeing, those other girls. “They were rather like gray figures in my background who had always been there, who always would be there, and I didn’t question them. I just knew they were there, but they were nothing to do with me.” She had lived then as if her life existed in a separate, higher dimension from those other girls.

In 1965, Nora was twenty-one and meandering through the end of her youth. She had recently moved to a quaint rural town in England, where she lolled away her time with a new boyfriend she met there. “I say my life was your average twenty-one-year-old. You know, having great fun and no responsibilities and thinking it was going to go on like that forever.”

On a visit home, she discovered that she was pregnant. She phoned the boyfriend to break the news. He let it be known it was her problem, and with that he was gone. Nora confessed her predicament to her mother. Her mother knew that, like all illegitimate pregnancies, Nora’s had to remain a secret, and that places existed to deal with such major indiscretions.

Nora and her mother had a strained relationship from the beginning. In 1944, when Nora was six weeks old, her mother walked out on her father, decamping to Dublin. She didn’t bring her new baby with her, and her husband did not seem to be expected to care for his baby. Before she left, Nora’s mother passed her newborn to a local girl of sixteen to look after. Nora’s mother’s dramatic departure turned out to be only a short sojourn. Just a month later, whatever row or pent-up grievance had been wedged between the couple subsided, and Nora’s mother returned to the family home. But she did not send for the baby. Nora was left with this gentle local girl for the next three and a half years, who sent little Nora back to her parents only when she could no longer look after her, having contracted tuberculosis.

Once home, Nora said she quickly came to feel like an inconvenience. She never felt a bond with her mother, whom she found a forceful and forbidding figure, and Nora grew up in fear of her and her expectations. Her mother set her children through the motions, and Nora knew that she was to be either a nurse, a teacher, or a nun.

Officially, that was what brought her to England, to train to become a nurse. For Nora, she saw it as an escape from the authoritarian atmosphere of her home. She dropped out of nursing quick enough but stayed in England, because she still had freedom.

Maybe a straight line can be drawn from what happened to Nora back to her mother’s reluctant and resentful parenting style. This, however, was not a personality problem but a social pattern. Sending your daughter to a Mother and Baby Home was what so many women did when their unmarried or single daughters revealed their illegitimate pregnancies.

Women and girls lived in complete terror of falling pregnant outside marriage. It wasn’t the prospect of the baby, the bodily changes, or the impending labor—in fact, much of that was unknown to them. What they dreaded was having to tell their parents, not just because of their reaction, but because of what would happen. The news could be a scandal, and it would set in motion a series of responses that were more like concealment than care. The details of what this process involved were not always entirely clear to them, but they knew the consequences were to be dreaded. Most young Irish women in the twentieth century had heard the stories, and some had firsthand experience of knowing girls who just disappeared under the cloak of a cover story. Off to Dublin to be an au pair, or away to England to care for an elderly relative, say. They returned, and they then had to keep up the ruse.

And now it was her turn. Nora’s mother knew what to do; she called the local priest or the local person who was in the know about the secret business of hiding pregnancies. Nora was sent to a Mother and Baby Home in the North of Ireland. The island of Ireland had been politically partitioned into two nations in 1922, but for the Church, there was no border. And so girls passed back and forth as they moved in and out of these institutions across the entire island.

After her baby was taken to be adopted, Nora was ready to go home alone. This is when something unexpected happened. She got in the back of a car driven by some person she did not know and was brought to a nearby Magdalene convent. It may well have been a taxi, as the nuns often had accounts with local taxi companies to shuttle pregnant girls from the hospital, home, and elsewhere.

Nora’s mother wasn’t religious in any serious way, but she seemed to be acutely aware of the social risk her daughter’s pregnancy presented and the lesson her daughter must learn. Nora’s mother was a customer at their local Magdalene convent in the Republic; she had sent her washing there over the years. Now she sent her fallen daughter, like more of the family’s dirty laundry.

By the 1960s, Ireland was still considered the “valley of the squinting windows”—a term that came from the title of a controversial novel written by Brinsley MacNamara and published in 1918. The book tells the story of a couple who have a baby illegitimately. The townspeople rejoice in openly gossiping about the news. Even decades later, the scandal has the power to destroy the lives of the protagonists and ultimately leads to brutal savagery and murder. The Valley of the Squinting Windows was immediately taboo. MacNamara had based his fictional rural town on the one he had grown up in, and the story of the book had been inspired by real episodes of violent local gossip. Upon publication, the community of MacNamara’s village were so outraged to see themselves depicted as small-minded and cruel that they took to the streets to burn copies of the book. The school where the author’s father was principal was boycotted. The Valley of the Squinting Windows suggested that while Ireland was a harmonious rural culture, maintaining this facade could be a callous collective endeavor. The actual response to the book seemed only to prove the point.

Gossip had accrued a lethal potential, destroying lives and families. Perfect silence and airtight secrets were their only protection. Nora’s mother might have known too that the whispers of disapproval would not be reserved for Nora alone. Her daughter’s pregnancy would be seen as a stain on her, a failure of her own parental control. Later, Nora’s mother confessed this was why she had sent her away. “Oh,” commented Nora, it was “to get [me] away as far as possible from the neighbors so that nobody would know about my pregnancy. It was to shelter me, to hide me, to protect me, to protect my brothers and sisters from the shame of the scandal.” Looking back, Nora said her mother “was right to not take the chance.”

Magdalene Laundries are often erroneously spoken about as places designed exclusively to hide the unwed mother and her baby, but a Mother and Baby Home rarely led directly to the Laundry. There was very little direct overlap between the Laundries and the Homes. While they were both run by the Catholic Church, it was not always the same religious orders that managed them. A handful of penitents, like Nora, were transferred to the Laundry only after they had given birth. Even at that, being discharged to the Laundry from a Mother and Baby Home was unusual, a drastic step reserved for that small number of women and girls who came looking for assistance with their second and third illegitimate pregnancies, who were labeled as “repeat offenders.” Women at Mother and Baby Homes who were identified as problematic were as likely to be sent to an asylum as a Laundry. Mostly women did not need to have anything as openly sinful as a pregnancy against their name to be sent to a Magdalene Laundry.

In truth, those entering the Laundries were most often the illegitimate babies themselves. For many of the girls—like Carmel—their only transgression was that they had what was described as a “defective family background.”

Those girls sent to a Laundry from an industrial school were usually regarded as “incorrigible” or “high-spirited,” the ones that could not be trusted to conduct themselves with an adequately Catholic etiquette once out in the world. The nuns felt that such girls should not be on the streets. Nor could the nuns arrange to get them the usual jobs as maids or nannies. What worried them was that these girls were “wicked creatures” and a “mass of disease” who would then mix with “pure girls.” They were suspected of a malignant femininity that spread evil: “They all go back to a life of sin—except those who enter the Magdalen homes,” one nun wrote in a letter complaining about the practice of trying to integrate such women into the community.

Sometimes, the nuns did not wait for the girls to leave the industrial schools before depositing them in the Laundries. If they were under sixteen but showed “immoral tendencies,” then they were moved on quicker, the nuns keen to contain them so that they did not influence others. “Removal,” they knew, “was imperative.” If the industrial school had failed to inculcate in these girls “industry, regularity, self-denial, self-reliance, and self-control,” then the Laundries operated an even more zealous commitment to these principles.

The Magdalene Laundry was also advocated as an extreme measure against unwieldy girls—a short, sharp shock intended to restore their manners. As a schoolgirl in 1948, twelve-year-old Brigid skipped classes, and sometimes left school early. What matter anyway? She was at that age where most of her friends were leaving school.

Brigid had been born outside marriage and was being raised by her grandmother. The local priest decided to intervene, sensing that young Brigid’s devil-may-care attitude to school attendance spoke of a deeper, inherited moral malaise. He persuaded her grandmother that he should bring the truant young Brigid to St. Mary’s, the local Good Shepherd Magdalene convent in Limerick, for a period.

Sometimes the girls who entered under these circumstances stayed only a few days before a family member returned to pick them up. Some of them languished for longer, a year or more. For Brigid, having played fast and loose with school rules, it was a life sentence. Adult men sentenced to murder in the twentieth century were rarely expected to serve more than seven years. Somehow, by the 1940s, the mildest transgressions of girls and young women caused more outrage than the taking of a life. It was Brigid’s mother who finally came to liberate her daughter. By that point, she was thirty-nine years old. Brigid was put to work but was unable to settle. She had spent more time in the Laundry than with her family. After just two and a half years free, she walked back in through the Laundry doors a second time, this time voluntarily, as a woman in her early forties.

In some instances, a family tragedy led girls to the Laundries. This was the case for Catherine, born in 1935 in a small town in Wicklow on the east coast. Her life must have looked charmed, as her family had literally won the lottery. Or her grandfather had, to be precise. His numbers came up in the sweepstakes, and he gave enough of his winnings to his son so that he could build a home where he would live with his young family. Catherine grew up there, in a newly built house next door to her grandfather. Then it all came asunder.

When Catherine was six, her mother died in childbirth. While her father was still alive and the house intact, Catherine and her five brothers and one sister were sent to live with their aunt. This arrangement quickly fell apart. Her father arrived one evening and had a thundering row with the aunt, accusing her of spending his money carelessly. He took the children, but not to bring them home; instead he farmed Catherine and her siblings out to a rotation of other female relatives.

Her father soon remarried, and for a period Catherine was home again. She recalled how her new stepmother referred to the children as their dead mother’s “bastards.” One evening the stepmother’s rants accelerated into a furious fit, and she grasped at every picture of Catherine’s mother, tore out any photos of her parents’ wedding day from the albums, and thrust them in the fire. Catherine watched as every trace of her mother that had lingered in the house was burned. Her father didn’t try to tread the line between his new life and his previous one. He was not prone to taking the children’s side as it was. He had a domineering character and would berate his children for their imperfections, no matter how slight.

The children were shipped back out, this time to her father’s great-aunt, and he returned to his life as a newlywed. This great-aunt was elderly when the children first arrived, and they had not been there long when she died. It had been eight years since her mother died, and Catherine’s father had finally exhausted all options. He had reached the end of the line, and so it seemed had Catherine.

It was 1949, and Catherine was fourteen. Her father told her she was going to be brought somewhere to get a better education. Secretly Catherine was thrilled to be escaping her vicious stepmother and cold father. She readied herself, and then, with her bag on her back, satisfied she had the few bits she needed to begin a new life, her father sat her on the crossbar of his old bicycle to set out on the long journey. Traveling over the empty rural roads, they switched between pedaling and walking for many miles until they finally reached the town of New Ross. He left her with the Good Shepherd nuns without saying a word.

Catherine said, “I realized after I settled in that I was being sort of thrown away, what shall I say, abandoned.” But at that time, girls like Catherine who had no mother, no one to love them and lead them into adulthood, could find their lives being discarded like this. They were not seen as evil or dangerous, but treated as one burden too many. Catherine had become a surplus population inside her own family.

Then there was a steady intake of girls and women from families for an assortment of other reasons. Many were described in the documents as “mental defectives,” or more commonly in the old Irish vernacular as simplí. They had some disability—they might have been deaf or mute, and others had epilepsy and their families did not know how to deal with their daughter’s fits. These families knew that the Magdalene Laundry was a place of last resort if they were beyond coping, and maybe, on occasion, also beyond caring. The religious order that ran the Laundries bore the full cost of everyone who was sent to them, alleviating the family and the taxpayer of ongoing medical and care bills that were demanded in other institutions. One nun recalled how a social worker turned up on the doorstep of a Magdalene Laundry with a girl with Down syndrome in tow.

“I have been asked to deliver this teenager here,” she said.

The sister replied, “I am sorry. We can’t take her, because we don’t have facilities.”

Unmoved, the social worker responded, “Well, I was told to bring her here, and I am leaving her here.”

The nuns agreed, however, that women with Down syndrome were especially vulnerable to the kind of skulking male who saw them as prey. The Laundries were the only way to keep them out of danger.

Women and girls also came to the Laundries in small numbers from the criminal justice system. Fewer than one in ten of the known admissions were sent to the Laundries by the prison authorities and courts, as well as police and probation officers. It was believed that they would receive a more intensive program of moral reclamation, which was tailored to their specific gender needs and beyond the prison to provide. One priest I interviewed, Father Barry—who had been assigned as a chaplain to a Dublin Magdalene Laundry in the 1960s—told me that going to the courts on behalf of the nuns was sometimes part of his job. “Whenever a young girl got into trouble, we always tried to help her. Both the nuns and the gardaí [Irish police] were determined that no girl would go into a prison, because if they went into the prison system, that was the end of them.” On one occasion, Father Barry had to go to the courthouse and “plead” for a “little country girl” to be spared the prison and sent to the Magdalene Laundry instead. She had committed infanticide, a crime which he described with patrician magnanimity; there was not a hint of revulsion. I asked how old this little girl was. “Oh, only in her late twenties,” Father Barry thought. “Only for the gardaí and me, she would have gone into the prison.”

Another priest, writing in the 1920s, also adamantly believed in the Laundries’ great advantage over the prison. And yet, he wrote, “In many instances [female] offenders have expressed to me in Court a desire to go, in some cases they have begged to go to prison rather than a Home.” He could not fathom why, and concluded, “This seems like a strange if not an unreasonable attitude to adopt, for which I cannot venture an explanation.”

Men given custodial sentences had no alternative site of incarceration beyond the prison. In fact, the prison administration found ways to reduce the length of men’s prison sentences, as they thought of long stints of incarceration as degrading and inhumane. The use of temporary release in the Irish men’s prison system was once used so liberally and permissively that it is considered that for a period during the twentieth century, Ireland had one of the more humane prison systems in the English-speaking world.

If the Magdalene Laundries were like a shadow system of confinement, there was also a shadow system of enforcers. Priests like Father Barry, yes, but also concerned citizens. By the end of the 1920s, thousands of people had joined lay missionaries, such as the enormously popular groups like the Legion of Mary. It is estimated that between 5 and 7 percent of women and girls at the Laundries were brought there by the Legion of Mary, as Eileen was as a fifteen-year-old in 1954.

Girls like Carmel, Nora, Brigid, Catherine, and Eileen had different routes into the Laundries. Yet for each of them, their being deposited in a Laundry was a reality that everyone around them seemed unable to articulate. Their chaperones acted as if they were duty-bound to follow silent rules, which gave the whole system a heavy air of subterfuge. Whatever their situation, these girls were often lured to Magdalene Laundries on the pretense of something better. Women and girls who ended up confined in the Laundries were usually sat in the back of cars and on bikes, told by a priest, a missionary, a social worker, a nun, or their parents that they were getting a new job, a better education, or a nice new home. But this was not going to be a new beginning; instead it was an end, a social death.

It had not always been like this, though, with Irish women and girls disappearing, being detained and dumped en masse. There was nothing inevitable about Ireland’s permissive use of Magdalene Laundries. They were not a fated by-product of independence. It could have all been different, if it had not been for the unfortunate happenstance of history. To understand what happened to these women and girls, and many thousands more like them, we first need to understand the ambitions and actions of the men who made Ireland.

Chapter 2 Discontent

In the darkness of winter and weary from war, the Irish Free State became independent of Britain on December 6, 1922. Irish independence was conditional: The Free State had to relinquish its claim to the entire island of Ireland, allowing the British to maintain control of the northeastern counties, which held the largest population of those who were Protestant and identified as British. They were descendants of those frontier families who had settled in the foreign lands their government wished to colonize, known as plantation. The Irish delegation agreed to this during Treaty negotiations, and in 1922 the island was partitioned. The Free State, the North, and the border were born. That nation began in a schism.

Some could not accept this truncated conclusion. They felt that if the Treaty could not include the entire island, then it was worthless. A small but thuggish civil war broke out during the Free State’s first tentative year of existence. The anti-Treaty group, who came to be described as the Irregulars, were led by Éamon de Valera. A former math teacher, de Valera was bookish, bespectacled, and starched, with an autocratic streak. He had no taste for the modern vices; he liked neither drink nor cigarettes and he is said to have spoken “in a manner reminiscent of a schoolmaster talking to a class of dim pupils.” He led the rebels as they turned their warring energies inward, away from the British, and upon those who were once their fellows in arms.

The Catholic Church already held an authoritative position, and after partition they found themselves without a rival for power. They denounced anyone who opposed the Treaty and would deny Ireland its peace at last, saying that the “guerrilla warfare now being carried on by the Irregulars is without moral sanction… All those who, in contravention of this teaching, participate in such crimes, are guilty of grievous sins, and may not be absolved in Confession.” Yet the Catholic men and women who made up the ranks of the anti-Treaty rebel forces ignored the Church’s calls to lay down arms. Even Éamon de Valera, who was himself a devout Catholic, was willing to face the threat of damnation in the name of nationhood, but it was in vain. The civil war petered out by May 1923, and building the Irish Free State began in earnest.

Yet it was not all wartime gloom. Ireland was a young nation in more than one way. Almost half the Irish population was under the age of twenty-five, and for some it must have felt exhilarating, as though they were on the cusp of the future. The ignominy that had marred life under British rule—famine, mass emigration, dispossession, and oppression—could all be cast into the history books. And 1922 was not just the birth of the democratic Irish State; it was ground zero for modernism, the jazz age—a creative and critical atmosphere that was lighting up the post–First World War world. Modernist literature, new music, and changing fashions opened up an invigorating new perspective on life. It was that liberated way of life that seemed to pose the most immediate threat to the Church’s newfound authority.

The prospect of a roaring twenties assaulted every one of the Church’s codes. Literature had become outrageously individualistic, subjective, a celebration of ordinary lives and mundane bodily pleasures, such as James Joyce’s unflinching stream-of-consciousness style in Ulysses, which was a vulgar affront to the Catholic values of modesty and self-denial. Then there was the honky-tonk after-dark fun of it all. The tight and respectful choreography of traditional dance was increasingly being overlooked for dancing of the likes previously unknown in Ireland. Liberated bodies improvised seductively to music and moved dangerously close. In the dance halls, the native reels and jigs were giving way to the provocatively titled shimmy, Black Bottom, Charleston, shag, and jitterbug. It was an experimental culture of debate, discussion, and critical thinking that prioritized the self-indulgent pursuit of happiness in the here and now. Even religion was to be reduced to a topic suitable for intellectual and philosophical dissection: Communism? Socialism? Capitalism? Catholicism? Catholic magazines railed against the idea that Christianity could be diminished like this.

The bishops felt that there could be no surer sign of the immorality afflicting Ireland than the impact it was having on women. Suddenly, they wore shorter skirts and shimmering drapery designed to accentuate their movements. These getups were, according to the bishops, “bordering on indecency.” For Catholic leadership, Irish women were idealized as chaste and reserved as the Virgin Mary herself, and these new trends were decried as the ruin of Irish maidens’ fundamental “Christian virtue.” These modern women were reviled as no more than “fag-smoking, jazz-dancing, lip-sticking flappers.” The Church hierarchy warned the people that this cultural shift could be disastrous, as the “future of the country is bound up with the dignity and purity of the women of Ireland.”

These outbursts from the Church were more than the comments of fuddy-duddies who were out of touch with youth culture. A key principle of Catholic ideology was purity. Purity meant living without sin, to be morally unblemished, and this state was achieved through a strict schedule of prayer and penance. Engaging in the intellectual, self-indulgent pleasure of reading books and listening to music was decried as a “modern menace” and a “tyranny of the senses.” While there were “hysterical denunciations” of this modernist culture across Europe and North America, in Ireland priests stood in their pulpits and denounced these gaudy trends as a “cloak for sin.”

The Catholic social ideal was that of people conducting simple rural lives, ensconced in a quiet domesticity. Families should be tightly knitted into parishes, small towns, and communities, which met at cèilidhs, the weekly Mass, and other parish get-togethers. The problem was neither Irish men nor women were really complying.

In a way, how could they? The Catholic Church’s view of human nature was acutely utopian and severely naive. Purity meant nothing less than perfection. Perfection is an impossible standard for an individual, let alone a nation, to achieve. Instead, many young people seemed to be playing with their new freedom, probably enjoying being liberated from the servitude to their mothers and the guerilla warfare of their fathers.

The Church was not alone in its outrage, though. Since the formation of the Irish Free State in the early 1920s, new groups of Catholic fundamentalists had been forming, while long-standing groups grew in number. They had names such as the Catholic Truth Society, the Catholic Society for the Protection of Girls, the Irish Vigilance Association, the Kingship of Christ (An Ríoghacht), and, of course, the Legion of Mary. These concerned citizens saw themselves as armies against the rising sin of the modern age. Together, they formed a new right-wing public movement advocating a more traditional, Christian nation, where Catholicism would have the strict air of a “public cult.”

One of the most consequential thinkers and activists in the early years of the Irish State was a man named Father Richard Devane. Born in Limerick in 1876, he was upright, with wire glasses that were themselves framed by his low-slung bushy eyebrows. He was high-minded and uncompromising; he campaigned with fire and brimstone.

Devane had a relatively inauspicious start to his religious life, serving quietly as a curate in England before returning to Ireland in 1904. England—its class system, liberalism, Protestant work ethic, and the shameless accumulation of wealth—seemed to have left an indelibly negative impression on the young curate. Back in Limerick, he became obsessed with matters of morality and social purity. Devane was especially appalled to see British newspapers like News of the World titillating Irish communities with tawdry gossip and debacles, from divorces and “adulteresses” to gruesome murders. This was not news. He understood that its true purpose was to scintillate and arouse. This destruction of spiritual well-being was fine for the English, but certainly not for the Irish. With a zealot’s indefatigability, Devane became a leading agitator for a more staunchly committed Catholic Ireland.

Even prior to independence, Father Devane saw the need to work “outside the law” if he was to rid Ireland of the “filthy Sunday cross-Channel papers.” In 1911, he set upon a train with a consignment of British newspapers along with an equally committed compatriot. They approached the man who had come to collect the newspapers and deliver them to the various shops in the area. Devane told this fellow that he had better not lay a hand upon this filth, that he must go now and leave the newspapers behind.

Matters escalated the following Sunday. Devane, this time accompanied by an energized mob—his Vigilance Committee—seized a newspaper delivery at Limerick railway station. Once they had bundled the heavy bales out of the carriage, they formed a procession; a band played behind them, and a supportive crowd gathered. They marched to People’s Park, where they piled the newspapers into a pyre, and after the group joined in prayer, they burned them with triumphant satisfaction. Devane is reported to have said that “he hoped that Limerick’s example would have widespread results.” Devane then orchestrated a boycott of Limerick shops that saw fit to stock these newspapers. It was another success, as the shopkeepers soon relented, but how to replicate this at national level, he wondered. Devane knew that these initiatives to cleanse local streets, shops, and lives would not work in the urban enclaves with more diverse populations and an even greater access to modern temptations of cinemas, bookshops, and dance halls.

The Church’s view was that the best way to enforce a Catholic code of conduct was through a culture of coercion, where obedience was maintained via firm public norms and severe judgment within the community. That was the other problem with foreign culture—it fostered tolerance. The loose manners shown in books, newspapers, and films normalized sordid behavior, “weakening one of the strongest restraints upon anti-social action, the fear of provoking social condemnation and ostracism.” Devane’s censorious avidity went further. He believed people needed to be forced to comply, and that became his mission.

From 1922, he sat at his typewriter clacking out his credos. His articles and letters appeared in newspapers, pamphlets, and periodicals, each intent on exposing the rot in modern society: foreign newspapers, books dealing with “nauseating subjects,” and unmarried mothers. He also methodically pointed the way forward. With independence, he saw the “new won powers” as a way to marshal the law so that Ireland could be organized “according to Irish ideals and Catholic standards.” Dance halls must be controlled, and cinemas must be censored, he argued. Foreign materials should be banned, and those that were not must be heavily taxed. He outlined ideas for legislation that could see girls charged for immoral behavior. Unmarried mothers and their illegitimate offspring must be dealt with swiftly, secretly, and discreetly. Then there were the kinds of “irresponsible creatures” who were so morally degenerate, and therefore “mentally deficient” or “perverse,” that they needed to be protected from themselves and their “own silliness and stupidity”—that was the job of a “chivalrous and Catholic nation,” Devane wrote. Those women and girls displaying such immodesty “should be committed to a Good Shepherd Home,” namely, a Magdalene Laundry. Detention was the only way to ensure that “the public is safeguarded.”

However, he predicted that legislation of this kind was going to be a challenge. A discussion of prospective laws that addressed sin was counterproductive if your goal was to cleanse the national consciousness of such debasing ideas. That was the special problem with the Catholic social ideal: People could not claim purity of mind if they knew otherwise. Devane felt that one would need to find a way to introduce law while avoiding public discussions of immorality. In fact, he mused, “would it be asking too much of the government” to instead make legislation by a private committee of people who could bring the law into harmony with Catholic spiritual values?

In this way, Devane was to become a man of his time. He looked across Europe and admired their new hardcore populist politics. He was appalled of course by the absence of religion in the new fascist and communist regimes, but was enamored by their “all-consuming faith, a totalitarian faith, coloring their minds, influencing their outlook and operating in a conscious way throughout the actions of their daily lives.” He wondered, “Can we Christians develop such a totalitarian Christian faith of a like white-heat intensity?” And he spoke openly of his hope that the Irish could become “as consciously Christian or Catholic as the Germans are Nazi, the Russians, Communist, the Italians, Fascist.” He believed that for this to happen, all distractions must be removed, all recourse to idleness squashed, and all cultural outlets that espoused the values or aesthetic of individualism be erased. And of course, all those who contaminated this way of life needed to be removed. What he wanted was a purge.

Devane was a renegade outsider, however, and not part of the inner fold of the Catholic Church. Maybe he was even the kind of rogue character that some people brushed off with a roll of the eyes. His clique of fringe activists was described in liberal periodicals as “uncultivated fanatics.” One bishop, upon receiving a letter from Devane urging him to support censorship, said, respectfully, “You are inclined to more exertion than is good for you.” His colleagues implored him to soften his vociferousness and “scolding tone,” which they suggested gave way to “crudities of expression” and, less forgivingly, “wild statements.” Even one of his fellow Jesuits suggested to Devane that his writing was strangely “pornographic,” as he lingered “with a zest that is almost morbid upon sexual irregularities.” Maybe these assessments help explain why Devane never achieved the personal standing he seemed to desire. But as the fortunes of the newly independent nation plummeted, his decisive suggestions began to gain credible traction in a society seeking stability and renewal. Within fifteen years, Ireland would be remade in the authoritarian vision he was advocating.

Perhaps the allure of total solutions offered by Devane and his ilk could have been resisted if the Irish Free State was not being battered by larger forces. The Free State found itself in extremis. With the augury of suffering to come, the nascent and primarily agricultural nation suffered a bleak winter and spring, and in 1922, heavy rain deluged the harvest and left it rotting in the soil.

Impoverished even before the financial crash in 1929, the fledgling Irish State was poor and getting poorer. Staring down the barrel of financial disaster, the new government cut spending from £42 million in 1923 to 1924 to £24 million by 1927, then had to shrink the already meager welfare budget, including a 10 percent cut to the pension. Wages fell, welfare payments lapsed, and a cost-of-living crisis struck. And across the 1920s, those grim universal markers of terminal national decline—infant mortality, overcrowded living, and unemployment—all began to rise.

By the mid-1920s “famine-like conditions” were being reported, with one newspaper stating that famine was “imminent [and] as bad as 1847,” considered the worst year of the Great Famine, that devastated the nation and saw roughly one million Irish people die and another one million emigrate. Unable to blame the British for their deprivation, the government instead rebuffed this as exaggeration. If the omen of the soil failing wasn’t enough, it was reported that an entire family named Sullivan, two parents and two children, had died of starvation in Cork in 1927. The family were said to have been prosperous prior to independence, having owned enough land to earn a decent living from farming. As they owned land, however, when they fell on hard times, they were denied welfare relief. The newspapers also insisted that this dreadful event was the terrible fate awaiting many Irish people. In 1929, an elderly woman living in Temple Bar in the center of Dublin was found dead. She too had starved to death.

More echoes of the famine abound. Men and women were leaving in such numbers that by 1927 the population had descended to its lowest recorded level since the 1840s. The Irish must have felt that after coming up for air, they were plunged back into the depths of their despair.

Campaigners such as Devane traveled the country giving lectures and sermons that offered simple assessments and solutions. Ireland’s misery was not born of economics, but ideology. Before assembled audiences in parish halls, these hardcore Catholics advocated that a “wealthy country is not necessarily a prosperous one”—that was only what materialists (which was as much to say, the Protestants) thought. In fact, if “centuries of oppression” had not “robbed” Ireland of a national culture with a “distinctly Catholic tone,” Ireland would be blessed with “the ripening corn of harvest, the fishing fleet put out to sea,” and “new halls, bridges, and factories.” In Ireland’s time of weakness, the Catholic hierarchy declared that “purity is strength.” The nation could begin to thrive, though, but only if it became a “Christian democracy.” Catholicism was not just the “open sesame” to the gates of heaven. It was the “passport to polite society.”

The desire to identify the culprit of a nation’s malaise can unite people with a mob-like purpose. At the end of the 1920s, there was a prominent new campaign to cleanse Ireland of the distorting influences of “imported” culture of an “evil kind.” In 1926, the Catholic Truth Society urged people to ostracize those they knew who purchased “objectionable” newspapers. Such was the fervor of this issue that even the teachers began advocating for intellectual protectionism. The Dublin branch of the Irish teachers’ union set up their own committee against evil literature. They hoped that this would pressurize the government to bring the law in “harmony” with Ireland’s “high moral standards.” They suggested subjecting all written material coming into the country from “outside sources” to a morality test. If it failed, it must be heavily taxed.

Yet the Free State’s first government were not persuaded by such calls. Cumann na nGaedheal, the pro-Treaty party, was led by W. T. Cosgrave, a staid but stable character. One historian described him as being so lacking in showmanship that he could be admired for a “cult of no personality.” Even in 1922, Cosgrave was likened to “the general manager of a railway company.” Nonetheless, his was a party that wanted to maintain the inherited economic status quo. Ireland would still have the conservative trickle-down economy, organized around big farmers and the professional classes, but now a native hand was upon the tiller.

During the 1920s, Cumann na nGaedheal certainly did create legislation that showed a clear commitment to patriarchal tradition. They maintained a marriage bar that demanded women resign from civil service posts once they were married. Though not demanded of them, the private sector and schools also often adhered to the marriage bar. In 1927, women were taken off the list of citizens who were automatically eligible for jury service. If they wanted to sit on juries, women were forced to opt in. This was, according to the government, to save time on administration. Most Irish women were at home with their families, and between the ceaseless cooking and the child-rearing, they had no time for such public service. These acts formalized the widely held belief that women were primarily housewives who needed no place in Irish public or political life. If men and women thought they might escape their marriages, they were also at a dead end. Divorce was prohibited in 1925 as it defiled the Catholic sacrament of marriage and undermined the family.

The Minister for Justice, who was responsible for changing this legislation, was Kevin O’Higgins. O’Higgins, still a relatively young man in his thirties, who had once considered joining the priesthood, is said to have marveled at Cumann na nGaedheal as “the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution.” He initially tried to resist the more extreme appetites for cultural censorship. However, in 1926, the government formed a censorship committee, known as the Committee on Evil Literature, to explore the need for stricter laws.

It was during this fractious time that the former nationalist leader, Éamon de Valera, returned to the political stage. De Valera had always been committed to an unadulterated version of Ireland and Irishness, and in 1926 he formed a new populist, Catholic, and nationalist party: Fianna Fáil, a name that translates into English as “soldiers of destiny.” The Fianna Fáil manifestos triangulated the holy trinity of Irish life: family, land, and religion. They claimed to speak for the Catholics. If Ireland was ever to be for Irish people, the nation should become culturally and economically self-sufficient. Fianna Fáil “want to try and make this country as self-contained as possible,” they said.

Fianna Fáil’s popularity was immediate. In the general election of June 1927, the party narrowly missed out on government, garnering 44 percent of the vote. Cosgrave managed to secure a victory, just, with 47 percent. And it was in the wake of this blistering election result that Minister Kevin O’Higgins was assassinated.

O’Higgins was walking to Mass one Sunday morning, a mere month after the election, accompanied by his police escort. Realizing either that he had forgotten his cigarettes, or that he did not have enough to tide him over until the end of the service, his police protection obliged O’Higgins by heading to the nearest newsagent to buy some more. Now alone, O’Higgins continued toward the church. A group of civil war dissenters seeking revenge ascended upon him with pistols. They managed to get one shot before O’Higgins fled for as long as he could until he collapsed to the ground. They shot him again as he lay there limply.

Whatever sympathy the government might have hoped to harness from O’Higgins’s assassination did not materialize. News of the murder further enfeebled them, and the newspapers reported that the country was “trembling on the edge of disaster.” The national mood, emboldened by radical campaigning and relentless privations, was becoming more vehement. Increasingly, people felt the need to wield cruder and more violent means than just pen and protest if they were to rid Ireland of insidious reading material. In 1928, armed extremists stopped a train in Mullingar that was carrying a delivery of English newspapers and torched what they found. This was only one in a wave of vigilante groups that were forming across the country and seizing upon trains. Civil war guerilla methods were now being wielded against perceived sources of immorality.

It was in that period of mourning and disarray that Cumann na nGaedheal relented and in 1929 gave a legislative remit for censorship. Imported goods were monitored. Certain British newspapers, as well as novels and magazines, were prohibited. While contraception remained legal, publications were no longer permitted to advertise it. Customs officials, lay vigilantes, and the public formed a network of surveillance, scanning publications for possible offending material and reporting it to the committee. The works of Beckett and Balzac were banned, as were those of Huxley, Hesse, Graham Greene, Colette, and, by the 1950s, over 1,700 other books.

A small, articulate group of dissenters railed against censorship for what it was, a tool for “mental repression.” Sir John B. Keane, a barrister, writer, and senator in the upper house, derided the constriction of this act as a purification process that sought to achieve “hygiene of the mind.” In the Catholic periodicals, Keane and his fellow liberals, such as William Butler Yeats, were viciously dismissed as pagans, who were part of a “College Green” elite. Namely, they had studied at, or were associated with, the Protestant Trinity College.

The Committee on Evil Literature was intended to be a conciliatory gesture to douse the fiery public fervor. Instead, it became one step on the road to victory for the fundamentalists and their desire that “the next generation of Irish men and women [be] a clean-minded, pure-souled community.” In 1931, the protests became more brazen. Libraries in Mayo were boycotted when the county appointed a Protestant, Letitia Dunbar-Harrison, as the head librarian. Encompassing an Irish-speaking Catholic population in a vast landscape of sheer mountains, mossy boglands, and rugged coastline, Mayo was emblematic of an idealized Ireland. It was felt that only Catholics who were “loyal” to the course of Catholic social action could take on such prominent public roles. A local insurgency was mounted; books were returned. Public meetings were held in which anti-Protestant prejudices were slung with open disgust. The government stood firm on their appointment, but when the entire Mayo County Council resigned in protest, the government was left with no choice but to relent and appoint a new and Catholic librarian.

This was not a Church-backed insurrection, but bottom-up populism. Emboldened by the success of Dunbar-Harrison being cast out, the bishops began their own short-lived campaign for public hospitals to ban Protestant doctors. Catholic morals required Catholic medicine, it seemed. While the government had to publicly maintain relations, Cosgrave wrote to the archbishop in the early 1930s, stating that the Church must cease trying to direct the politics of the nation. To give the Church more power—to make legislation even more ostensibly Catholic—would be a breach of their secular and democratic constitution, he told the archbishop: “As I explained to Your Grace at our interview, to discriminate against any citizen—or exercise a preference for a citizen—on account of religious belief would be to conflict with some of the fundamental principles on which the state is founded.”

Others, like George Bernard Shaw, another of Ireland’s literary Protestant senators, were less measured in their dissent. Ireland must resist the “handful of morbid Catholics with heresyphobia” who were seeking to turn the country into a theocracy, he warned.

Sales of British newspapers may have been stymied, but the Irish newspapers continued to carry stories of infanticide; they told of the steady climb of venereal disease and proliferating illegitimate births. These were received as credible evidence that Irish society was not simply in trouble, but in the process of self-destruction. Those vocal morbid purists did not just want to scour certain kinds of ideas from society, but soon came to feel that they also needed to cleanse it of certain kinds of people who engaged in illicit sexual activities. If books and music were threats from beyond the border, fallen women came to be seen as the enemies within. As one government commission described them, they “have become sources of evil, danger, and expense to the community.”

These fears fed fantasies about the benefits of a “detention policy,” under which morally lax women who were getting pregnant outside marriage could be held “until such time as it might be considered advisable to let them out.” As if citing Richard Devane’s trenchant writing, and lacking the reserve of his earlier readers, a new wave of people began to suggest that the government should allow “compulsory lock-up” for those dangerous women. The Department of Local Government released their annual report in 1932 addressing the problem. They agreed that the only solution—though it was, they admitted sadly, “repugnant”—was to employ the “power of detention in special cases,” keeping this class of moral degenerates “under control and discipline.” Otherwise, they would continue giving birth to these ill-gotten children—“whose chances of average health and intelligence are small”—which created its own ancillary problems and need for further containment.

The figure of the fallen woman loomed large over these discussions on law and order. But as they voraciously imagined who she was, and why she needed locking up, the idea of the fallen woman began to expand well beyond prostitution and sex outside marriage, to all forms of behavior that, as one priest decried, “shattered the ideals of womanhood.” She was lustful, indulgent, had foreign tastes, was unbridled by the demands of family; she “lacked moral fiber.” The concept even stretched to those women “on the verge of being wrecked in the whirlpool of the busy world.”

The excitement and potential of the early 1920s had quickly given way to difficult years marked by extreme poverty and discontent in the late 1920s and on into the beginning of the 1930s. A circle of contenders—from Cosgrave and his conservatives, to lay fundamentalists, the Catholic hierarchy, and radical campaigners like Richard Devane—each vied to be architects of the fledgling nation in its hour of need. They grappled over what kind of place they wished their country to be, what cultural currents should guide their identity, and what the role of government was. What had begun as a kind of culture war quickly became a one-sided cultural coup.

Chapter 3 Purge

In 1924, the Westminster government updated its criminal law bill, which raised the age of sexual consent from sixteen to seventeen. Before the advent of independence, the Irish law would most likely have been amended in tandem. Finding themselves with a lower age of consent gave Irish legislators the impetus to update their own bill. It also gave them an opportunity to try to dampen the mounting pressure for stricter Catholic legislation. In June 1930, the Department of Justice appointed a review committee that included Catholic and Protestant clerics, as well as health and welfare professionals, chaired by a judge named William Carrigan. The department asked this committee to reappraise the criminal law bill, with specific attention paid to the age of consent and juvenile prostitution, and to produce a report with their recommendations.

I have spent my career as a researcher reading government reports and documents on crime and its control, and the Carrigan Report, as it came to be known, is like nothing I have read before. It begins in a tone that is legal and dry, then it descends into a trenchant assessment that is pitiless in its condemnation. The committee seemed to have expanded their remit beyond that which was asked to the matter of “social morality” and “evil.” Their concern was the “suppression” of the vague but dangerously all-encompassing matter of “public vice.” In a neat formulation, the report laid out what and who was to blame for the widespread decline: popular amusement, male predators, immoral girls, illegitimate children, and an absence of tougher laws to surveil, punish, and remove them. The committee had invited twenty-nine expert witnesses to testify. These were the sort of usual suspects, such as Father Richard Devane, each of whom provided ample evidence that supported the report’s claim that Ireland had “become gravely menaced by modern abuses,” overrun by “dances of a disgusting character” and “misbehavior” in cinemas.

Of central concern was the growing number of illegitimate children. Yet the rates of illegitimate births rose only slightly, from 2.6 percent to 3.5 percent, in the ten years after independence. Having gathered a wide array of evidence, some of it anecdotal—what was described as “authentic sources”—the committee argued that the small percentage of illegitimate births was spurious, a mere fraction of the true scale of the problem which was bringing Christian Ireland to its knees. Because of this, the Carrigan Committee had decided to reorientate their purpose from criminal law to social morality in general:

Though our enquiry was not directly concerned with the question of illegitimacy we felt it necessary to make it a subject of the enquiry, as illegitimacy must be regarded as one of the principal causes of the species of crime and vice… illegitimacy is an evil which, contrary to past experience of history, has begun to grow and spread.

These immoral characters were the product of bad families, in which the parents had either carelessly lost or balefully relinquished control. In particular, their attention was drawn to the industrial schools, places designed, they wrote, for “delinquents.” When these children left the confinement of these institutions, they “are usually without responsible friends or relatives.” This group was a special threat to national purity because they “drift into evil ways,” girls in particular. The “girl of 16,” they wrote, “is often mentally and emotionally unstable; she has not finished developing; and cannot really appreciate the nature and result of the act to which she consents.” These were the girls who “fall into the hands of vicious associates and are ruined.” This was, for want of a better term, what they saw as the endless cycle of illegitimacy, and a source of Ireland’s degeneration.

The report beseeched the government to begin “purging the State of these evils.” Children leaving industrial schools should not be given additional welfare, but additional monitoring, and if it was deemed necessary by the industrial school manager that more confinement was required, then they should be sent on “for further detention.” Special reformatories for such ill-natured girls should be established, the committee argued, as well as appointing “women police” to help deal with the distinct proclivities of female deviance.

When it came to male sexual offending they were just as committed, and recommended reinstating flogging, unless of course “an official medical certificate declared it unsuitable.” As part of the punishment, public shaming should be reintroduced. The particulars of an offense, along with the name and address of the guilty party, should be published in the newspapers, the committee suggested.

What a relief, then, that the Department of Justice were similarly taken aback when they received the Carrigan Report in August 1931. If the committee was so concerned with immorality, the civil servants lambasted, why did they not look at matters economically or socially, by exploring housing, education, and unemployment, rather than dancing? In fact, they thought the committee’s “suggestions amount almost to a suppression of public dancing.” To abide by the report’s suggestions would be to move toward having morality police, which, the civil servants wrote, “we do not want… in this country.” The assistant secretary of the Department of Justice drew the attention of the new minister, James FitzGerald-Kenney, to the report’s attempt to create a new class of offender, by making illegal what were not “unnatural sexual relations.” Legislation will not stop sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds having sex, he said. He thought the report was so farcical that he wondered to the minister, Why had they stopped at the suggestion of whipping? “I think they might have added branding with a suitable initial on the forehead,” he mocked. The assistant secretary said that the “report may be termed extreme and in parts, fanatical.” He told the minister directly that some suggestions were so outlandish as to sound like the “thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock.” The question was not whether to follow the report’s recommendation, but seems to have been how best to bury it.

The accepted line was that because the report wasn’t especially judicial, they would need to consult legal experts to find within it the scraps that might aid in assembling a new criminal law bill. With that, the report was filed away. Or so they thought.

Maybe if the Minister for Justice had responded with more trepidation, if he had asserted himself publicly against the ideological extremism that the report represented with the same vigor as inside government offices, the outcome could have been different. The department’s plan was simple, though; all it required was time. Time for the report to be forgotten, time for it to become defunct, and then time for it to be revised. Anyway, the government had other grave problems at hand. The misery of poverty and of economic desperation had not abated. At the end of 1931, the government had been forced to produce a supplementary budget, with income tax rises, an increase in the price of petrol, cuts to teachers’ and gardaí wages, and a promise of more austerity to come. The Carrigan Committee Report could, they thought, wait. But time was the one asset that this administration did not have. Within five months of receiving the Carrigan Report, there was a new populist Catholic government.

In the new year of 1932, Cosgrave’s government were at their “wits’ end in financial matters” and felt no other option was left but a snap general election. They dissolved the government on January 29, and two weeks later, when the election was held, Fianna Fáil won with 44.5 percent of the vote, with the Cosgrave government gaining only 35 percent of votes. Upon their ascent, de Valera sent a note to the Pope that their intention was “to maintain with the Holy See that intimate and cordial relationship which has become the tradition of the Irish people.”

Fianna Fáil embarked on their extreme protectionist plan by launching an economic war with Britain, Ireland’s main trading partner. High tariffs were placed on British goods. The British, in turn, retaliated, raising tariffs of up to 40 percent on Irish imports. In 1932, when the government initiated this strategy, members of Fianna Fáil took to the streets of Dublin carrying banners that read BURN EVERYTHING BRITISH BUT THEIR COAL, and they were accompanied by twenty thousand supporters of this new political surge, what one observer called “super-nationalism.”

A new Minister for Justice was appointed, James Geoghegan. In familiarizing himself with his new brief, he was made aware of the Carrigan Report, as well as the department’s—now his department’s—robust rejection of it. Reading it over, Geoghegan agreed with the main thrust of the report. Something needed to be done about Ireland’s immorality. He also agreed that further consultation was required. But Minister Geoghegan did not seek legal counsel. Instead, he instructed that copies be sent confidentially to the Catholic hierarchy, who saw themselves as an “episcopal deputation” in considering what the government should do next.

They advised Geoghegan that the Carrigan Report must be acted upon, but warned that the very nature of the report was incendiary. The great challenge, as they saw it, was that even a discussion of these matters would corrupt the collective consciousness. They fretted that if its contents became public, it would expose that “the influence of religion has failed in this country.”

One consultant cleric, the Reverend Browne, dissented, suggesting that the people needed “wakening” up to the “aphrodisiac influence of cinema, drama, and literature.” But this was a minority view. A consensus was forming, that silence and secrecy were the handmaidens of purity.

Richard Devane’s early ideas about developing legislation in private read like prophecy. Geoghegan wanted the law brought in line with “the best Catholic teaching and practice.” To do this, he felt he must also find a way to usher in legislation without recourse to the usual parliamentary oversight. To circumvent public debate, one must circumvent the machinery of democracy. This is precisely what happened. On November 26, 1932, Geoghegan convened a secret committee of sitting politicians who shared the “Catholic view.” And for six months, he kept the bishops and de Valera abreast of their progress. The committee produced a bill, but they did not have the power to ratify it, so it had to pass through the house. To make an amendment would require a parliamentary reading and discussion of any new laws, where all the evidence of Ireland’s “unsavory” “sex problems” would spill out and stir into scandal on the pages of newspapers. As one member of the upper house said, when it came to the public, “the less that is known about it the better. The public, perhaps, know too much.” Thinking itself was to be controlled. The mental repression that started with the censorship bill was being tightened. Amendments were rejected outright. You must trust us, the Minister of Justice implored his cross-party colleagues—all your concerns have already been addressed in the secret committee. They relented, seeming to agree that social evils must be dealt with swiftly, discreetly, and with clear authority.

It was under this cloak of secrecy—without debate—that the 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act and the 1935 Public Dance Halls Act passed into legislation. This included a near total ban on contraception, a stricter licensing regime for dance halls, and the criminalization of acts of public indecency that offended “modesty or cause scandal or injure the morals of the community.” The 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act legalized incarceration in places other than a prison for the “moral reclamation” of prostitutes, which is one of the few shadowy references in the law to Magdalene Laundries.

Incrementally, the government ceded moral authority to the Church. Of course, the free labor of nuns and priests made this especially appealing given the poverty of the Free State. But this was hardly an actuarial logic. There was an acceptance that political machinery was inherently secular, and it simply did not have the capacity to manage, let alone achieve, morality on a national scale. If you believe your fellow citizens have souls that live forever, then the tactics of government, seeking to balance the mere mortal matters of health and wealth, do not go far enough when the job of a state also becomes salvation of souls and the prevention of sin. School education was, like everything then, to be based on “the supernatural conception of Man’s nature.” Children would not be taught the language with which to critique, or to question. The next generation were set to be fed an intellectual diet of fear, superstition, self-abnegation, and obedience. And when it came to matters of “girls with marked tendencies toward sexual immorality,” the government felt that Catholic, rather than State-run, institutions were the only appropriate setting.

As this system of subsidiarity was formed, the government saw itself more like a janitor, or as one Minister for Education, Richard Mulcahy, put it, a plumber, who “will take the knock out of the pipes and will link up everything” when the Church required.

By the mid-1930s, Éamon de Valera was doggedly pursuing another of his major plans to renew Ireland: writing a new constitution to replace the one that had only been in operation since 1922. This too was done with the consultation of priests. Loosening the burden of the secular conditions of nationhood, the 1937 Constitution declared, “The state recognizes the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.” It seemed the new government had heeded the earlier maxims from the bishops about the future of Ireland being bound to the Catholic decorum of its women. The Constitution also declared that a woman’s place was “within the home… without which the common good cannot be achieved.”

This triumphant period of reinvention was presented in utopian terms. In 1943, after twenty-one years of Irish independence, Éamon de Valera, who was still taoiseach, gave a famous radio address on St. Patrick’s Day. His vivid words were carried by a soft radio crackle:

The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit—a land whose countryside would be bright with cozy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children… and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires.

By the 1940s, Ireland had done its best to cut itself off intellectually, culturally, and politically from the incursions of the modern world. As Cosgrave had feared, Fianna Fáil had sought to “erect a Chinese wall around this country—develop a sort of Hermit Nation.” Forms of excitement—life’s little pleasures, such as dancing, literature, lively music, and, of course, sex—were then tantamount to vice and evil. Travelers to Ireland marveled at the newsstand shelves that were thick with Catholic magazines and literature, which had filled the space vacated by censored material. One author, writing in a 1954 periodical, noted grimly the tightening moral surveillance of social life. Until 1932, he wrote, there were lots of occasions for dancing and socializing. Then suddenly, the dance halls bore warning signs like RESPECTABLE GIRLS DON’T SIT ON GENTLEMEN’S KNEES. Priests sometimes attended too, watching to ensure a modest etiquette was maintained.

On a weekend evening, some parish priests took to their cars to patrol the back roads and narrow country lanes, looking to catch young dancers who had taken to setting up makeshift wooden stages for their shindigs. The priest would then set them alight. It was said some priests went further, driving their cars back and forth, like steamrollers, over the splintered embers.

Young people would try to make a break for it, scarpering across the fields—it would not do for the priest to identify you as an errant member of the flock. Yet when those who fled on foot returned, they would find their bicycles gone. It transpired that the priest had loaded them into his car. The following morning, when the owners were forced to go and retrieve them, they received a severe sermon on the doorstep of the parochial house concerning the dangers of dancing and “company keeping.”

Devane himself provided the best metaphor for this period. In another of his manifestos, he wrote that daylight saving was an English imposition. He extolled that “by a few lines of a British Act we lost our own Irish Time… an Irish sun was replaced by an English sun.” If it meant keeping the Irish mind, the Catholic mind, on the path to purity, Devane quite literally preferred to keep the Irish in the dark.

The reaction to this strict new regime was mass exodus, as the hopelessly unemployed, the Protestants, the liberal intellectuals, but mostly women, fled for lives less oppressive, less restrictive, less hopeless. For those converts who stayed behind, levels of Catholicism rose. In the 1911 census, 89.6 percent of the population identified as Catholic; in the 1926 census, 92.6 percent; in 1936, 93.4 percent; and in 1946, 94.3 percent. Like a dosimeter, ticking upward as something toxic leaked into the atmosphere.

Usually, where there is power, there is resistance. Yet no movement rose up in opposition; in fact, it seems the public’s moral sensibilities only deepened. This staunch new order was more insidious because it held a certain appeal, a vision of the good society at a time when a stable future seemed unattainable. This was propelled by fear: fear of damnation in the afterlife, or fear of damnation in the street. But it was not a “repression of the unwilling”; there was “enormous cultural kudos” to be had from staying within the tightly drawn margins.

A cultish obedience coiled around Irish communities, and a fervid national routine developed, bound up in popular piety and devotional rituals. A holiday was a pilgrimage, a hobby was a parish mission, a family activity was saying the rosary on bended knee together every evening. People’s hopes hung on the devotion of their weekly novenas. In their hundreds and thousands, Irish people attended public prayer and processions, as well as the obligatory weekly Mass. In their homes, they committed to their penitential obligations, undergoing frequent periods of fasting and abstinence. Saturday evenings saw long lines for confession outside churches, as Irish men and women sought to receive their penance. The Catholic calendar punctuated the year with the pageantry of Christmas and Easter and other feast days. An ever-increasing number of Irish people joined religious orders. By the 1960s, one in ten Irish children became a nun, a priest, or a Christian brother.

As Edna O’Brien—who was to become one of Ireland’s most denounced and censored authors in 1960—later described it, the nation became “small, claustrophobic, ingrown” as the Irish came to be ruled, in their hearts and in their habits, by the Catholic Church.

Éamon de Valera, Devane, Cosgrave, the bishops, fervid activists, and a fretful public—together they remade the nation and had made history. But it was Nora, Brigid, Eileen, Catherine, and Carmel, and thousands of other women and girls like them who had to live in its wake. And they have told us what it came to be like, as women and girls, to have their very bodies treated as landscapes of potential sin and temptation. How they too could be removed from circulation, just like a lewd book or a foreign newspaper. In the archive of survivor testimony, one woman described the authoritarian atmosphere as feeling as if “someone come along like Hitler and said, ‘right, we want all you purged,’ ” or that they “done a purge like they done for the witches.”

In February 1933, a Reverend Gannon delivered a sermon at the church in Donnybrook; he was looking for charitable donations for the local Laundry. These imperious sermons in aid of the Laundries were regularly reported verbatim in the newspapers. Donnybrook Laundry had been in the center of this affluent Dublin suburb since 1837, its tapered brick chimney stack looming behind the main street. Standing before his flock, Gannon praised the nuns for their “heroic work” with those women who “had been giddy, irresponsible, undisciplined from the start, too eager for attention, flattery, and fine dress, too addicted to cinemas, music halls, and the like. They played with danger in spite of the warnings of life around them and the reproaches of conscience within them.”

As one politician later put it, these were not “ordinary people” anyway. “They are miscreants of one kind or another. They are people who are in there, in these institutions, for the public good.”

The parishioners at Donnybrook that day also heard another, more uplifting story. The Laundries were a remarkable act of charity, and the Church was an unparalleled philanthropic organization. Looking back now, even with the potential benefit of hindsight, Father Barry, once a Magdalene Laundry chaplain in the 1960s, remained adamant that this was the case. He said he was “very impressed by the whole thing, the fact that these nuns were giving their whole lives to help these ladies who otherwise wouldn’t be helped by anyone.” And that the local community supported the Laundry so willingly with donations was evidence that the entire Magdalene enterprise was “a very Christian thing, a very, very Christian thing.”

When I visited his home in 2024, the parish priest house—marked as such on Google Maps—was like stepping back in time. It was a menagerie of twentieth-century furnishings: There was a 1950s kitchenette, the hall was lined with a 1990s patterned rug, and his office was home to gleaming 1930s mahogany furniture. In this strange stasis, perhaps it was no wonder that he remained a staunch devotee of the old order. These women and girls had been saved by the nuns, he insisted, rescued from the streets, safeguarded from themselves. They didn’t send these “wild girls” to the Laundries because they wanted to, but because they had to. After I left, I made my long walk home, fueled by a sense of frustration. I had been hoping for the kind of honesty that comes from reflection, maybe even remorse. Initially, I felt his views were so antique that he had not told me anything I could not otherwise have gleaned from the archives. It was only later I realized that in his untrammeled enthusiasm, he had shown me the deeply held conviction that allowed the Laundries to proliferate in the first place.

That Sunday in 1933, the collection baskets were passed between parishioners, getting heavier as they reeled their way back to the altar. Each donation sent to support Donnybrook’s Laundry was from people who, like Father Barry, believed they were cleansing the women, and the nation, of the “leprosy of sin.”

In this repressive and censorious atmosphere, Ireland’s peculiar carceral system evolved. In the early 1930s, the Laundry nuns commissioned architects to draw up new blueprints. The Laundries should expand. Bigger dormitories, larger chapels, extended dining rooms. This way they could hold a growing influx of “penitent sisters.” They came to the Laundries in increasing numbers, every day of the week. In the 1920s, it is conservatively estimated that 1,846 women and girls were received within the Laundries, and by the 1930s, admissions rose to 2,695 entrants, all while women’s emigration figures continued to rise. Each of them was perceived to have fallen in some way, and now they would begin their ascension.

Chapter 4 Penance

Built in 1870, the smooth redbrick facade of Sunday’s Well sat high upon the suburban horizon of Cork city. It had the horizontal expanse of a cruise liner and could be easily seen, but not so easily accessed. This convent was set back from the road, at the end of a long private avenue that wound up past a sloping lawn lined with vertiginous evergreen trees. To the east was a fine walled garden with a statue of the Blessed Virgin proudly raised in its center. That space was reserved for the nuns, who were willingly enclosed as part of their religious vocation. The garden was where they ambled and took their recreation. Like so many convents, Sunday’s Well was a complex. The middle section contained the nuns’ quarters and the chapel. The eastern wing contained an industrial school with nearly two hundred girls. And situated on the west side of the convent was a Magdalene Laundry. The only hint of the Laundry was a large, corbelled brick chimney that puffed out billowy steam from the boiler house below.

Eighteen-year-old Carmel arrived there in the summer of 1963. While she had grown up in the industrial school in New Ross, which also had a Magdalene Laundry, when the nuns decided she needed more training, more supervision, they did not send her next door, to the penitent side. Perhaps that Laundry was full. New Ross was one of the smallest Laundries, with capacity for only fifty women and girls, while Sunday’s Well had capacity for up to 120. Or maybe the nuns sent Carmel to Sunday’s Well because of its reputation for a strict commitment to the Magdalene principles of discipline and spiritual training.

The first staging post for their descent into the Magdalene convent was usually the parlor. It was there that women and girls had their names taken from them. This was nonnegotiable. Once they were anointed with a new house name, their own name was not to be spoken again as long as they were enclosed. Carmel, standing impassively by an imposing solid mahogany table with carved legs, watched as the nuns spoke among themselves. They could not agree on a house name, as if having conducted this ritual so often they had reached the limits of their imaginations.

“What is your second name?” one of them asked.

“Carmel Josephine.”

“Josephine? No, no, we already have one of those as well.”

“Ah, Imelda!” one exclaimed. They all immediately agreed. The matter was settled.

Imelda? That was the name of the nun who had brought Carmel down to Sunday’s Well. What an incredible slight it must have been to be given this name, as if she was this nun’s chattel.

The nun who oversaw the Sunday’s Well Laundry, who Carmel would later come to know as Mother Vincent, whisked the bewildered girl out of the room. “Follow me, Imelda.” There would be no gradual transition to this new name. Mother Vincent moved at a clip down a cold hard corridor, decorated with elaborate Victorian tiles, a geometry of blue, cream, and terra-cotta beneath her feet. She led Carmel in stately strides with the set of sound effects distinctive to a nun in motion. The weighty folds of her woolly robes quietly whooshed, while the heavy cross and beads that swung from her belt clanked softly. They were in a far less grand room now, where another nun was waiting. This nun was smaller and older than Mother Vincent, more bowed. She introduced herself as Sister Angela. Mother Vincent left the two women. She was off to note the arrival of Carmel in the ledger with some skimpy formulation:

Name: Carmel

Class Name: Imelda

Age on Entry: 18

County of Origin: Wexford

Family Status: Orphan

Referred By: Industrial school

Looking at Sister Angela, Carmel noticed she was not dressed quite like the other nuns. She wore a religious habit, but it was more spare, and her robes and veil were black.

Sister Angela explained that she was a consecrated penitent, what was known as an auxiliary. There was an intricate hierarchy of purity and power within the Laundry. Like all auxiliaries, Sister Angela had arrived decades before, in the same manner as Carmel, as a penitent. In that time, she had undertaken a devotional approach to her penance in order to reach the position of auxiliary. She had likely spent years on probation, being monitored while she practiced a strict religious regime of daily prayers. Some auxiliaries had chosen this path as they said they had been stirred by the Holy Spirit, while others were chosen by nuns, as if selected especially for the role.

Once they had completed their probation, a ceremony would be conducted in the chapel, kneeling before the priest—who served daily Mass at the convent chapel but lived outside in the parochial house. The new auxiliaries confirmed they would devote themselves to this cloistered life of obedience, chastity, and frugality, renouncing the world beyond the convent walls. Next, the priest delivered his words: “Bend down deeply, into the priceless waters of prayer.” Then the group of new auxiliaries descended from the altar as consecrated penitents. There would be no scrimping their way into this privileged position. From then on, they read from a special book of prayers every day, reciting the Office of the Seven Dolors. Each year Sister Angela and her fellow auxiliaries had to recommit to the Magdalene convent.

In 1956, an article in a Limerick diocesan circular marked the occasion of the consecration of twenty new auxiliaries. The nuns wrote that it was “a humbling thought that God has made us the means of enabling these souls, by successive stages, to the total giving of themselves to God.”

They could never become nuns, of course; they had stumbled in some irreparable way, and no amount of devotion would change that. The role came with benefits, however: Auxiliaries became supplementary staff in the running of the Laundry and were afforded a degree of trust. Like low-ranking managers in a large corporation, they supervised the penitents and helped preserve, and sometimes enforce, the Laundry’s order. As there were often only a handful of nuns managing the Laundries, the auxiliaries were indispensable to maintaining the regimen of daily order.

Sister Angela had received new entrants many times before. Once their names had been wiped, all their earthly possessions were to be removed. Calmly, she took Carmel’s suitcase. Still Carmel said nothing.

Congregation of nuns and what looks to be two auxiliaries at Good Shepherd convent, New Ross, Wexford, c.1901–1954

She then instructed Carmel to take off her clothes and her shoes. Standing there in her slip, Carmel was passed black stockings, a bra, knickers, and an ill-fitting dress made from rough calico material. Sister Angela gave her different shoes too, battered black leather lace-ups, which had clearly been worn by someone before her. Sister Angela did not ask Carmel her size for either the dress or the shoes. It was only when she slipped her feet into them that Carmel realized they were far too large. What Carmel did not yet know was that this was her uniform.

Then she saw the glint of the twin blades. In the two years since leaving the industrial school, Carmel had let her hair grow: “My hair was very dark and down to my waist, beautiful hair I had.” Without uttering a word, Sister Angela stood behind her. Carmel heard the scissors make judicious, repetitive slices. Then the long lengths of hair dropped to the floor.

At that moment Carmel began to sob and spoke at last. “Why are you cutting my hair?”

Sister Angela replied with rank indifference, “You have to have your hair short here.”

“But where is here?” Carmel asked.

With her pudding-bowl hair left kicking out around her ears, Carmel was brought a plate of bread and dripping and a mug of cocoa. The fatty dripping was yellow and murky, with rough little grainy clumps of meat still in it. The cocoa also tasted vile—perhaps it was salted?

When she’d finished, Sister Angela beckoned Carmel to follow her out into the hall and up a staircase. They walked along a corridor of closed wooden doors until the auxiliary stopped, turned the knob on one of them, and pushed it open to reveal a dormitory filled with women.

Carmel observed three sinks at one end of the wall, and twelve, maybe sixteen, iron beds, organized in two long rows, the bottom end of one abutting the top of the next bed. It was not long until new girls understood that such arrangements were designed to minimize contact with others in the closely packed room. Turning to speak to the person in the bed closest, they were faced with the soles of their neighbor’s feet.

Carmel was shown her bed. She said that she sat upon her gray blanket and “I cried my eyes out,” as so many of the new girls did on their first night.

She saw then that her roommates were old. An elderly lady was on the bed next to hers. This woman labored slowly, struggling to shift herself from lying down back to sitting up. “I could see her trying to get in and out of bed, and I think to myself, ‘Where am I? What am I doing here? Am I going to be looking after all these old people?’ That’s what I thought my job was going to be.”

The disquiet upon being confronted with a community of older women is a recurring trope of the survivor testimony. Cork, Limerick, Galway, Dublin, Belfast. It was always the same. Worn-out women, crooked, with rotted teeth, short white hair, glazed expressions, silent demeanors. Sunday’s Well Magdalene Laundry was no different. This was a place filled with the aged and infirm. They sat apart from each other on their beds. A handful were rocking back and forth.

The nuns mostly sent the girls from the industrial schools to domestic service jobs. So, why wouldn’t young and spritely girls like Carmel have been brought here to hold the elbows of these ladies, help them in and out of bed, and aid them through their days?

As her mind raced, she realized then that many of these women were ogling her. “They were just staring at me, you know, just staring at me.” Carmel felt an urge to do as she had done when she was younger, to call them out, to scream, “What are you gawking at?” But something in her held back. She had a sense that they were not being intentionally impolite or judgmental. Their stares were intense, innocent, inquisitive, yet they said nothing to her. It was not just that they were elderly, they seemed to have succumbed to some force. There was something frightening about this mass of gray-and-white-haired old women.

That night Carmel might have gone to sleep believing that she was to be their carer. But before lights out, a woman approached and introduced herself as Perpetua. She explained that at Sunday’s Well they worked in small groups that were known as circles. Perpetua was in charge of the circle Carmel was to join.

“Imelda, you’re going to work in the laundry tomorrow.”

It was a bracing start. Prayer began at 6 a.m. A nun arrived in their dorm, and she commenced immediately with the first Angelus of the day.

“The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.”

The women responded, “And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.”

Together they cited a Hail Mary, and then the nun spoke alone.

“Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”

The collective response again came.

“Be it done unto me according to thy word.”

Then they slithered into their uniforms underneath their nightgowns, the only way to retain some modesty in the open dorm room. Having lined up, they were led in silence downstairs.

They entered a vast chapel. There must have been at least one hundred other women here, the majority of whom were elderly, all dressed as Carmel was. A priest appeared and delivered the morning Mass before giving them Communion. When it was over, they filtered out in silent, orderly lines. Moving as one, they made their way down a corridor and entered a refectory where they hurriedly took their seats at long communal tables. Unlike the beautiful table in the parlor, these bore the nicks of wear and tear, and the tines of forks had left their marks.

The tables were arranged in single rows, so that the women did not face each other but all looked in the same direction, to the top of the room, where a nun sat at a chair and table raised up on a rostrum, what women described as the “throne.” With every penitent woman facing the nun, any attempts to communicate with each other would have been immediately visible. Tired and hungry, Carmel ate her breakfast of porridge, tea, and toast in a daze.

Having finished, the women moved lockstep from the refectory just a little further along the same corridor. One of the arches that punctuated the corridor bore a stylized cursive script and the instruction “Unless Ye Do Penance, Ye Shall All Perish.” They turned through a doorway that brought them into a gray and industrial set of rooms.

In scale and organization, the Laundries were an impressive and professional commercial operation. Everyone moved to their positions. Having never worked in a laundry, Carmel did not know what to do but to watch.

Morning light flooded in from skylights that ran the entire length of the pitched roof. Steam filled the air. There were rows of huge wooden tables, too broad and too high for anyone to sit at. Standing around them, the women worked in concert and without consultation. Some were covering coats and sheets with a smattering of starch. Others were swiveling their hissing irons from side to side and into the fiddly corners of shirt collars. With repetitive rhythm, they dipped into the baskets of crumpled clothes and cloth that waited at their feet, pulling out the next item to be ironed.

Across from the ironers, another woman was working a large, curved presser. Its metal lid was shut with a deep thud. The machine then sighed loudly as it released its heat upon the linens within.

In the middle of the floor two women folded an ironed bedsheet with exacting choreography, lifting their arms to raise it for a moment like a mighty sail, then stretching it from corner to corner. Coming together for a moment, making folds in the crisp white sheet. After several more folds, the square was brought over and set upon one of the tables. The two women moved to take another sheet, to begin their dance anew.

Other sheets were being fed into a mangle to wring out unwanted water and creases. This was no household mangle. It was gargantuan by comparison. A large sheet traveled over and under these rollers. Pulled taut, it created an undulating white landscape. The mangle was driven by two women who stood to one side, their hands rising and falling as they pulled the levers.

Nearby, more women were folding the freshly ironed domestic items, the heavier tweed blazers, the wool slacks, the school dresses, and sometimes the few private articles of the better classes.

Even at this early hour, the atmosphere in the room was overwhelming, like a heaving greenhouse with the sibilant spitting of the irons and hot exhales of the compressors. The swirling vaporous air was so thick and incessant that rust had formed on the metal joinery around the windows, meaning they were in constant need of repair.

The women’s faces were flushed from the heat, their cheeks and foreheads sprinkled with steam and sweat. Sitting on a chair against the wall, watching this scene unfold, and keeping a close eye, was a nun.

While this ironing room was the first that Carmel moved through that morning, it was one of the last stages of the laundry process. It all began when the laundry was dropped off. Sometimes the vans bore the name of the Laundry in painted script: GOOD SHEPHERD LAUNDRY. Front of house was the preserve of the religious sisters. The women inside never received the deliveries; their contact with the outside world was restricted to the stained garments of others.

Each consignment of laundry was brought to the sorting room. Every piece was tagged with a polymarker, a machine that stamped a tag with little letters and numbers to each item. This number and the item were then noted in a heavy-bound ledger so that each consignment could be tracked, reunited, ticked off, and returned.

Girls from industrial schools, like Carmel, who the nuns themselves had often not sufficiently educated, were unlikely to be charged with the polymarker. Ostensibly, this was as close as one could get in a Laundry to an admin job—the light touch of rote paperwork, in comparison to the heavy-duty hazards of the other rooms.

Those who worked in the sorting room, who separated the clothes, found it vile. The big sacks of laundry were, as one woman described, “all filthy dirty, and the smell of it and everything was awful.” None of them could adjust to the fetid air. It was “reeking, stinking, bleach, smell of piss, urine, always had that smell, always.” With no more than a regulation apron to protect them, these women and girls had no barrier between them and soiled underwear or sticky hankies, or the butcher’s aprons with hard, clotted stains. Sometimes women in the sorting room said they envied the women who did the ironing or the folding, which was considered the clean work. It seemed the worst they had to deal with was the heat. One woman recalled being a young teenager in the sorting room. “I always remember wishing I could be in a different department, like I’d be looking over at all the women—they’d be doing the ironing and I was like, ‘Oh God, I wish I could do that,’ or the women that were folding the sheets and thinking, ‘I wish I could do that.’ But little did I know that they were probably wishing the same as well.”

The sharp differences between these rooms shaped the women’s experience. From the early 2000s, as the Magdalene Laundries gathered enough momentum to become a scandal, and lost their vestiges of being an asylum or a home, some women who had spent years there did not think they would be included in the redress scheme that was established in 2013. They had worked in the dry rooms, packing, sorting, ironing, sewing, and tagging. They were not in the laundry, which was often known as the wet room, and this was where Carmel was bound that first morning with Perpetua.

Folded shirt in protective plastic wrapping from Galway Magdalene Laundry

If the ironing room was a rainforest, this was a swamp. Women were sloshing through a floor flooded with water, just enough to cover the soles of their shoes. Great pipes knocked overhead as they chugged into action. The heady smell of the carbolic soap was clinging to the air. Carmel stood marveling at the trembling metal machines. This equipment was still a luxury in the 1960s. In previous generations, the Magdalene women would have had to stir the washing in a steaming vat of hot water. The boom in the size of the free workforce and, indeed, a growing business, meant that by the 1950s, many Magdalene Laundries had been modernized. At its peak, these new laundries took up more than twice the space of any other part of the convent, and in Sunday’s Well the laundry was one of the largest, most modern, and busiest. Here within the most sacred grounds of Catholic Ireland, a country that venerated the farm, the land, and women at home, lay an industrial underworld with an exclusively female workforce.

Perpetua presented Carmel with a trolley filled with a batch of wet shirts, scalding and bloated from the washing machine. This was her station, in front of a great silver vat that came up to her waist. This was the wringer, Perpetua explained. Despite their newfangled setup, the washing machines did not have a spin function, so this contraption had a fierce centrifugal force, used to whip out the excess water.

“You pack it like this, evenly all the way around, because if you don’t pack it evenly, instead of it spinning around it’ll bump from side to side,” Perpetua instructed Carmel. She opened the lid of the machine to give Carmel a demonstration. Deftly, Perpetua placed a shirt on the side of the gaping drum before reaching back into the basket for another. When the cycle was done, Carmel was expected to remove the items and shuttle them over to the dryer, another hulking metal obelisk.

Perpetua left Carmel to it and took up her own post at one of the washing machines. Filling the machine was one matter, but operating it took skill, honed over years of practice. One could not simply take a seat and wait for the cycle to be complete. The women had to manually turn a metal valve at the side of the washer to allow the water to spill into the drum and begin the prewash. There were no automated settings: no silk/cotton/wool, no 20 degrees/40 degrees/60 degrees. The temperature and time required were judged by instinct. The color of the water and the condition of the sheets after each stage had to be eyeballed carefully as they churned and soaked in the machine. Ensconced in this meticulous work, Perpetua had no time to oversee Carmel.

As Carmel lifted the first sopping shirt out of the trolley, she felt a prickly irritation rise in her. She lumped the wet shirts into the wringer, one after another, each hitting the bottom with a thwack. She slammed the door and pressed the on button.

As the speed of the drum reached its full force, it began to rumble, as if the machine itself was about to reach terminal velocity and take off. Suddenly it shuddered and then stopped dead. Quickly, she pulled open the door and saw the mess of the shirts. They were caught inside the wall of the drum, hanging in a knotted web of sleeves. To remove them would be to rip them.

Carmel closed the door again and then called to Perpetua. Her only option was to feign stupidity.

“How do I open this?” she asked, while she pretended to struggle with the lid. Perpetua had left her alone for all of ten minutes. Marching over, she opened the door. Carmel gasped, as if seeing the tangle for the first time.

“Oh, my God! Imelda! Look at what you’ve just done!”

“I just pressed the button, that’s all I did.”

“But you didn’t pack it right.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Oh, yes, you are, the nuns are going to have to fork out a lot of money, all of these lovely businessmen’s shirts.”

As Carmel was new, it was possible that Perpetua bore the brunt of the punishment later. In that moment, though, Perpetua decided Carmel was a liability, so she gave Carmel the most unexacting job in the laundry: unloading a washing machine, piling the items into the trolleys, and ferrying them back and forth between the wringers.

The door handle of the washing machine was perhaps four feet from the floor, and its dark metal drum was deep. For the children who were sent to the Laundry, who were not fully grown and too small to reach the front-loading machines, a stool was stood by, giving them the extra height required to reach up into the washing machines.

In other laundries, the women and girls who did the job of unloading wore wellies and a rubber apron. But that was not the case at Sunday’s Well. Carmel’s feet were already soaked when she opened the machine and it spewed more water down on her. With two arms, she heaved dripping masses into the trolley. The trolleys had slats at the bottom to allow the water to drain. Their cast-iron wheels, rusted and weary, squeaked with sharp repetition as they were shuttled back and forth across the terrain of the wet room. Load after load, hour after hour, this was Carmel’s soggy and monotonous job.

The hazardousness of this work—the bleach spattering off hand brushes, the searing hot metal, machines spinning at one hundred miles per hour—was exacerbated by the nuns’ total lack of technical know-how. If machinery was on the brink of collapse, the nuns would simply say a prayer. They resisted calling a tradesman, as his masculine presence was the very danger from which they were trying to keep these girls safe. In such instances, the nuns had to halt production entirely. But the nuns’ heedless approach to maintenance only increased the dangers. Burns from machines and corrosive industrial bleach were common, and on a handful of occasions women are reported to have lost hands and arms. One warning story that was retold was of a former penitent, a young woman named Kerry. Kerry was charged with a wringer that had stopped functioning. It spun all right, but the brake pad had gone and so it lost the capacity to stop. The lid was supposed to automatically lock while the machine spun, but the lock was broken too. She found she could actually open the lid and see the blur of linens as they sped round. Considering how to manually stop the drum, Kerry decided to put her hand in and try batting the raised dividers on the side walls as they whipped past, but the drum would not slow. When she tried again, one of her fingers got caught and her whole hand was pulled in. She ended up losing half of her right hand.

Despite their lack of technical competence, the nuns were ever present. On her first morning in Sunday’s Well, Carmel and the others were overseen by Mother Asumpta, who was sitting solemnly, making sure the laundry room remained under close surveillance. Her flinty stare kept the women rooted to the spot. But Mother Asumpta’s main purpose was religious. Once everyone had commenced work, she cleared her throat and began leading them in prayer.

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” All the women instantly joined in, speaking in one unified murmur. When this prayer ended, another one began. Again, every woman recited the words in unison.

“Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”

“Amen,” Mother Asumpta said.

She read out litanies, rosaries, and stations of the cross in an incessant incantation. Sometimes the prayers were broken up with a crescendoing hymn. All the while, the women never ceased working. The monotonous drone of prayers and the undulating cadence of their collective voice melded with the deafening whir of the machines to create an engulfing wall of sound.

Carmel was bewildered. While she followed suit, swept up in the tight tempo of this place, all the questions she’d had the night before became more pressing in her mind. What was going on? Where was she? And why was she there? As the Laundries existed in the realms of rumor, and were most often referred to euphemistically—as charity, salvation, and penance—this exacting industrial internal world was shrouded in mystery. Most women and girls simply did not initially know they were at a Magdalene Laundry. Without any kind of formal explanation or induction, many of them, like Carmel, said that they found themselves confused by what was going on around them. As their first day proceeded, they found themselves in desperate search of answers.

One such young woman was eighteen-year-old Elizabeth, who was also at Sunday’s Well. She recalled her own fruitless quest for explanation on her first day in that same wet room. Elizabeth too had grown up in an industrial school and had been sent to this convent for reasons that were mysterious to her. Like so many other new entrants, Elizabeth began begging the women closest to her to explain what was going on. The responses were always furtive, clipped, and strict:

“We’re not supposed to talk.”

The extent of the prayer and silence seemed unfathomable to Elizabeth. Ducking behind her machine, she caught the eye of a woman and with a jocular tone asked, “Are we in retreat?”

The woman was fastidiously laboring and, keeping her head down, whispered, “No, but we’re not supposed to talk. We’ve got to pray.”

“But why do we have to pray?” Elizabeth kept insisting.

“For our sins.”

Elizabeth was not yet fazed and laughed at the incredulity of this. “I didn’t do any sins!”

“Shh!”

Elizabeth was undeterred. “Have you been here long?”

The other woman yielded just a little. “Since I was eleven.”

The idea of an eleven-year-old sinning emboldened Elizabeth, and in an exaggerated voice she asked, “Why, did you do sins too?”

“No.”

“But why are you here?”

The woman gave her final response: “Shhhhh.”

This kind of conversation was so common that it was practically a rite of passage at the Magdalene convents. And as Elizabeth found, questions did not get her any closer to an explanation. Though the woman who stood before Elizabeth was in her forties, which was a telling detail in itself.

Girls like Carmel quickly learned that they had each entered a sphere of anonymity. The Sisters of Mercy, who ran three convents in the country, had a document titled Magdalen Home Rules and Horarium—the horarium being the hourly schedule followed by those in religious life. On the first page, it stated that it was “strictly forbidden to mention anything concerning their past life or associates.”

Without being able to speak to one another, new entrants perhaps came to believe the hearsay, that these women were the rumored prostitutes or had illegitimate babies. But what about those ancient women hunched over the ironing? And what about themselves? They hadn’t been pregnant, or on the streets. That silence prevented the women from knowing why their fellow captives were there, that they too had been abandoned and abused, neglected, and rejected.

They soon came to learn that “silence was everything,” as one woman described it. Except for the pealing sound of the bell, of course: They did everything to the shudder of the bell, which was wielded by a nun. One woman, Betty, who was only a girl when she was in the Laundry in Limerick, said that there was “a bell for this, a bell for that.” It was “like the army.” When it sounded, the penitents knew it was time to wake, to sleep, to work, or to pray. Otherwise, there was no clock. Sunday’s Well was a place where “there was no such thing as time.” “Work, work, work” and “pray, pray, pray”—that was the ticking beat of their day.

A bell was struck for the Angelus again at noon. Together, they recited the requisite number of Hail Marys demanded by this prayer. In this moment, they were briefly aligned with many Irish people across the country, who broke at noon to undertake their daily rosaries. For those in the Laundry, though, the ceaseless praying can only have seemed like a never-ending penance for sins they had yet to confess, let alone commit.

When their break came at 1 p.m., Carmel followed the women as they returned to the salty whiff of the refectory to sit down for their dinner.

Another nun sat perched upon the “throne” above them. As they each passed her, they issued a subdued but polite “Afternoon, Mother Vincent.”

The food that was doled out was roundly recalled as being “horrific.” They were usually served a watery slop of stew with a sorrowful potato floating in it and some gristly pork that had sunk to the bottom of the bowl.

Tea was poured from a big metal teapot by another penitent, who needed two hands for the task. Though freshly brewed, the tea was lukewarm, as it had already been mixed with milk.

Even during meals, silence was observed. No gossip was exchanged; no chat developed. This was merely a break from toil, not from the regime itself, which was total and unrelenting. In some Laundries, prayers were read out during dinner too. Prayer accompanied any moments when either the hands or the mind might idle. But Sunday’s Well sometimes gave their afternoon meals a flourish: One of the penitents was made to read from the Bible while the others ate.

At dinner on her first day, while she was still trying to figure out where she was, Elizabeth watched as a young woman moved to the top of the room, and was passed a Bible by the enthroned nun. The girl opened on a page where a small ribbon sat as a bookmark. She began to read. Elizabeth could not believe it: She recognized the girl. Her name was Fionnuala. They had been in the same industrial school. Although Fionnuala had been a few years ahead, she had been widely admired by the smaller ones, including Elizabeth. This girl had a reputation for being fiercely intelligent and for standing her ground against the nuns. Then, one day, she was gone.

After a short thirty minutes, the bell rang again, and it was back to work. They lined up with their plates and cups, scraped the remains into a large bin, and left their dishes in little towers. Buoyed by enthusiasm, Elizabeth approached Fionnuala as they formed their queue out of the refectory. She called to her: “Fionnuala.”

“I’m not called Fionnuala anymore.”

Seeing that Elizabeth was flabbergasted by this response, before they parted in the laundry Fionnuala told Elizabeth that the “quicker you obey,” the easier your life will be. They returned to their stations, ready for the rest of the day to stretch ahead of them.

After a while Carmel needed to go to the toilet. On that first day, she had observed other women raising their hands to ask the supervising sister for permission for things like the toilet or a glass of water. The nun would call them out. The other women, when called upon, had names like Loretto, Fintan, Joseph, Alphonsus, Scholastica, Cyrille, Pelegia, and Borgia. So now Carmel did the same. The nun responded coolly. “Yes, Imelda, what do you want?”

“I need to go to the toilet.”

“Go on then, don’t be long. Be quick.”

In the cubicle there was no toilet paper, just balls of crumpled-up newspaper. When she was done, she found herself running back up along the corridor to the laundry and straight over to a washing machine.

At six o’clock the bell was rung again, and they repeated the Angelus. The day must have been drawing to a close, because some women who had finished their tasks were kneeling on the floor beside their empty ironing boards, hands clasped, muttering their prayers.

Just before seven o’clock, at last, the nun told them to start tidying up. As another woman who was also at Sunday’s Well, Brenda, recalled it, each day “we drank our sweat.” Now their work was done. They left everything ready for tomorrow and closed the door behind them before returning to the refectory for a supper of bread smeared with fatty dripping and another cup of tea. Once again, a Bible reading hovered over the silence.

They were at last permitted some time for recreation from 7:30 p.m. They headed out the back to a gravel terrain that was known as the gym. Here you could see that much of the convent was enclosed by a twenty-foot wall crowned with glistening shards of broken glass. The convent’s high walls, which hid them from the cities and towns outside, were designed to make the convents a “strict enclosure.” These purposefully kept the penitents “away from mundane pleasures” and safeguarded them “from a temptation to return to the old life” of “gaiety and excitement.”

Like the rest of the day, recreation was undertaken in supervision. As the nuns had retreated to their cloister for evening prayers, an auxiliary had taken charge. Carmel thought the groups of women had the lifeless gait of “zombies” as they paced around the gym in a slow shuffle, under a heavy duvet of cloud.

At the gym, the women could look down upon what had been Cork City Gaol. Built in the nineteenth century, it was more reminiscent of a medieval castle. The exterior walls were topped with a row of crenellations, as if prepared to withstand battle. It hadn’t lasted long. The jail was closed in 1923 due to the building’s advanced state of deterioration, and many of the prisoners were swiftly released. In fact, just as the Laundries began to expand in scale, Ireland had been closing many of its prisons. With the end of the civil war, and the decreasing levels of crime due to mass emigration, the need for the state to maintain so many prisons didn’t seem practical. Reflecting on this turn of events, the Minister for Justice said it was a source of national pride: “I think we must all feel very pleased at the fact that we have now reached a stage in our history where we are in a position to close up some jails. It speaks well for the country.” When Carmel arrived in 1963, there were three men’s prisons and ten Magdalene Laundries.

In 1993, Cork City Gaol was reopened, this time as a museum offering an immersive insight into a different era of imprisonment. Even then, in 1993, the Laundries were still running, still receiving Ireland’s dirty washing and holding its disavowed daughters.

At 8:30 p.m., the women headed to their dormitories. Within the professional laundry rooms, they did everyone’s laundry but their own. Their clothes had to be washed on their own time, at the sinks in their dorms. Sometimes they would bring the wet underwear into the bed with them and lie on top of it as they slept, hoping that the heat of their bodies would wick enough of the wet from them so they could be worn again the next morning.

They were not permitted to wash their clammy bodies, let alone to soak and soothe their worn limbs. Wash day came every other Sunday, when an auxiliary filled a cast-iron bath and one after another the women would scrub themselves with carbolic soap. The water was changed after ten women had used it, though sometimes it was fewer, depending upon the depth of the dirt. On wash day an auxiliary would ensure they did not take too long. The words You’ve had enough time, out you get! would come barreling through the door.

Before bed, these rows of anonymous women around Carmel sat on the edges of their mattresses. One coughed from her soggy lungs, and feared the heat might kill her. Another unknown woman felt her arms heavy with pain. The women who had worked all day in the wet room alongside Carmel peeled off their black stockings to reveal white waterlogged feet, mapped with soft, pruney folds. Carmel noticed with a shock that her knickers were black. She gratefully realized that it was from the newsprint she had used to wipe herself.

Even in their exhaustion they were supervised. One woman reported that a “dim light [was] left on all night, and the nun would walk around from time to time to make sure there was no one getting out to talk.” In the Practical Rules for the running of Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundries, it said that a light was to be left on to remind the women, who were referred to as “children,” that they were always being watched. Yet talking felt like a distant prospect. The women worked side by side all day, but they went to bed feeling that they were miles away from each other.

The next morning Carmel was woken again at 6 a.m. They all knelt down at their bedsides and began the day in prayer. They wriggled back into their uniforms underneath their nightgowns. Then they were back in the chapel and before the priest who commenced the morning Mass. They received their Communion and murmured their collective responses to the priest’s rote “Let us pray.” They trailed back into the refectory, past the words about repentance and perishing, to get their breakfast: again, porridge, toast, and a cup of tea. Breakfast differed only on Fridays, when, after they had scraped their plates of its dregs, they were made to line up before one of the auxiliaries as if they were about to receive Communion. When they reached the top of the line, they were each given a cup of cloudy water. It was their weekly dose of Epsom salts that the nuns learned was required to help the women’s digestive organs expel the unremitting rounds of stodgy food.

Once more they crossed the corridor into the laundry, and everyone returned to the exact spot where they had stood all day yesterday. Carmel went to ready her trolleys. The variety of the washing was hardly enough to keep the mind entertained; one drenched pile was about as exciting as the next. One woman, Mary, sent to Sunday’s Well in 1969, said that each day felt as if it was “back to square one again.”

Mother Gertrude, who sat upon the nun’s perch that second day, recommenced the chorus of prayers. The stifling heat gathered quickly, and the same smells and stenches fermented in the air. The day itself was hot, and windows had been opened. While they were too high to look out of, for a short while the distant cries of the orphans at the opposite end of the convent drifted into the laundry. At dinner break, the same girl who had read from the Bible the day before began reading from where she had left off in the passage, while the penitents slurped the same miserable milky tea and anemic stew. The overall effect was strange, both intrusive and overpowering. Nora, who was at a Laundry in Northern Ireland, said that her overwhelming feeling was that the Laundry was “mind-numbingly bland.”

Some evenings, when the weather was bad, recreation took place in a sitting room. Here, with the radio on, they could sit and knit Aran sweaters under the supervision of an auxiliary. Carmel had spotted a girl who was about the same age as her but was not in her circle. She gingerly navigated her way over. Her name in here was Angelica. They chatted for a moment, but they were already standing too close, looking pally. The auxiliary sensed something illicit and called out sharply, “Imelda, get back here to your own group.”

Human relations were not to be tolerated. Getting caught talking could get you moved. Everyone at Sunday’s Well had seen this happen. Two women might converse beyond a low remorseful mutter, revealing some sort of spark. The next day, one of them would be gone, sent to another circle. Some warned it could be worse than that: There was always a risk you might be transferred to another Laundry. It seemed that they were in a game of snakes and ladders, and they could descend back to the beginning.

Anyway, what exactly was there to talk about? The silence reset between them. At 8:30 p.m., it was time for bed. Carmel shuffled out of her uniform beneath her nightgown, watched the other women lower themselves into their beds, and then fell asleep in the dim light of the dorm.

Saturday was a half day, because the convent needed to be cleaned. Each Saturday, the chaplain would stay after morning Mass, hear their confessions from the week, and dole out the penances to be said before they went back to work.

In a small number of Laundries, Saturday was letter day. Those in the Laundry would be given any correspondence that had arrived for them. The women and girls knew that the nuns read the letters first because the envelopes had already been shorn open. The few select women and girls took their thumbed and torn envelopes to find updates from their aunts or mothers. While at Donnybrook, Eileen was a fervent letter writer. No post went out uncensored either; she knew that. Yet every few weeks she would hand another unsealed envelope to a nun to send to her mother. Despite her dedication, Eileen never got a response. That was the case for most girls. Being at the Laundry felt like they had been “put into nowhere,” some women said, and their days passed without contact from the outside world.

The Magdalene Laundries were often sprawling compounds. Each was a warren of corridors, back stairs, side doors, passageways, and yards, usually set within lawns and gardens. Yet the penitents were restricted to one tiny recurrent route through the building: dormitory, laundry, refectory, laundry, refectory, recreation. Then, to complete the circle, they’d trudge back up to the dormitory as the day came to its close. This route was repeated each day until Sunday, a day of rest. Hope for a reprieve was dashed when the morning began again with the usual Mass. They would spend the long afternoons inside making scapulars or knitting. Sometimes the radio would be put on and they would be allowed to dance a little.

If this was a job, then wages should have been handed down by Mother Vincent by the end of the week. By now, though, none of the women ever thought to look for pay. No one considered that this was a workplace. Whatever it was, they understood it to be something else.

Monday brought the same routine, the same persistent pace of hefting and heaving wet piles of steaming laundry for twelve hours. The same monotonous murmuring of ritual prayer. The same three solid rounds of carbohydrates.

Sometimes there were ways to leaven the gloom of their days. One evening, while they were taking recreation in the sitting room, someone produced a newspaper, a few scraps from a recent issue of the Cork Echo. A customer had sent in their laundry wrapped in it, and a woman in the sorting room had stuffed it into her apron pocket. It was like contraband smuggled over the border and was passed around with relish. It would not have mattered to Carmel that the little snippets of news concerned matters that only locals might have cared for. The local children who had just had their confirmations, repairs to a nearby bridge, the election of new regional council members, the latest from the angling championships. None of them were really from anywhere anymore. They had no names, could make no mention of the lives they had once lived. These bits of news were as good as foreign correspondence.

It was as if this life could go on forever, uninterrupted. Tomorrow was bound to be as it was today, just as yesterday had preceded the day before. Over time, they felt the impact of this desolate atmosphere and grinding regime. As though they were being hollowed out, no longer a person of any real kind. “We were the living dead. That’s what we were. We were the living dead.”

While the looping rhythm of the Laundries seemed unerring, so much remained shrouded in secrecy. They had all been arraigned for something, but what remained opaque. Women said they were demented by these questions:

“What have I done wrong? What crime did I commit? Nothing! What crime did my mother commit? She committed no crime. What am I doing in this place? What am I doing wrong in life? If there was a God there, why have I been suffering so much?”

If the girls were lucky, they might hear a nun deploy gnomic expressions like You have brought this on yourself, You are here to be trained in character, or You’re here for your sins.

In the early days, new entrants felt an urgency to solve this mystery, to understand the reason for their being here—perhaps in the hopes of reversing it, pleading their innocence. The reasons for their detention diminished in importance as a more frightening problem emerged: how to leave.

Carmel arrived in July, just after she turned eighteen. While she settled in, the long summer evenings retreated, then the tall trees that grew alongside the gym turned russet. Soon they were bare, and the outdoor exercise was undertaken upon a carpet of fallen leaves, until it was too murky to go outside at all. The dormitories grew painfully cold and damp. Each morning, they had to flick on all the light switches when they entered the laundry, as the meek dawn light didn’t break until well after they had started work. As the dark winter days came upon them, time had passed, but no one had left.

Going to bed that first night, Carmel had thought she had been sent to Sunday’s Well to care for the old women. Gradually, she had come to realize, like many others before her, that she had been sent to the Laundry not to look after these women, but to become one of them.

Chapter 5 Erasure

In 1966, Sister Mary Declan visited a group of secondary schoolgirls in Ballinasloe, Galway. Standing before the class, she wore her authoritative uniform: pristine white robes, with a crisp white wimple framing her bare, confident face. She had come back to Ireland from the mission fields and was there to regale the assembled schoolgirls with stories of countries that they had never heard of, filled with people living lives they couldn’t even imagine. If they were to become nuns, she told them, they too could live such a life. They could be teachers in Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Asia. Maybe they might train as nurses and practice the impossibly alluring skill of tropical medicine. But they could do even more: establish schools and open hospitals. These nuns were humanitarians. They also saved whole civilizations. “These people” in Africa, Sister Mary Declan told the class of girls, “are the victims of ignorance, disease, malnutrition, and superstition, which is really the worst of all, isn’t it? They don’t even know there is such a thing as God.”

In their frequent recruitment drives, missionary nuns such as Sister Declan visited schoolgirls across the country in their cold and creaking rural classrooms and laid out the most enamoring accounts of religious life. As part of these presentations, the nuns sometimes brought photos, which passed between the schoolgirls, showing these trailblazing nuns teaching impeccably dressed children who all sat obediently among strange vegetation. Other pictures showed them cutting through these landscapes on boats or bicycles, riding on horseback, surrounded by foreign people gazing up at them admiringly. Whatever post they took, they could go through life with their heads held high; nuns were the female professional class.

These visits were arranged with opportune timing. As their schooldays were drawing toward their conclusion, these girls knew that they were faced with making their way in a nation that was increasingly inhospitable to women and theocratic in its mores. The convent was often the only viable alternative for girls who did not want to be cast in one of the other few strict molds of Irish womanhood: mother, spinster, fallen. This was the choice for girls with drive, aching for adventure and hoping to diverge from the world of their mothers. The spellbinding magic of these visits lured many girls into the postulant’s silent enclosure. Some did not wait until they had finished school. Radiant with ambition, they entered the convent as young as thirteen.

Naturally, many joined convent life because they felt a divine calling, that they had been chosen. Other young women were sent to the convent by their families as if they were being committed. Though their families might have portrayed it as simply encouraging their daughters to enter, it was less for religious reasons. One nun said a family member advised her to “get married or be a nun. Don’t be an old maid. They don’t make good women.” Undoubtedly, most parents also enjoyed the additional social clout of having a child in religious orders and were said to be “delighted”—a daughter entering religious life was celebrated as a blessing on the entire family. Other parents were propelled by fears that their innocent daughters were easy prey for the evil that prowled modern life. In one interview, a nun named Sister Elaine recalled how her mother responded to the news that she was to enter the convent as if it was deliverance. “She said, ‘Oh, that’s fine. She’s safe now.’ ” Sister Elaine said that what her mother really meant was that her purity was safe. This was her mother’s obsession. Every day, a young Elaine was made to say three Hail Marys to help protect her purity. Some women in the Laundries said they could ascertain which of the nuns had come through coercion and expectation rather than vocation.

Whatever it was, in the hardship and fundamentalism of the first decades of independence, there was a boom in nuns. In 1901, there were 8,031 nuns in Ireland, and by 1951 this had jumped to 13,360, which is to say nothing of those who worked among the missionaries off the island.

If they had thought they were entering to find their place in the world, they quickly found they had been secluded from it. Letters were censored, family visits were prohibited, books and newspapers were banned. These girls, many of whom had been excelling at school, learned that their formal education was over. There were only two books that mattered now: The Bible, of course. They also discovered they were to be strictly governed by The Rule, the title they gave to the book that held their order’s code of conduct.

This prescriptive text taught them that they must restrict their movements and constrain their thoughts. In their training, the nuns were made to observe a remorseless regime that was intended to wear them out. Friendships were forbidden, talking was outlawed, independent thinking was to be scrubbed from the mind. Idleness was akin to wickedness, and The Rule demanded that their days be committed to “laborious and fatiguing duties” that were “crucifying” in nature. The aspirant sisters were told that they must take “custody of the senses.” They must commit themselves to “continual mortification” so that they did not get ideas beyond their new station.

Motivational poster on the wall of Seán McDermott Street Laundry

It was mind-numbing and patronizing; to some young nuns, it felt like “brainwashing.” One nun recalled the shock of the convent: “You were taught, conditioned, not to [like yourself]. Anything to do with yourself was considered to be pride. How you looked, how you dressed, how you walked, how you talked.” Every moment of the day, the nuns were expected to dull their minds and detach from their bodies, until they understood themselves only as a vessel for God: “self-surrender,” the “abrogation of self,” a “true spirit of self-abnegation,” “obliterate everything.” That was their goal. In the chilling words of The Rule from one order, once the sisters achieved “blind obedience, rejecting every opinion and judgement of theirs to the contrary,” they could be “ruled” by God “as a dead body.”

The convent was not an equal opportunity open to all. To become a nun in some orders, the women and girls required a dowry. Those who came from families with land and wealth became choir sisters and were called Mother. Those without such means were installed at the lower echelons of this hierarchy, as lay sisters, a post just above a Laundry auxiliary. They were never referred to as Mother, but instead as Sister. On bended knee, they scrubbed and cleaned their convents; they undertook the cooking, preparing the meals and tidying up after those whose affluence had allowed them to ascend to being Mothers. In the chapel, they cleaned the altar, picking at the hard dribbles of candle wax and polishing the floors. Their devotions, the work of their souls, were often to be offered up for the moneyed nuns.

Margaret Lee joined the Sisters of Mercy in 1961, an order that oversaw three Magdalene Laundries. As a novice, she remembered how the two-tier class system of the convent shepherded the “brightest and most talented sisters” into training to be teachers, missionaries, and medics. The untrained lay sisters were mostly corralled together and dispatched to staff the industrial schools and Laundries. Margaret Lee felt this spoke of the “scant regard in which both the carer and those cared for were held.”

For some eager new postulants, however, interested in the nun’s mission of charity and sacrifice, the Laundry was a post that held a special appeal. Recalling her time as a new recruit of the Sisters of Mercy, Phyllis McMahon said that she favored that order precisely because they had a Magdalene convent. “I thought that I could do great things—that sounds horrendous when you say ‘great things,’ but I really did think… I should do anything and everything within that area… I thought they gave more. So, from that point of view”—of wanting to do great things in the name of God—“it was good for me to be there,” at the Laundry. Did she feel sorry for the women who she knew were working there? No, though she did think the circumstances of their lives were unfortunate. “I thought they had children out of wedlock and that’s where they belonged; it was a terrible thing to think, but that’s the way I thought. They were serving their sentence… These women were locked up for sins they committed.”

And who better then to lead the fallen back to the realm of morality than the perfect embodiment of Catholic female decorum? As one Catholic magazine reported of the Laundries, it was a place where women’s vice and virtue confronted one another. To enter a Magdalene Laundry, they wrote, was to see “innocence and guilt face-to-face.” The “spotless lily side by side with the foul-smelling weed! The consecrated nun speaking to the polluted outcast.”

Young nuns like Phyliss McMahon were taught that this was their “lofty mission”: “to bring penitents to God.” They achieved this by getting those who were marked by “degradation and sin” to live “holy lives”—they demanded that the women and girls live in the same manner as the nuns themselves did. If they could just instill in them the “correct values,” they could make good their relationship with their Creator, securing their seat in the kingdom of heaven.

In the 1940s, another young novice, named Patricia Burke Brogan, was summoned one afternoon to the office of her Mother Superior. Entering the room, kneeling before the desk, Patricia noticed a large, framed photo of the bishop among the papers. Patricia then lowered her head in deference and awaited instruction.

“Tomorrow morning I’m sending you to our branch house on the other side of the city.” There was no further information, only that Patricia would be there for a week and be given further details of her duties once she arrived. She would walk there with another nun, though the Mother Superior warned her, “Remember to keep eyes downcast, custody of the eyes at all times, Sister!”

The next morning the pair of nuns walked as instructed, with heads bowed, toward the branch house. It was right in the center of the city and in bold gold lettering bore the words MAGDALEN HOME LAUNDRY. As they waited for someone to let them in, Patricia heard the rattle of keys on the other side, and at last, the heavy door swung open.

“I walked in; I was brought down a long corridor, a long brown corridor. A door was unlocked, and then I was brought along the corridor and then another door was unlocked and each time the door was locked after me. This is what I found strange, so I was imprisoned.” She was brought into the recreation room, which was “full of women. It was a Sunday afternoon and these women were crowded into a room… trapped-looking.”

The following morning Patricia woke at 5:30 a.m. and began her day in adoration, as expected. Taking to her knees on the cold, hard floor in her cell, she mumbled her prayers. Then she began to bind and bury her body in the stiff and starched layers of her habit. Upon her head, she pinned and taped a tight, coarse cap called a coif. The veil went on last.

When the aspirant nuns ascended to their vocation on their Reception Day, it had the ritual trappings of a wedding. Patricia and her fellow postulants had worn white dresses, to symbolize that they were Brides of Christ, and as a signal of their purity and commitment to one man, one cause, for life. Before everyone, in a grand ceremonial gesture, their hair was cut short. Each night from then on, when she removed her habit, Patricia realized that like most nuns, her short hair did not prevent the expanding patches of baldness that came from the permanent chafe of the veil and coif upon her now “ragged scalp.”

The nun who led Patricia on her first morning told her that she was there to supervise women inside the wet room, a role known as a surveillant. This was an essential task, because there was a need for constant monitoring. Souls strayed in the shadows. As Patricia was trying to comprehend the meaning of this beady-eyed task, they entered the laundry. The mighty grind of that steamy room shocked her. It took her a moment to comprehend what she was seeing. “Gradually I see the room is full of women. Elderly women, middle-aged women, and young girls all seem to merge with the gray of womb-like washing machines.”

On a practical level, those spiritual needs demanded continual recitations of the Hail Mary for “the conversion of girls.” If the actions of the women had proven anything to the nuns, it was that they no longer communed with God or paid Him due reverence. In that “search for God, an atmosphere of silence and recollection” was “indispensable.” Apart from their prayers, these women before her, Patricia was told, were not to speak.

The Laundry nun then informed Patricia of the starker realities of this place, some of the mortal facts that were not contained in Laundry rule books, but which nonetheless underlay everything else that they did.

“On no account are you to speak to these women, except to give orders, Sister.”

Confused and confounded, Patricia asked who these women were.

“These women are penitents.”

“Penitents?”

“They’re weak. They’ve no control, Sister.” She went on, “No one wants these women. We protect them from their passions. We give them food, shelter, and clothing. We look after their spiritual needs.” The Laundry nun then passed Patricia a heavy bundle of keys and left through the door they had just entered. Horrified, Patricia realized that she was now a jailer. “My spiritual life has changed forever.”

As the first few days passed at the Laundry, new nuns like Patricia Burke Brogan were taught another critical technique to discipline the free-spirited souls of the penitents, as outlined in their Practical Rules. If they were to successfully “subdue” these “forward children,” with their “wild” ways and inherent “evil-doing,” what they required was “a severe reprimand given coolly and briefly in public.” This would turn their “boisterousness” into their shame.

“Instruction” took place late in the afternoon each Sunday at New Ross in the recreation room. Fourteen-year-old Catherine filed in alongside the other women and girls, who sat in a half circle around Mother Ignatius, the indomitable Mother Superior. She stepped up onto the plinth where she took her seat.

Mother Ignatius had in her hands a little black book. Transgressions and errors made by their fallen charges throughout the week were surreptitiously noted in lush cursive. Women and girls in Good Shepherd convents quickly came to fear the black book. Whatever faults they had incurred, no matter how meager, underwent a transubstantiation on those pages, becoming something grave and degrading. Inside this dreadful sphere of silence, the only thing worse than disappearing into the role of the fallen penitent was to be called out and drawn above the parapet. With everyone seated silently below her, the Mother Superior took up her sovereign role.

“Theresa broke her silence and kept on talking, even though Mother Attracta told her to stop,” she said.

Theresa was beckoned to come forward and kneel down. The Mother Superior instructed her to apologize. Theresa kneeled and said she was sorry.

“For your penance, you will go without your supper today.”

“Yes, Mother Superior.”

The next woman on her list was named and her transgressions outlined. Mother Ignatius told her that she had spoken three times, despite the warning against it. She also heard that this girl had made complaints, of which there were three: that the food was not nice, that the work was too hard, the prayer too arduous. This woman, Joseph, anonymous to the others until this moment, understood what was to happen. She moved forward and was directed to kneel before the Mother Superior, who then bade her to kiss the cold floor and apologize.

This ritual was not rushed. Sometimes Mother Ignatius demanded that her penal subject lie on the floor before everyone and say aloud a prayer of forgiveness as penance:

Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.

Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.

Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.

She went on repeating this expiation until, at last, the Mother Superior announced, “You are forgiven.”

At New Ross, Catherine was one of the youngest among what was otherwise a realm of elderly penitents. Like Carmel, Catherine also had the blunt bob haircut. Another auxiliary had handed her the uniform cut from calico, she walked in someone else’s too-big shoes, and she bore someone else’s name, Colomba.

“Colomba,” began the Mother Superior.

Catherine looked up, shocked. She could not think what accusation was about to be leveled at her.

“Colomba has been complaining.”

Catherine hadn’t complained to anyone that week—though she would have been well within her rights to do so. She was a small child, enduring life locked up, but this public accusation pushed her over the edge. “I ranted and raved in my Irish blood. I was very angry, because I was angry at my father for putting me there, I was angry that I wasn’t getting an education, I was exhausted from the work.” Bitterness and rage charged through her like an electrical surge.

“Do you know, you’re all bloody liars.”

Mother Superior bristled.

“I never said such a thing. I never complained.”

To be accused at Instruction was to be found guilty. There was no due process, and the nuns’ authority was total. Attempts to impugn the nuns or to plead innocence were seen as further evidence of the insolence that simmered within the penitent. It was proof of the work that still needed to be done to salvage her soul from sin.

With a swift motion, Mother Superior beckoned the auxiliaries. After a quick skirmish of limbs, they wrestled Catherine to her knees. Mother Superior descended from her throne and approached Catherine with a set of scissors held aloft. There in front of everyone, she grabbed Catherine’s hair in fistfuls, pulling it tight, and worked the scissors with her other hand until only tufts of Catherine’s red hair remained.

“Cutting of hair” was top of the Laundry’s penal code when order was grievously breached. To cut their hair like this returned them to the start, a new sacrifice from a penitent who had not yet tamed her violent passions. Though it seemed that the nuns themselves hadn’t always tamed their own incendiary sensibilities when they undertook the haircutting.

Martina, a woman who survived Seán McDermott Street Laundry, recalled walking one morning in the usual cavalcade of silent women, when suddenly their convoy seemed to crumple as if it had hit a wall. They watched from a distance as a girl cowered and held her head between her hands, trying to protect herself from the two nuns who stood over her, one of whom was hitting her with the heavy crucifix that hung from her habit. The other nun then held up a pair of scissors. “Thank us for saving your soul,” they barked. “Thank us!”

“Thank you for saving my soul,” she repeated, as they sheared off her hair.

They cut so close to the roots that patches of scalp were left exposed. The rest of the women were all hurried into the laundry and took up their positions as if nothing had happened. Once they had collected themselves, the nuns’ violence was most expertly executed in their theatrical displays of penance.

Early the next morning at Mass, the nuns, women, and girls all shuffled into the pews as usual. As the stillness of the church settled upon them, the girl who had been beaten and shorn the day before made a slow procession up the aisle. Stopping at the foot of the steps that led up to the altar, she kneeled. Then she laid her hands on the steps and lowered her whole torso to the ground, until she was face down. She straightened her legs and stretched her arms out wide, splaying herself out in the shape of a cross, as if she had brought herself to be crucified. The priest then made his solemn entrance from the side of the altar. For the next twenty-five minutes he delivered his Mass without acknowledging the scalped and prostrate woman laid low before him. After the service, the penitents left for the laundry, stupefied. No one knew what to say. No one even knew what she had done or been accused of. But no matter. The lesson was clear.

In their rule books, the nuns read that public shaming was to be carefully calculated, because the greater the personal mortification the women and girls experienced, the greater, it was believed, their spiritual conversion would be. The nuns were also taught that the most effective punishment came with a degree of infrequency—they did not want the women and girls to grow accustomed to these as daily displays and either become inured to them or revolt at their injustice. An ever-present, ambient fear was ideal. Despite their clearly stipulated formal discipline, the nuns habitually broke from their written code, feeling that not all misdemeanors could wait until Instruction.

One woman, Marina, at a nearby Good Shepherd Laundry in Waterford, recalled how she lost her temper one afternoon. She had been working on the presser and got a searing burn from the machine. In frustration, she flung a clothes hanger across the room. Immediately, the nun who was supervising rose from her station and came toward her. Instead of tending to the injury, she tied a string around Marina’s neck and told her she had to keep it there for three days and three nights. Marina knew that at dinner she could also expect to be sentenced to the penance table, a single chair and small table that was set up at the front of the refectory, beneath the Mother, but facing the others who sat in silence at their communal tables. That seat could be the loneliest place in the Laundry. When the women headed to the refectory later that day, there was no penance table, but Marina was beckoned. For her insolence, and the recklessness of expressing feeling in the wake of pain, Marina’s punishment was to have lunch before the nun supervising the break, though not at a table. In front of eighty other women, she was told to take to her knees. Bowed in obeisance upon the floor, she was made to eat from her bowl like a dog.

When she was finished, Marina had to repeat, “I beg on mighty God’s pardon, Mother’s pardon, and my companions’ pardon, and can I have my seat back.”

“No,” the nun answered. This ritual was repeated for three days. She was lucky. For some of them it lasted a week.

Sometimes the auxiliaries tried to coach the newer girls so that they might avoid such punishments and the degradations of Instruction. While they worked in their circles or tramped around the yard, they approached the fresh-faced entrants to warn them: Continue doing that—talking, messing, drawing attention to yourself—and you’ll be punished. The women and girls at the Laundries learned that if you kept your head down and did nothing but work and go to bed, you could avoid punishment. Reducing themselves like this, however, did little to help them avoid the nuns’ constant casual insults. The women came to be governed by what Nora called the “rule of fear.” It oppressed them because it “was in the atmosphere,” she said, from which there was no reprieve.

Being “put down” was as much a part of the system as doing the laundry and saying interminable rounds of prayers. Humiliation—that is what so many of the women recalled time and again, though they rarely wanted to go into too much detail. This is humiliation’s great trick: It silences people, cows them so they internalize it and it curdles into shame. It was a viciously effective tool, one that helped to instill the repentant disposition the nuns sought. Each of the women was made to feel a deep indignity for having existed, for having brought ignominy on the world around her with her illegitimate presence.

When the Mother Superior had finished chopping Catherine’s hair that Sunday afternoon at Instruction, Catherine was justifiably angry. But she said what cut most deeply were the words that followed this ordeal: “You’re causing the biggest trouble here. No wonder your father threw you out and brought [you to] us.” Now everyone knew the one thing about Catherine that mattered, the one thing she wished was not true.

Women and girls like Catherine were continuously told that God didn’t care for them. At the same time, many of the nuns’ startingly blunt insults were directed at the women’s bodies, a barrage of comments letting them know that they were fat and filthy, dirty and unwanted, that they were worthless. In Sunday’s Well, Carmel went to wash her hands and her apron one afternoon. By the sink was an elderly woman working something up into a lather of foamy suds, a nun glowering over her. Carmel caught a snippet of the tirade.

“You stink, do you ever wash?” the nun asked.

Carmel was not shocked.

“We were very humiliated by the nuns,” she said. “It was all psychological and mental humiliation.”

This was what so disturbed Patricia Burke Brogan in her dreadful week at Galway Magdalene Laundry. Across the wet room, she saw an elderly woman trip and stumble to the ground. Patricia observed how the nun nearest to this woman stood still, watching her, and did not offer to help her up. Looking down upon her, all the nun said was, “That’s not the first time you’ve fallen.”

While some nuns took to denigrating the penitents with more vigor than others, there were those who were gentler, though often covertly so. A nun in New Ross frequently sneaked young Catherine a treat whenever she could. It might be a boiled sweet or a biscuit, sometimes even a big, bright orange. She could conceal it in the mysterious folds of her habit. Then, catching Catherine’s eye, this nun would sidle over, gently slip the treat out of its hiding place, and say warmly, “Now, you’re not to let anyone know I gave you that.” Nora also befriended a nun, as much as one could befriend anyone in there. This nun was a novice, or certainly new enough to the vocation, because she was Nora’s age. In this place of old nuns and elderly penitents, they gravitated toward each other. These furtive conversations still bore considerable risk. At each meeting the young nun muttered the same hushed refrain: We must not get caught speaking.

Many Irish people of an older generation hold memories of inspiring or supportive nuns who were “so generous and kind.” Who encouraged them at school, counseled them as they grew into adulthood, offered alms when they were desperate. Even if they were not the same orders of nuns who ran the Magdalene convents, this personal experience is often the first line of defense, or the last barrier of disbelief, when people are faced with the gothic horror of the Laundries. Yet the malignancy of the Laundries is not a question of the misdemeanors of the bad nuns. Nor is telling this history helped by countering with the points of the good nuns, then checking both sides of the balance sheet at the end. These harms endured in the Laundries were not the singular indiscretions of a handful of religious sisters. Humiliation was regimented and ritualized, dished out systematically to denigrate their personhood. Different women, different decades, different Laundries, the same pattern of insults repeats itself:

“You are here because nobody wants you.” Some women recalled being told this this every day.

“You’re dirt.”

“Your mother didn’t want you; your father won’t come for you.”

“No wonder your family doesn’t want you, look at you.”

“You are illegitimate.”

“You’ll end up like your mother.”

“You are nobody, and you have nobody.”

Some women at Sunday’s Well were made to line up and repeat this after the nuns: “I am nobody, I am nobody, I am nobody.”

“You are here because you have reached the end of the line.” The charitable valor of the nuns was reiterated in light of this. “You are a sinner, and we are the only ones who will take you in.”

Paula, who had been sent to the Laundry when she was only eleven, remembered the damage these insults wreaked. The nuns would say, “We have to do this because you have the devil inside you. You’re this horrible child and nobody wants you, and we’re the only ones [here].” The sisters “drummed it into us, drummed it into us, and it got to the stage where I believed it.” Sometimes, when they spoke out against their treatment, they were given a crudely literal punishment and made to walk around with a bar of carbolic soap wedged between their teeth.

Countless women described the overall ravaging effect of the Laundry in the same way. They felt the intensity of the regime: the relentlessness of the silence, the endless droning of prayer, the perpetual penance, the constant toil, the crush of humiliation, the anonymity and isolation—it all combined to deprive them of their sense of self:

“They took your freedom, they just—they took your identity.”

“The Magdalenes tore anything that was left there. They just sieved it right away out from me.”

“We were never allowed, kind of, to be human, really.”

“They didn’t hit us, but they tried to brainwash us.”

“I just went completely blank, I think, in there… They had destroyed me so much in there, when that door locked, that I think they just blanked me.”

“You lost your mind completely in there. It was just a place in there to die in darkness.”

Something of our humanity always withers when confined behind walls. Institutionalized seems like the apt word here—it is the one often used to describe the long-term effect of the Laundries—but there is something inactive about it. The process of institutionalization is inert to the naked eye, as the tempo of the mind steadily aligns to the repetitiveness of the place. In a Laundry, there was nothing inadvertent or passive about what happened to these women. It was an astringent arithmetic designed to achieve a specific purpose: the salvation of souls. In the Laundries, the nuns sought to reeducate the fallen, to retrain their characters entirely until they were the perfect Catholic woman, subjugated and silent. It was something between a conversion camp and a gulag. Indeed, conversion was the word the nuns themselves used to describe the aims of their work: “Until the penitents forget the past, nothing solid can be done towards their permanent conversion.” Day after day, prayer after prayer, the nuns thought they were wringing the sin out of these women. Bleaching and compressing their personalities along with the sheets.

Officially, the nuns today have reiterated that they were following their theological dictates, training the women as they had trained themselves to embody the immense modesty of Christian prudence. The religious orders undertook exactly the same sorts of self-sacrificing pursuits, living by the same ascetic regulations. They too cut their hair, changed their names, prayed continuously, and subjected themselves to penance. The constricting code of conduct for penitents was also for the nuns; it was merely a mirror of it, a replication. This feels a disingenuously staid account of the Laundry nuns’ practice. It is the theoretical, textbook version of the Magdalenes. The rigors of salvation presented in this way make it seem that the nuns truly had dulled their interior lives. As if, as the poet Paul Durcan once wrote of Irish nuns, they had become “Christniks” who had achieved “terrestrial abandonment.” The nuns’ supernatural hauteur certainly gave that impression; that they had been successfully defeminized and were dispensing discipline without feeling—compelled by naught but God himself. As if what had occurred in the Laundries was textbook religious life. The irrational violence and sustained cruelty that characterized the Magdalene Laundries were not entirely reducible to religion.

Margaret Lee, who had joined the Sisters of Mercy, later tried to explain the terrible institutional violence that marred Ireland in the twentieth century. The nuns were subservient within the Church system, and even within their congregations, she said. Promised a life of respect and the possibility of adventure, in reality they were “voiceless and without any great status.” They were reminded always that they were supplicants of religious authority held by men, rather than outright bearers of it. “Consequently, within themselves,” Margaret Lee said, the nuns all around her “were simmering with anger, frustration, and dissatisfaction with life.” The religious orders were powerful, but an individual nun, she was powerless, except before the women and girls sent to the Laundry, women and girls whom they already understood to be lowly, rejected, and detested. This was who they were supposed to sacrifice their lives for.

Many of the Laundry nuns seemed to have been livid, perhaps at their lives, or at the immorality of the girls before them. Maybe both and much else. Perhaps the nuns came to realize, as Patricia Burke Brogan did, that nuns and penitents were two opposing points on the axis of Irish womanhood. Both had descended to a place where they were no longer accorded the rights of the living. Whatever it was, in this pent-up punitive atmosphere, many of the nuns treated the women before them as contemptible, undertaking these prescribed duties with a venomous zeal that was not demanded by the rule books.

Catherine, even as only a child, felt that the nuns’ lurid callousness was gratuitous. Her father beat his children, insulted them, and really, he did not want them. If it had not been for the Magdalene Laundry, Catherine thought, he would have left them all at the side of the road like an unwanted litter. “So, for that we are grateful that there was a place for us, not to be thrown on the street,” she said. If the nuns were the answer to all that was wrong in her life, she said she had expected them to be kind. But “they were not.” Instead, they were some of “the cruelest nuns you ever want to meet.”

Patricia Burke Brogan and Margaret Lee were among a small handful of nuns who abandoned the convent and turned their backs on their vocations—a bold step that risked their becoming another kind of fallen woman, a pariah within the community, ostracized by their families for the disgrace they had brought upon them. These two women have since spoken of how harrowing it was to be a nun, or to be sent as young novices and junior sisters to the Magdalene Laundries and to use such “wounding” forms of discipline, like the black book. Not inculcated in its logic, they were aghast at what they found, yet felt helpless to say anything, let alone do anything to stop the grind of humiliation and the loss of their own humanity.

Part of what is so dreadfully sad about this history is that many of the nuns surely endeavored to do good work, committed years to training so they could achieve something worthy. They thought they could make miracles happen by salvaging those who had strayed. Even Phyliss McMahon, who had initially been so zealous in her commitment to the idea of the Magdalene convent, abandoned her vocation entirely after a year spent as a Laundry nun. Every day they worked in the Laundry they were “less of a Sister of Mercy, of that I can assure you,” Phyliss said. “I really did think that God had chosen me to be a nun,” she said, but the longer she was there, the further she found herself moving from God. She observed the Laundry’s effect on the nuns around her; it deformed them, she said, until they were either “cold or cruel, or hid away and did nothing.” “My year in the Magdalene was my last year in the convent, and it was certainly the last year I wanted to be a nun. Certainly, I did not want to be a nun anymore… Frightened and out of it I thought I’d never get.”

The testimony of these nuns gives us a rare glimpse into the Laundries, and a haunting sense of how they actually operated. Whatever disdain was held for these women and girls in society seemed to course through the convent, crude and unfiltered. The Laundry did not simply contain fallen women. The nuns operated a regime designed to degrade those in their charge—it whittled the penitents down until they displayed few traces of the women and girls they had once been. It went on like that until there was nothing left of them at all.

The death of a nun was always marked with a public funeral Mass. In Limerick Laundry, this took place in the glittering church on the convent grounds. There, the floor and the columns were covered in thousands of gold and pearlescent mosaic tiles. Mourners from her family and the local community came to pay their respects, so it was unusually full on such occasions.

Brigid, who had been brought to the Limerick Laundry at twelve by a priest and with the consent of her grandmother, had been renamed Peter and had become an auxiliary in her adult years. She had been at Limerick Laundry long enough to have seen this ceremony many times. The nun was laid out in an open coffin before the altar. She was still in her habit, and you could see the soft, cold skin of her face. Her hands had been set in a clasped position upon her chest, as if in prayer, and a string of rosary beads had been threaded through her stiff fingers. As the Mass drew to a close, people waited for the undertakers to take the coffin upon their shoulders and then trailed behind it as it was carried ceremoniously down the aisle.

This procession continued under an avenue of lime trees, toward the nuns’ cemetery. Flocks of birds nested in the trees, leaving the path splattered white with droppings. Each time a nun died, one of the men who worked at the convent as a hired hand had to go to the laundry and grab some powdered soap to douse the path. He would attack it with his coarse sweeping brush, before blasting away the lather of grit and suds with a hose.

As an auxiliary there were few perks and many expectations, among which was attending the nuns’ funerals. The other women, the lower class of penitent, were excluded. The graveside was as far as the auxiliaries could go. Once the murmuring crowd had flowed back through the convent doors, toward the parlor where a lavish lunch was being served, Brigid and the other auxiliaries headed solemnly back to the laundry.

Auxiliaries received a more muted send-off. When one of their number died, all the women attended the funeral, including the penitents. It was not open to the public; their deaths were not advertised in the newspapers as the nuns’ were. The auxiliaries were buried on the grounds, not as lavishly as the nuns, but in separate plots nearby.

Then there was the third tier of funeral. The penitents’ coffins were not set out before the dazzling church. Their bodies remained in repose in the mortuary. Lined up on a bench along the wall, Brigid and her fellow auxiliaries sat with the body, muttering their obligatory daily Office of Dolors as they waited. A hearse would be called, because this woman was not going to be buried in the hallowed St. Mary’s Good Shepherd graveyard. Despite their perpetual penance, they had still not earned a place beside the nuns.

Only Brigid and the auxiliaries walked behind the penitent’s coffin. The hearse waited at the doors of the packing room, where the van drivers delivered and collected the consignments of laundry. Brigid could go no further, but she wondered about the funeral that might follow. She never knew, however, that when she and her fellow auxiliaries had sat with the body earlier in the day and dispensed their daily offerings, this would be the only ritual that would mark this woman’s passage into death.

The dead woman was then taken to the nearby Mount Saint Lawrence Cemetery. No priest attended to bless the ground; the Laundry nuns never attended the burial either. The coffin was lowered into a mass grave. Without the delay of a funeral, the gravediggers would likely have begun shoveling the soil upon the coffin as soon as the straps that lowered it had been snapped up out of the ground.

A huge gray headstone sat upon the plot, bearing the words HERE LIE THE RESIDENTS OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD CONVENT. Otherwise, its surface was smooth marble. There were no inscriptions of names or dates to show the individuals who had once lived. Its blankness was an infinite space for a potentially infinite number of bodies.

Within the Laundry, the death of a penitent could only be guessed at through telltale clues. Women woke to see a bed empty. Some other woman was now at the station that had once been occupied by someone else. Some couldn’t bear to ignore the obvious loss of life and resorted to asking the auxiliaries. This of course bore a risk. “Mind your own business” was the response they usually got. Whoever she had been, she was now gone.

This was what made the Laundries inherently abusive: These women knew that there was a chance they would die there, anonymous, their own name long since lost, buried in an unmarked or mass grave. This potentially indefinite incarceration compounded their terror, that they might live out all their years there. When the probation office was asked in 1941 to explain why a Magdalene Laundry differed from a prison, it was, they wrote, because a Laundry was a regime of “religious training” that was “directed with the purpose of leading the subjects to a permanent renunciation of the world and to a life of penance,” as the nuns wished the women to become “hidden and buried from the world.” One woman at Sunday’s Well said, “What really traumatized me more, [was] to hear that door locking behind you, and you were never, never, never to walk out that door again, never!” Round and round the weeks went as they stood at their machines and dispensed their work silently, until they felt the awful shattering realization that “this was your place for the rest of your life,” just “washing and washing.”

In 1993, an order of Catholic nuns, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, decided to sell a plot of land at their High Park convent in Dublin. As Ireland’s economic fortunes took off in the mid-1990s, the value of land in the capital rose exponentially. The Catholic Church, with its swaths of grassy convent grounds, suddenly found itself sitting on a fortune. High Park contained a large, shaggy, and vandalized graveyard that the nuns were going to sell to a developer. According to their ledgers, there were 133 bodies buried there, which needed to be exhumed for the sale to go through; however, the nuns had only seventy-five death certificates.

Even at that, some of the bodies were nameless, only recorded on the death certificates under their pseudonyms, the causes of their deaths not included. When the exhumation began, the problems continued to mount, as did the body count. It seemed there were actually the remains of 155 women in the plot. They were disinterred and cremated. Though cremation was not usually permitted in Catholicism under canon law, the nuns had instructed their solicitors to ask the undertakers for the most inexpensive way to deal with the bodies. The undertakers responded by saying that if keeping the budget low was a priority, then cremation was by far the cheapest option. They assured the nuns that they would use coffins that were “simple and without embellishments.” The urns were reported to have been taken en masse, in the back of a four-wheel-drive car, and buried in a communal plot at a public cemetery. The nuns later complained when the final bill was higher than the initial quote. It turned out that the remains were not able to be cremated two and three to a coffin as planned, and they were then expected to pay for more coffins than they had requested.

Even by then, after these women’s bodies had been dug up by an excavator and piled into coffins, many of their identities remained unknown—and could never be known after they had been cremated. Reflecting on this disturbing event years later, the author Anne Enright wrote, “The living can be disbelieved, dismissed, but the dead do not lie. We turn in death from witness to evidence.” But evidence of what?

In the early decades of independence, Ireland had arrived at a place that was excessively exclusionary and cultishly Catholic. They chastened themselves against critical thinking, against outside views, and in so doing lost the ability to name, let alone oppose, this inimical system. That problem lingers today—we have not inherited a language to adequately describe the Laundries. And so we have been forced to focus on what we know, on what is tangible: the walls, the money, the labor. This is why we often call the Laundries slavery and liken them to prisons. These are the best metaphors we have at hand, but they are only partial ways of seeing and speaking about this past.

The story of the Laundries is a story of eradication, not just imprisonment and enslavement. In a society so suffused with secrecy and denial, 155 women, and hundreds of others like them, ended their days in convents, forgotten. Nameless, voiceless, from nowhere, belonging to no one. The indifference to their death was not accidental. The nuns had taken the Magdalene regime to its logical extreme. Their total erasure was complete.

Chapter 6 Escape

Friendships were explicitly prohibited in the Laundry. Yet Carmel had managed to make what amounted to a friend in Angelica. Sometimes Carmel would go to the toilet and then Angelica would request to go a few moments later. The two teenage girls would steal a minute before they took their turns to run back across the corridor. They were lucky. In other Laundries, an auxiliary was permanently stationed outside the cubicles to prevent exactly this kind of prohibited conversation.

Maybe because Carmel and Angelica were practically still girls, or because they were both relatively new, they had not yet learned to smother their exuberant joy at this illicit alliance. At the end of her third week, on a Friday evening, Carmel was alone in the laundry with Angelica. They were meant to be doing the last of the mopping and folding before joining the others at the refectory.

The unsupervised space was too alluring to abandon, though. Angelica clambered into one of the empty trolleys and Carmel gave it a push, sending Angelica hurtling across the room. Carmel climbed in next, swinging her legs out over the front, though still keeping a hand to her skirt, because she wanted to make sure she was modest. Angelica launched the trolley across the room, and Carmel put her feet up to stop it from slamming into the wall. Maybe Carmel would have always remembered this “wonderful fun” moment simply because it was a reprieve, but when Carmel was taking another turn, trundling straight toward the wall, legs akimbo, Mother Vincent appeared at the door. And she was not alone. She was accompanied by an auxiliary as well as another nun who was not from the convent. Carmel recognized her as the Mother Provincial of the Good Shepherd order, because she had paid visits to them at the industrial school in New Ross. The nuns watched aghast as Carmel whizzed across the floor, her feet slapping the wall, bringing her to an abrupt halt. Carmel scrambled out of the trolley and walked over to stand beside Angelica. They straightened themselves, like members of an infantry regiment caught off guard. Carmel remembers her immediate thought: “I’m in trouble now.”

Mother Vincent turned to the auxiliary and said, “Tell Imelda and Angelica to come to my office in twenty minutes.”

Carmel entered the office first.

Mother Vincent got straight to the point. “You have let the whole of the Laundry down,” she said. “Your behavior today, your modesty was in question.”

But Carmel knew she had made the effort to keep her modesty in check. “I had my dress well down,” she retorted.

“You were still immodest, and then to show up my Laundry like this—and Mother Provincial expecting the best from you girls.”

Looking back, Carmel knew that she was meant to prostrate herself, to demonstrate her shame: “You never questioned anything, but I wasn’t going to stand there and have her tell me what was what.”

So she told Mother Vincent that she was overreacting. “The laundry was all finished, it was done.”

“Don’t answer me back!”

Carmel’s infraction required a response. Having made some calculation in her mind, Mother Vincent came to her decision. Haircutting, humiliation, kissing the floor were the usual. What Mother Vincent said next was unexpected.

“I’m getting nowhere with you. Monday morning you report to the sewing room. I believe you’re very good at sewing.”

Christening robe given to Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy, made by the women in the Limerick Magdalene Laundry

The laundry was not the only commercial operation at Sunday’s Well. It had a sewing service, as did the Limerick Laundry. The women working in the sewing room were tasked with mending threadbare patches on clothes and darning holes in socks. They also produced beautiful artisan garments and decorative pieces. In the Limerick Laundry, they crafted elegantly patterned lace that was so highly regarded that when the US President John F. Kennedy visited Ireland in 1963, he was proudly given a christening robe made by the “lace makers” at the Good Shepherd convent for him and his wife, Jacqueline, who was expecting a baby at the time.

After breakfast on Monday morning, this other compartment of Laundry life opened up to Carmel.

She reported to the auxiliary in charge of the sewing room, Sister Ann. The way Carmel described the concentrated hum in there, you would be forgiven for thinking that it was an atelier. Women stood around large tables, meticulously tacking and hemming. Others were hunched on their chairs, their hands moving in small rhythmic loops, dipping and pulling their needled threads through a section of fine, gossamer-like fabric.

This was a place of invention. In the sewing room they were gaining a real trade, an expertise that was admired. Initially, Carmel did what was known as the piecework—cutting Communion dress patterns and the heavy sections for priests’ vestments. She then passed them to another woman who directed the cuts of cloth through a noisy specialist machine that allowed her to embroider the necessary iconography onto the robes. The sewing team also made the banners for religious processions, smocked cushions, and stylish women’s frocks. When she was interviewed in 2013, Carmel still spoke with affectionate awe for the quality of the luxurious materials that came from France, the bold colors, the expensive cream wool, and the sensual feel of satin. “They did buy the best, the nuns did.” She did not stay cutting for long, as she was soon taught a new intricate style of tapestry, that “was fantastic.”

It seemed to Carmel that people came to Sunday’s Well week in, week out just to buy these items. In November, the convent held their annual Christmas sale. Ads were placed in the local papers—“Annual Display of Christmas Gifts, Souvenirs, and Children’s Wear”—and the people of Cork would flock to it. The nuns displayed the garments and gifts made in the sewing room, what Carmel described as “lovely gowns, night gowns, bed jackets and the robes… they were all beautiful.” Carmel attended the sale of work, standing behind Mother Josephine, who was manning the counter and whom she was there to assist. Carmel certainly was not meant to speak to the customers who were drifting past. A man approached the counter and began marveling at a large tapestry with an intricate image of a stag’s head with bright green eyes. Carmel thought he had the air of a businessman. He wanted to know who had made it. “Me,” Carmel whispered. She had dedicated herself to that tapestry, so compelled to see it finished that she had even undertaken it on her recreation time. Even at that, it took six months to complete. He asked more questions, but Carmel knew she was beyond the point of permissible conversation. She furtively threw her eyes to Mother Josephine. With a simple nod, she gave Carmel the permission to come closer to the table. Carmel took over; she explained the tapestry and expanded on her workmanship, the dozens of hours it took to finish it. Thrilled and thoroughly impressed, the man bought it for £50.

Weeks later, the nuns sometimes wrote to the newspapers, so that their thanks and gratitude for the tremendous public support could be printed in the letter pages.

“I will say I was lucky because I loved doing what I was doing in the Laundry.” But Carmel still lived in a walled world, and though women of all ages were humiliated and degraded there, what she most vehemently resented was the loss of her freedom. She could not shake her deep abiding fear: “Will I ever, ever get out of there?” Carmel knew that she had to escape.

With dogged persistence, each week Carmel asked to leave, and each week she was refused. She even turned to the chaplain. He would come to church every morning to give Mass and saw each woman and girl once a week at confession. In one of these brief moments, she asked him to plead her case with Mother Vincent, which he did. But the response was always the same: “Imelda is not mature enough yet; she’ll never be able to hold down a job.” Having arrived at eighteen, Carmel felt this preposterous charade had gone on for too long. “I must have been about twenty-two, twenty-three. I was a woman!”

The nuns insisted that they just wanted to wait until the girls were “fit for the outside world.” Those like Carmel only had to look around and see the wraithlike older women to know that this was not always the case. The Laundry was a point of no return.

The nuns’ recalcitrance sometimes spurred opposition. Boycott was not uncommon. Sometimes women sat obstreperously on the bottom steps of the stairs, looking down the corridor, and refused to go any further. Some women were acting as much out of self-protection as defiance. Women recalled how institutionalized others around them were and knew that they must not conform if they were to save their minds. They performed anarchic little acts, like stopping in front of a framed picture of the Virgin Mary that had a votive candle sitting before it. They would take out a cigarette and place it between their lips, then they would lean forward and use the flickering flame to light it. The nuns decried that these girls could “corrupt a barrack of soldiers.” They each spent many a dinnertime at the penance table.

Others detained at Sunday’s Well used their bodies as the last line of resistance. They would refuse to eat. This tack was sometimes described as someone being “up the stairs,” because they were in the infirmary so often, weakened from the starvation gnawing away at them. For some women it was more than protest; starvation was the only escape they could think of. One woman, Mary, who was a hunger striker at Sunday’s Well around 1969, remembered her motivation for putting herself through the ordeal: “I just wanted to die; I said there was no point going on living.”

Elizabeth, who had been in Sunday’s Well, undertook a hunger strike. She kept working, but when mealtimes beckoned, she leaned back in her chair in the refectory, literally turning her nose up at the food. One of the auxiliaries, Sister Angela, began to worry about her. She would go to Elizabeth and ask if she might take some iron pills. “No, I’m going to kill myself.” Sister Angela had seen it all before and knew the ways this might end. She whispered to Elizabeth, “You won’t get out that way. You might be sent someplace else, worse.” The Magdalene Laundry was for those deemed bad, but there were always the drugged-up depths of the asylum for those women who were deemed to be incurably mad.

After her hunger strike had gone on for longer than was usual, the doctor was sent for. He said he had to do something, otherwise Elizabeth would waste away. “I’d rather die than be here!” she said. Elizabeth didn’t like the doctor anyway; she felt he always looked down on them. In response, the doctor suggested that Elizabeth be given something intravenously.

Sister Angela sneaked Elizabeth a biscuit, but she told Elizabeth she couldn’t bring her more unless she came down from the infirmary. “I’ll think about it,” Elizabeth replied. Sister Angela seems to have been a gentle, guiding influence for some of the girls at Sunday’s Well, who felt they could speak to her. So on another of her visits, Elizabeth, who never lost her desire to ask questions, queried Sister Angela: “What did you do wrong to come in here?”

“You wouldn’t want to know,” was the reply. “I wasn’t your age when I came in.”

Elizabeth wanted clarification on another of the rumors about the Laundries. “Is it true all you girls had babies?”

“No, not all of us. I was a bit wild, but my parents put me in here.”

“So you’re stuck here all these years?”

“Be wasting my time going anywhere now. I’m in my sixties.”

“Oh, God. Oh, I think I’d die,” Elizabeth said.

To which Sister Angela wryly responded, “You could die at any minute if you don’t eat.”

Elizabeth acquiesced, but she knew that a hunger strike was always in her arsenal; it gave her a way to disrupt the rigidity of the Laundry and expose the injustice of it. Occasionally it worked. Persistent, unrelenting hunger strikers were sometimes thrown out, after the nuns had exhausted all their tactics and tolerance. Others tried a more direct route out of the Laundry.

After four years at Sunday’s Well, Carmel began her attempts to persuade Angelica that they should run away. She needed Angelica for more than company. Angelica was a Cork city native, so she would know where to go once they got out through the gates. She also turned out to be a good coconspirator and became preoccupied with the practicalities. Even if they escaped, they would still be wearing their convent uniform, making them easily identifiable as institutional girls on the run. So they decided to steal two dresses from the laundry. Simple as this should have been, they were patient. They had to be. One dress going missing would cause consternation. Two dresses going missing in quick succession might prick the nuns’ suspicions that something was afoot. They took one dress, and then not until after several weeks, another. Both were wedged in behind a washing machine. In all, it took them two months to arrange every detail.

On the night they were to escape, in the summer of 1967, Angelica said she had a stomachache and asked to go to bed early instead of having supper. Carmel did the same, saying she had a migraine and needed to retire to her bed. As far as the nuns were concerned, both girls had gone upstairs to convalesce in their respective dormitories. Once they knew the time had come for everyone to sit down to eat, the two girls stole back down the stairs and met in the empty laundry. They took their balled-up dresses from behind the machines and changed into them. A door that led from the sewing room to the back of the convent was unlocked. They opened it and walked out into the soft warmth of the evening. They skirted nervously around to the front of the building and then cut down along the tree-lined avenue. They were grateful to be sheltered by the heavy foliage, but still, anyone could see them if they were really looking. Carmel looked back constantly to check if they were being pursued. Once out of the gates and onto the public road, they sped into town, knowing that as soon as everyone headed up to bed, they would be reported missing. Time was now of the essence.

For Carmel and Angelica, absconding had turned out to have been as simple as opening the door. The doors were not always locked, they could leave if they wanted—this is a common refrain among the paltry few we have from the religious orders today. “If they really wanted to escape, it wouldn’t be too difficult to outrun a seventy-year-old nun,” they have said. It wasn’t a high-security setting. That, though, is an economical perspective on the past: The women and girls were told with puncturing frequency that they could not leave and that no one was coming for them.

One young girl, May, had been sent to Seán McDermott Street in 1972 when she was only fourteen because she kept running away from her industrial school. After some time there, May was told by the Mother Superior that she was going to High Park every day to work at their laundry. But oddly, she still slept at Seán McDermott Street. So off she went each morning, waiting for the bus that brought her to High Park. When she passed through Dublin in the morning, people moved at a brisk pace, as, like May, they streamed toward work. Retracing her route, she returned to Seán McDermott Street each evening. May sat on the bus beside her fellow travelers, all a little more crumpled after the working day. The bus passed smoky pubs and cheery fruit and veg stalls. Then at her stop, May stepped out into Dublin’s city center. She headed back behind the hubbub of the main roads, passing into the smaller streets of narrow brick buildings and tenement flats, turning onto Seán McDermott Street. Upon reaching the door of the Laundry, May knocked hard. Standing there, she waited for a nun to let her back in.

When asked why she didn’t run away, especially having taken every opportunity to flee the industrial school, May said that at the Laundry she realized she “had nowhere to go.” It was “common sense. I had to go somewhere, you know. So Seán McDermott Street was me stop.” That was the Laundry’s distinctive lesson: to make the women and girls feel tethered to the Magdalene convent. They believed only the nuns could grant their right to reenter society.

Carmel and Angelica had defied this system and were now out of the Laundry, but they also knew that they were not free; they were escapees, penitents on the run. Angelica led them to a local shopping arcade. Getting any further from Cork demanded money for tickets, food, accommodation. Angelica said that she might know people in the arcade, so she instructed Carmel to wait outside while she went in.

I have tried to imagine how jolting it must have been, as a young woman who had been held in captivity almost all her life, to stand as an adult in a bustling crowd for the very first time. The thrill and discombobulation of the traffic noise, the murmurous gabbing of passersby, the conjuncture of lives and styles. Maybe she was enthralled, which is why Carmel did not see the guard approach.

“Good evening,” he said. He was “a big, tall fella,” she recalled.

“Now who are you?”

Carmel knew the nuns called the police to report runaways, so she gave him a fake name.

“Are you on your own?” he asked.

“I am.”

He persisted, “Are you sure you’re on your own?”

Carmel repeated herself. “Yes, I am.”

“Why are you standing out here?”

Carmel felt this was where she slipped up, because then she responded, saying, “I’m waiting for someone.”

This gave the big fella just enough leverage. “Well, let’s go and see if we can find that person in there,” he said, looking into the dark arcade. He led the way, and Carmel followed behind.

Carmel caught sight of Angelica. In her mind she begged desperately for Angelica not to see her as she was trailing just behind the guard. But Angelica spotted her and enthusiastically yelled, “Imelda!”

The officer spun now to look at Carmel again and said, “Oh, so you’re Imelda, are you? Is that your friend over there?”

“I don’t know who’s calling me,” she bluffed.

“Would that be Angelica then?”

Carmel said she knew then that “the game was up.” He sat the two girls in the back of his squad car and told them he was returning them.

As punishment, the girls who were returned by the gardaí sometimes had their clothes taken and were forced to go through their days wearing no more than underwear and a sheet that they were to wear like a cape. The nuns said that this would stop them from running away again. When Carmel was returned, she kept her clothes, but her hair was cut even further. It looked so zigzaggy that she was sure they had taken pinking shears from the sewing room to do it.

Eileen, who had obediently followed her Legion of Mary chaperones to Donnybrook Laundry when she was only fifteen, spent her days working in the packing room. She would take the folded items that were fresh from the ironing room and parcel them up in paper or plastic bags, with the words MAGDALEN LAUNDRY & DRY CLEANING on them. Unlike Carmel, Eileen hadn’t even been afforded the dignity of a pseudonym, and was referred to still by her anonymous designation: “60.” When she was sixteen, having been there for a year, Eileen and two other girls started to meet behind the huge washing machines. In furtive, high-speed exchanges, they decided they had to escape.

This was a more ad hoc operation than Carmel and Angelica’s. Some painters were in the convent—Eileen had noticed them in the distance as they blithely moved in and out, and she spotted that they were not locking the gate behind them each time. When they saw the unattended gate left ajar, the three girls made their break for it, running out onto the main street of the busy suburb of Donnybrook. None of them had been as wily as Angelica and thought to nab some civvies. It was 1954, but at Donnybrook they were still wearing a heavy, Victorian-style uniform. Ankle-length skirts, petticoats, high collars buttoned up over their necks, and bonnets. Bewildered, the three girls found they were dashing about in circles, seemingly unable to escape this small network of streets, or the eyes of onlookers. One woman caught sight of this spectacle and took them in. She said she had daughters and so could give them a change of clothes and a bed for the night.

Connacht Tribune advertisement for a runaway penitent, 1928

The squad car arrived the next morning. Eileen was convinced that their Good Samaritan had phoned the police herself. Maybe after a night weighing up the consequences of what she had done, this kindly woman felt the risk was too great for her and her own daughters. In earlier decades, if the escapees were not found swiftly, short bulletins were sometimes posted in the regional newspapers. In 1928, one such story appeared in the Connacht Tribune with a description of the escaped “inmate,” though it was said her name was “unknown.”

The guard seemed to have felt sorry for Eileen and her fellow runaways. En route back to the convent, he stopped, left them in the car, and came back with ice cream cones. When they were returned to the realm of the nuns, Eileen’s punishment was to be moved to another Laundry: Peacock Lane in Cork. Once she arrived, she was told that she was no longer 60; now she was to be known as “100.”

When she was nearing her twentieth birthday, almost five years since she had been “kidnapped”—which is how Eileen came to understand what the Legion of Mary had done to her—a nun approached and told her, with a stark bluntness, that they were sending her home that day. They had written to her Auntie Sheila, and she was expecting Eileen that evening. They brought Eileen to the bus station, gave her the money for a ticket, and off she went back to the place she had tried to escape from in the first place as a fourteen-year-old girl.

Eileen was full of questions. Did her aunt know where she had been? Did she know what had happened to her? Why had she not come for her? Her aunt revealed that she had known where Eileen was as the nuns had written to her when Eileen was first admitted to the Laundry. She hadn’t realized it was as bad as Eileen was saying, she said. Trying to explain what had happened to her could wait—it had to. The only thing Eileen could think about now was her mother, to whom she had sent so many unanswered letters. She had longed to be reunited with her. “I couldn’t wait,” she said. Eileen asked her aunt how her mother was.

“Your mam is dead,” came the blunt reply.

“I’ll never forget it—it was like someone put a knife through me.” She had died not long after Eileen was signed into the Donnybrook Laundry. All that time, she had been writing letter after letter, passing them on to the nuns. The nuns knew too, her aunt said; she had written years ago to tell them.

After that, Eileen said, “I didn’t go out for ages or anything. I didn’t go outside the door, I was terrified of the dark. I used to sit alongside the fire, they had a big open fire at home, down there every day and every night, I couldn’t move.”

When the gardaí arrived with the captured runaways, they would sometimes “march them in through the laundry,” Brigid said. “We would be mortified.”

Brigid knew that the Laundry was not an easy place to adjust to. She remembered, “I was very lonely when I came here first. I used to go into the toilet at nighttime and open the window because I used to hear a dog barking and it reminded me of home. Every night I would go in and open the window just to hear him barking. But someone must have told on me because I went in one night and the window was nailed shut. But I got over the loneliness after a few years, and then I got to like the place. I liked it here.”

When she was thirty-nine, having spent twenty-seven years in the Limerick Laundry, many of them as an auxiliary, Brigid left for the first time. A parish priest needed a housemaid, and for whatever reason, the nuns decided it was the right job for her. Her mother arrived and shepherded Brigid to her new post. That priest was, she said, “too grand for me,” which seemed to be a euphemism for a man who was demanding and unkind. She missed everyone at the Laundry too; they were like her family. After two years Brigid decided to go back to the Laundry. Like a small number of Magdalene women—an estimated one in ten—she went to the Laundry voluntarily.

Years later she left again. She tried going home to her own family, but she still couldn’t settle. Before she had left, the nuns had said that they were worried something would happen to her. Brigid entered society filled with a pernicious, ambiguous fear that cast its shadow over everything. Something awful could happen anywhere, at any moment. What Brigid did experience were the tight-eyed stares of open judgment once people knew she had been in the Good Shepherd Laundry. They looked down on her and wanted nothing to do with her, even though, as she reminded herself, she had never done anything wrong. “It was very cutting,” she said; she had had enough. Again, Brigid returned to the Laundry; she hoped she might try to leave again in the future.

From the late 2010s, after the nation had begun to confront this history, there seemed to be a subsequent search for stories from the quiet dissidents, those who refused to comply or tried to exert some opposition to the Laundries and the culture they elicited. Two adult brothers, in their seventies, appeared periodically on documentaries and in newspapers to tell the story of how they had joined their mother, Ena McEntee, in helping women to escape from the Galway Magdalene Laundry. In 1963, their mother had taken up a job inside the laundry and was appalled by what she found. When the brothers were twelve and thirteen, their mother commenced a one-woman underground railroad, helping fifteen women escape by letting them out through the packing-room door and piling them into the back of her van. She then hid them like stowaways in her home before arranging for their passage to England. The nuns quickly cottoned on to the ruse and without notice fired Ena, effective immediately. Ena McEntee died in 1986. It was much later, in 2022, that she was posthumously given the Freedom of the City and a plaque was erected in her honor.

I sense that retelling this story of the escape operation speaks to our desire to append a hero to this sorry saga. We can, at last, see ourselves in this past and feel assured that if we had been there, we would have been with these boys as they rode with their mother in the back of the van alongside the huddle of Laundry escapees. This thought is as exciting as it is cathartic.

That rescue is an important part of this history, but only a part, and an exceptional one at that. And to overemphasize it too overtly skews the history. Because for the women, the daily grind of the Magdalene Laundries was compounded by the realization that no one was coming for them.

It was a cold morning in January 1969. Carmel was walking across the dormitory toward the sinks to brush her teeth when one of the auxiliaries, Sister Philomena, came in. She said she had a zip that needed fixing, and asked Carmel to come with her. Carmel did as she was told and followed her. Once the dormitory door had closed, Sister Philomena stopped in the hall and turned to look at Carmel. “Imelda, you’re leaving.” Carmel later remembered “the butterflies that went in my tummy that very moment.” It had been two years since her escape attempt, and six years since her first arrival at Sunday’s Well. She surprised herself in that moment because she became reluctant.

“Well, hold on a minute,” she said. “I’ll just go and say goodbye to my friends.”

“Imelda, you’re leaving. Did you hear what I said?”

Carmel started crying. “I wanted to go all those years I was in there—suddenly I was being plucked from the security I had in there for those six years and I was going out.”

There were never goodbyes at the Magdalene Laundries. Sister Philomena brought Carmel some ill-fitting clothes and a coat that hung off her shoulders. None of the women ever seem to have been given their own clothes back. Maybe they were passed on to some other departee, just as someone else’s clothes were now being passed on to Carmel, or they were bundled in a trunk with the belongings of other lost people. How farcical that any of them were ever invited to pack a suitcase, just as Carmel had been six years earlier.

When an abandoned asylum in Dublin was being redeveloped in 2011, a huge stash of forgotten files was found in the attic. This asylum had been in operation for over two hundred years and had once held around two thousand patients—its scale has aptly been described as a town within a city. Here was a dark trove of ledgers listing who came and went, with brief accounts of how, and why. The artist Alan Counihan took an interest in another set of boxes that were reported to have been in the attic. These were packed with the patients’ belongings, which had been taken from them upon admission.

Counihan created a set of installations using these unclaimed items, which he called Personal Effects. He took the soft mountains of forgotten handbags and hung them from the ceiling. The room was blacked out, with only enough light to see the contents spilling from the bags: the lipsticks that had been grabbed, in case they found themselves somewhere nice and in need of a touch-up; welters of personal letters waiting to be reread; rosary beads so that they could undertake their daily prayers wherever they might find themselves. There were hundreds of keys for front doors that would never be used again. It was an arresting manifestation of dispossession.

Once Carmel had changed into the proffered clothes, a nun chaperoned her to the train station and gave her instructions to disembark at Belfast. Carmel began to worry. How would she know where to go on the other side? She was assured that other nuns would be waiting there to meet her. Carmel then asked, “Where am I going?” The exit was as mysterious as the entrance had been, and the response was the same as it had always been. “Just do as you’re told. Sit down on the train.”

Carmel stayed on board as instructed, submitting to what was expected of her. When she reached her stop, as promised there were the two nuns waiting for her on the platform. They approached without hesitation. “Are you Imelda?” But at least here, Carmel could claw back something of herself.

“I’m Carmel.”

“But were you Imelda?”

“I was. I’m Carmel now. Where am I going?”

“Come on,” they said. Carmel was going to work in a hospital. It was managed and operated by religious sisters. Just as in her industrial school and the Laundry, the nuns informed Carmel that she would live in this institution too, though this time receiving a small wage.

For Carmel, though, at last, she thought, “I am free!”

Most of the women were given similarly unceremonious exit routes and sent to work in nursing homes, hospitals, and hotels. There were also the nice families, the doctor and his wife and children, who would come to collect a hired hand from the Magdalene convent. None of these women and girls were ever given forewarning of their departures.

In 1953, having spent four years at New Ross Magdalene Laundry, Catherine, now eighteen, was summoned by Mother Ignatius. In all her time there, Catherine never lost her nervousness of Mother Ignatius. To be beckoned like this, by her specifically, meant something was about to happen. Usually, it was punishment and strikes in the black book that disrupted the order of the day, so Catherine was sure she was heading to what she described as a “big penance.” When they were out of the laundry and in the parlor, Mother Ignatius simply announced that Catherine was leaving. They had found her a position. Like Carmel, Catherine was given someone else’s clothes and big brogues and put on a train to the city. There, she was also collected by nuns, who set her to work at a small suburban hospital.

Nora had constantly asked when she would be leaving. “I was just told I was going to be kept there until my mother decided otherwise,” she said. As abruptly as everyone else, in 1966, after a year at the Laundry, Nora was sent to the other side of the country to begin a new domestic job at a hospital.

This did not signal a new beginning, however. This was a phased return to society, a probationary period of surveillance. Almost all of the places they were released to were connected to the nuns in some manner. Sometimes this was explicit. The vast majority of schools and hospitals were managed and often staffed by religious orders. And even if they were somewhere more secular, like a hotel, the owners would remain in contact with the nuns. This was not freedom; these were halfway houses. Patients getting their hospital sheets changed by a quiet young woman, others having their houses cleaned by a girl the nuns recommended. All were being tested to see if they could maintain the moral lessons of the Laundry.

If they were suspected of fraternizing too much with the world around them—the cinema, boyfriends, dance halls—the nuns were called. One woman, Mary, left Sunday’s Well to be a domestic at someone’s home. The lady of the house thought her new hired hand was speaking too freely with the man who delivered the fresh bread in the morning. Mary heard her employer on the phone, saying irately, “I don’t want this woman! That young girl is talking to men!”

A man came in a car. Mary was put in the back and driven back to Sunday’s Well. She said she felt like a piece of shoddy “furniture,” picked up and returned.

Here is another trope of the archival testimony: I could have been. I could have been a nurse, a social worker, something else entirely. One woman, Catriona, had been put in the Limerick Laundry in the 1950s when she was eleven and was not released until the end of her teens. She felt that she had never recovered what had been stolen from her while she was there. “The future is the thing to look forward to. But I have no future. If I was educated, I wouldn’t mind. I could be going out and doing something.” Another survivor named Betty spoke of her lifelong aptitude for music, but felt she was now far beyond the point of reasonably pursuing it. Her talent and the dream to do something with it sat dormant. Betty had worked as a cleaner and was proud of herself and the life she made—like so many of the women, who gave their children everything they didn’t have. They found solace in caring for abandoned animals, helping the elderly and needy in their communities, and so much else.

Betty became a cleaner because it was the job given to her after she left the Laundries. That was the power of the decisions the nuns made for these women and girls about where they were to go in life. Equally, the nuns could have been the catalyst that changed their fortunes. It is not something so reductive as securing them better-paying or more middle-class careers. Under their supervision, the nuns could have propelled them into society with confidence, knowing that the hardships they had experienced, and had been subject to, were not their fault. Betty knew this too. “All I needed was someone just to push. Instead of, do you know, like instead of putting me into more institutions. All I needed was someone just to push me, because my life would have turned in a different direction. Do you know what I mean?” They were each now intended to be the servile class, to be the quiet entities that brought and retrieved, cleaned and tidied around those who mattered. As far as Carmel was concerned, the Laundries and the industrial schools “were recruitment places for people that wanted cheap labor.”

Rather than find Carmel a post that would allow her to expand the creative skills she had acquired in the sewing room, the nuns had assigned her a job at the hospital, bringing patients their tea and lunch and then clearing away the trays. This hospital also had a maternity ward, with both public and private sections. Frequently, young girls would arrive with their brimming bellies. And then one day, when bringing their meal, Carmel would see the bump was gone, but there was no baby to be seen. These girls were from families affluent enough to afford private wards and avoid the institutional depths of the Mother and Baby Homes. But the veneer of Catholic family values was still steadfast. These girls had been pregnant outside marriage and could not avoid the fate of having their newborn disappeared. Sometimes Carmel was asked to go to the nursery and feed the babies who were not going to be returned to their mothers.

Other times Carmel sat and counseled these bereft young women. They had been sent there by their parents and had often been abandoned by their boyfriends. Sometimes they said they were glad they would never see their baby again. Carmel felt for each girl, spending “a whole week in there trying to get over something she’ll never get over.”

One day a seventeen-year-old girl from the private maternity ward approached Carmel in the kitchenette. She was due to be discharged from the hospital and leave her baby behind. These mothers were expected to give the nuns a basket of baby clothes to be sent with their baby to the new family. Ostensibly, this girl had come to deliver the basket, though this was not Carmel’s remit. Sheepishly, the girl asked Carmel if she knew whether the baby she had given birth to was a boy or a girl. The baby had been whipped away with such immediacy after the labor that she never even had a chance to steal a glimpse. Carmel must have been startled, struggling to think of what to say, because before she had mustered a response, the girl again asked, “What did I have?”

Staff in hospitals could also be openly unsympathetic and contemptuous to the unmarried mothers. One midwife who worked in a hospital said, “You were told by the senior staff not to engage in personal conversation with them, and that’s what you did.” Their approach was, she said, “perhaps cold.” At this time, though, in the early 1970s, some hospitals still did not accept unmarried mothers on their labor wards at all. Midwives were often told to do no more than offer the sobbing postpartum women medication as required, painkillers or antibiotics, and to ignore their emotional distress. Maybe that is why Carmel stood out as approachable.

Then this young girl made a bigger request, perhaps something she had planned all along. “Could I see my baby?” Carmel was nervous now. This girl had given birth to a baby, but it was no longer her baby. To show her would upset the balance of secrets and separation that kept life in order. Only trouble would come from this. Yet Carmel also felt she couldn’t say no.

Here were two girls, both trying to emerge discreetly from their state of excommunication. Maybe Carmel recognized this, and perhaps that is why she agreed to the request.

Carmel told the girl her plan. The baby was in the nursery, and passersby could see the small crop of cots in neat lines from a large window facing the corridor. Carmel would bring the baby, a little boy, she said, to the window.

As she ushered the girl up the stairs Carmel must have felt a pang of peril. She warned her coconspirator, “You mustn’t cry!” Looking back, Carmel felt that was “an awful thing to ask, wasn’t it—a seventeen-year-old?” But these two young girls were now speaking about the things that were unspeakable. They were breaching the boundaries that had been established. An unraveling of composure would expose them both. And this girl was returning to her family. Carmel, having no family, must have known where she would land if she fell from her post.

Carmel brought the baby to the window as promised so the girl could see her son. Though the girl could not hear through the glass, Carmel whispered, “There you are.” Quickly, Carmel returned the baby to its cot and came back out. She said to the girl, “Come on now, you can collect the cups with me now from all the patients.” As they did, the young girl began to thank Carmel profusely. She said that she would never forget this. She paused. The baby looked like the father, she said. Her boyfriend—her former boyfriend, she corrected herself.

Carmel wanted to reassure her companion and found herself trotting out the maxim, “Your baby is going to a wonderful family.” But Carmel didn’t know that. She must have thought it was the right thing to say, because it was what was always said about these clandestine transactions. The baby was going somewhere better. It’ll be as though this never happened.

When the nuns came to collect these babies, forsaken by circumstance, Carmel was often enlisted to help, her arms loaded with bits and pieces, the cots and baskets. “That was heartbreaking for me,” she remembers. “It was dreadful.”

A minor media skirmish broke out in Ireland in 2024 after actor Cillian Murphy described Mother and Baby Homes and Laundries as damning evidence that Ireland had been in the “Dark Ages” up until at least the 1980s. First the habitués of social media weighed in, and then the newspaper columnists followed. Some vehemently agreed. How could anyone suggest that Ireland had been anything other than a backward backwater? The rebuttal for the defense was that there was also an abundance of simple conviviality. Friends and couples ambled off on Friday-night pilgrimages to see the latest showbands. Families ate Sunday lunch together after Mass; the men meandered home from the farm for dinner at 1 p.m.; children could play in the idyll of green fields. There had been darkness, but do not let it overshadow the goodness that was also all around. To present matters this way, to debate the bad and the good in such distinctive terms, still makes it seem it was either one way, or the other way. That if we just keep digging our separate tunnels, we can see whose spade hits the truth first. In reality, these realms were never so disconnected.

The fabulist ideal of Ireland set the bar for which behaviors were acceptable, and which disquieting groups were expungable. Places like Laundries, along with the Mother and Baby Homes and the asylums and the industrial schools, allowed the picturesque Ireland to prevail. Ireland could be self-mythologized as the nation of a thousand welcomes, of storytellers, a classless society of great craic and good times. Sure, the best Catholics in the world. Because those who had defied this facsimile of harmony had been exiled in their own land, their existence disavowed. Those who left the Laundries, who crossed from the margins back to the mainstream, saw all too vividly how these two worlds intersected.

Women from the Laundries had been sent out into society to find that they, like all other Irish people, must abide by the ways of the fallen—prayer, informal surveillance, silent comportment, confessions, and guilt. The whole island was a strict enclosure. The logic of the Laundry was writ large.

If they stayed, there was no way to detach from it. As Carmel discovered, even though she had not actively encouraged or sponsored this unsettling system of clandestine adoption, it was impossible not to become entangled in the subterfuge. “The only way I could get away,” Carmel said, and salvage anything of her future, “was to leave my own country.”

Not long after she arrived in England, she tracked down her mother, who had moved there with her new husband when Carmel was only a small child. She had finally found an address for her mother, which she had written on a crumpled piece of paper. She said, though, that when she held it in her hand, it felt “like a bar of gold.” When she went to the address and said who she was, her mother turned green, Carmel said, and began to shake. It was clear to Carmel that her mother “must have dreaded that day,” the long-lost daughter arriving at her home, “for all her life.” Carmel’s mother made it clear that she had come to England for a fresh start, and that did not include Carmel. “She didn’t want me in her life. It was total rejection.”

Carmel left the Laundry in 1969, Catherine in 1953, Eileen in 1958, Nora in 1967. Brigid stayed on. They had each been prepared to live in a world like the Laundries; upon release, each of them, in their own way, had found Ireland uninhabitable. When Carmel went to England, she was following in the footsteps of so many other women who left the Laundries. Catherine also fled for England, before saving enough to make her way to America. Nora headed to England too. They joined the casts of immigrant Irish in Liverpool, Glasgow, London, and Boston. At last, they felt they had finally made their escape.

In London, Nora said she “fell in love” with the city. Yes, it was vast and diverse, but it was not that Nora was in awe of the bright lights, or anything so folksy. When she was in Dublin, she could not shake the feeling of being watched and judged. It seemed that a day couldn’t pass for her in Ireland’s capital city without meeting people she knew. She could be sure that where they saw her, and what she said, was being passed on as news at home and that each word would reach her mother, who still kept track of Nora that way. “Everything I did could be and would be reported back because that was the times we lived in.” Their lives were fodder for the litany of hometown gossip and the “Did you hear…?” tidbits exchanged on the streets. In London, “nobody knew my mother,” Nora said. She began to occupy an expansive anonymity and grasp the potential of her freedom to live an easy life of small pleasures. “I could walk into a bar, order a pint, sit on the barstool, smoke my cigarette, and nobody was going to tell my mother.”

The thousands of women sent to the Laundries from the 1920s until the 1960s had been there during the Laundry’s period of expansion and technical revolution. At the end of the 1960s, the Magdalene Laundries began what we now know was their decline. Sunday’s Well had housed between one hundred and 120 women and girls until the 1960s. Not long after Carmel left, the number of penitents fell to an average of sixty. When it closed in 1977, only forty women were being held there. It was the third Magdalene convent to close. The seven remaining Laundries saw their numbers of inmates dwindle too. Ireland was changing, loosening even, and so too were the Laundries. But not fast enough to prevent another generation of girls from being confined in a new version of the same silent world.

Chapter 7 Welfare

Europe flourished in the economic boom that followed the Second World War. There was unprecedented technological advancement and a surge in consumerism as people’s wages rose. Ireland remained in the long cold shadow of this prosperity, however. Between 1949 and 1956, the real national income rose across Europe by 40 percent, while in Ireland it only grew by 8 percent. Throughout all European nations in that period, only Ireland and East Germany saw their populations drastically decline, as people didn’t so much emigrate as escape their respective dire predicaments. During the 1950s, even though Ireland had a population slightly lower than three million people, half a million emigrated. As one writer observed in a best-selling book of 1953, Ireland had become an independent nation, but at the expense of the Irish people, who were “vanishing.”

That was the irony of Ireland’s bucolic, Matryoshka-like national image: people living within families, nested within communities, sitting within the nation. But that last piece, the political and economic system, was so feeble and inadequate that people needed to disappear to make it all fit together.

Emigration was a misery lamented by the public but accepted by the government, and the Commission on Emigration, as “a part of the generally accepted pattern of life.” It functioned as an additional, if somewhat inadvertent, form of social control, “sweeping social problems aside.” For one, it subdued crime rates as the young, the marginalized, and the unemployed—those who most often fill up our prison systems—left the country. By the 1960s, English prisons held twice as many Irish-born men as Irish prisons.

In 1959, Éamon de Valera stood down. Aside from two short three-year stints in opposition, de Valera had been Ireland’s political leader for a mammoth twenty-one years after his initial election victory in 1932. New Fianna Fáil leadership, led by Seán Lemass, saw that people needed more than what little Ireland had to offer. A nation based around subsistence farming might have been a fine ideal, but it was a failed reality. He declared that “the years ahead will be a great time to be alive and to be young, and to be Irish.”

The government began enthusiastically lowering the economic borders that had been built up around Ireland, embarking on a plan of economic expansion that at last invited competition, free trade, and foreign investment into the country. Between 1959 and 1960, the Gross National Product grew by 4 percent.

Lemass was determined to further improve the nation’s prospects. This was not simply strategic financial thinking but a new modern mindset. From the 1960s, the government began assuming greater responsibility for the health and well-being of its citizens and for the first time introduced more expansive welfare provisions. There was a concerted effort to increase the number of social workers employed by the State, a welfare role previously within the remit of the priests’ parochial duties, and the profession grew exponentially. The Department of Justice began to modernize the prisons, improving the living conditions as well as implementing ideas of rehabilitation, which were by then beginning to fall out of favor in the US and UK. The Department of Justice was even intent on building Ireland’s first women’s prison as they sought to hold lawbreakers in decent conditions.

The progressive reform of the prisons collided with the Magdalene Laundries and in 1960 became one overlapping issue. Remand, the practice of holding people in prison before they have been tried or convicted, was discussed in parliament. The overall common sense was that the prison was destructive to the human spirit and should be avoided where at all possible. It was decided that a small group of girls who would otherwise have been remanded within the prison, estimated to be about thirty a year, would be outsourced to a number of Magdalene Laundries. The new policy was announced in parliament in a positive speech that reflected a progressive belief in alternatives to imprisonment.

Then one member of parliament, a senator named Nora Connolly O’Brien, dissented. She stood up and said that which usually could not be spoken: that the stigma of the Laundries ruined women’s lives and upended their futures. She said she was indignant to see how “thoughtlessly” they had inserted the use of Magdalene Laundries into the new bill. It was playing into some image of the Laundries as a charity, but, she said, “If I were asked to advise girl delinquents, no matter what offenses they were charged with, whether to go to prison on remand, or to go to St. Mary Magdalen’s Asylum on remand, I would advise them wholeheartedly to choose prison, because I think having a record of having been in prison as a juvenile delinquent would not be so detrimental to the afterlife of the girl as to have it legally recorded that she was an inmate of St. Mary Magdalen’s Asylum.”

To be a Magdalene, even for a brief period, Connolly O’Brien went on, damned a woman “to spend the rest of her life in the fear and terror of being charged with having in her youth been an inmate of St. Mary Magdalen’s Asylum.” Before anyone could take to their feet in opposition or to feign ignorance of what she meant, Connolly O’Brien concluded, “I do not think any adult person in this country is unaware of the connotation of St. Mary Magdalen’s Asylum… I do not think there is any member of this House who is ignorant of what the stigma would mean to a girl.”

Missing the point so badly that he proved it, the Minister for Justice assured her that this new stream of remanded girls entering the Laundries would not mix with the fallen women already within the convent. He seemed to confirm that those already there—who had not broken any legal rules—had a spoiled identity, and others must keep their distance.

In the end, Connolly O’Brien lost the debate. The bill was passed, and the Laundries were made an official arm of the criminal justice system. But with her statement in parliament that day in 1960, she had marked the beginning of something else. The Laundries, their true meaning, their bogus charitable pretense, their shameful lifelong implications, were uttered aloud and discussed.

The women in the Laundries weren’t the only warehoused populations whose fates were getting a public airing. In the 1960s, a member of the Jesuit order, who had had some dealings with industrial and reformatory schools, contacted the Minister for Justice and asked for a private meeting. He revealed to him that he found the conditions and atmospheres in these schools entirely “punitive.”

When the whistleblowing came to the attention of Dublin’s Archbishop and Primate of Ireland John Charles McQuaid, the Jesuit was ejected from his order. The government, however, was no longer content with being merely the Church’s handyman. The minister decided a further investigation was required. The Commission of Inquiry into Ireland’s Industrial and Reformatory Schools was established in 1967, chaired by Eileen Kennedy, the first woman to be appointed as a judge. To examine children in care, they soon found that they had to look beyond the reformatories and industrial schools, because the Laundries held a large number of young girls.

What became known as the Kennedy Report was published in 1970. They found seventy girls between the ages of thirteen and nineteen in the Laundries, and in crisp, clear criticism, they wrote, “This method of voluntary arrangement for placement can be criticized on a number of grounds. It is a haphazard system, its legal validity is doubtful, and the girls admitted in this irregular way and not being aware of their rights, may remain for long periods and become, in the process, unfit for reemergence into society. In the past, many girls have been taken into these convents and remained there all their lives.”

The nuns were described as entirely untrained for what was being asked of them. Such a statement would have been unthinkable only ten years earlier. The Kennedy Report exposed a small, solid kernel of doubt about the religious welfare institutions. Rather than saying prayers and doing penance, which hardly prepares one for life, the report said, “All children need love, care, and security if they are to develop into full and mature adults.”

The Catholic Church simultaneously underwent a reorganization that was nothing short of revolutionary. The hierarchy in Rome could see that societies were becoming more secular, despite their efforts. Stern and unintelligible Latin Masses, cloistered men and women, people expected to regularly fast, the exalted vision of the Virgin Mary, all made the Church look medieval and out of step and, most importantly, unappealing. Catholicism needed to find renewed relevance.

In autumn 1962, the Pope convened a Vatican Council. So rarely do Vatican Councils occur that the last one prior to that had been held in 1869, and before that in 1563. The Council was far from straightforward, and there was much debate, disagreement, and disappointment, but over three years, almost three thousand bishops deliberated on the strictures of Catholic rules. In 1965, the outcome, which became known as Vatican II, enforced a system-wide modern makeover, and, as one person present at the Council recalled, it “marked the entrance of Catholicism into the twentieth century.”

For the nuns, the changes were drastic. Their fidelity to The Rule was no longer required. They could speak, question, make friendships. They had a new freedom of movement. Nuns could learn to drive, which had previously been banned. Nuns no longer needed to wear the restrictive layers of their habit. Modest civilian dress, with or without a veil, was permitted. Each order could reconsider whether they wanted to remain contemplative, hence enclosed. The hierarchal separation of choir sisters and lay sisters was dissolved. In 1971, a television documentary titled Are Nuns Human? began by saying, “In Ireland, we tend to take nuns for granted. They’ve always been here; they’ll always be here.” Without their starched habits and social standing, the life of a nun was reduced to immense self-sacrifice. From 1970, fewer women and girls were drawn toward the convent, and the number of novices began to decline. In 1966, there were 562 new nuns, but by 1996, only nineteen women joined the religious orders.

In this time of transition, the electorate were asked if they wanted to remove Catholicism’s “special position” as the religion of the Irish people from the constitution. In place since de Valera’s great Catholic triumphs in the 1930s, suddenly this article appeared odd and otiose on Ireland’s legal landscape. In 1972, the electorate voted 84 percent in favor of deleting it.

It was never so simple over the first decades of independence that the government was economically enfeebled and the Church benevolently stepped in to fill in the gaps in welfare provision. The Pope had decreed in 1931 that the proper place of government was to subsidize the Church in the managing of moral and spiritual affairs. In the view of those in power, the huge Church influence over social and political matters was as it should be.

John Charles McQuaid, as Archbishop of Dublin, and perhaps the most consequential Primate of Ireland, had taken up his post as the religious leader in 1940. He was an austere and uncompromising character. According to one biography, McQuaid had been greatly inspired by J. Edgar Hoover’s autocratic leadership style at the FBI. They had even exchanged a few complimentary letters. Accepting nothing but total conformity, McQuaid threatened to damn and denounce any politician who sought even to suggest a modernization of legislation and social policy. Together, McQuaid and de Valera were considered the towering duo of authoritarian Catholicism, ruling from their respective seats of power.

Yet, given all of that, McQuaid was also swept up by the progressive zeal of the second half of the twentieth century. He began to badger the local Magdalene convent nuns about their medieval methods. The Mother Superior had the power, he reminded her, “to make rules for the better training of the girls and women Penitents.” We “must make ourselves acquainted with the best modern methods of dealing” with the troubled and needy, he wrote. Could the nuns better equip themselves, train in social work and other adjacent disciplines, to meet the complexities of young women in need? he inquired.

Quite incredibly, by the late 1950s, he had begun to chastise the nuns for asking young women sent to Magdalene convents to do laundry work. The “need to protect young girls in recent years has become much more urgent. These girls will not enter a penitentiary where only laundry work is offered,” he emphasized. McQuaid advocated for training centers—separate buildings within the local Magdalene convents—for young girls who entered via the courts or had been removed from their families by social services. McQuaid suggested that the training centers would create a partition between these new entrants and the older, long-term penitents. Those attached to the training centers should have actual teachers who provided an education in subjects such as home economics. The girls should be able to go outside for work during the daytime, he suggested. The nuns, in turn, wondered “whether what was in effect a mechanized, factory setup could be incorporated into a modern ‘rehabilitation’ program of the kind that was being urged on the sisters by the archbishop.”

The Laundries always reflected the mores of the society around them. They had begun their operation as lay refuges, then morphed into places of religious internment, erasure, and conversion. During the 1960s, it was not simply that their numbers declined; they began to evolve once again. At Limerick, Seán McDermott Street, and High Park, these new training centers were opened. The one at Seán McDermott Street, Ri Villa, opened in 1966. The plan was that younger girls would get some formal education in a newly built classroom, and the first cookery lessons took place there that same year.

In 1970, in light of the heady pace of change and particularly the critical Kennedy Report, the nuns at High Park undertook a week of deliberations, considering how they might alter their mission. The nuns felt that they needed to determine “how far our influence for good is affected by detaining them under extreme legal coercion.” They began to wonder if their “primary objective” was to help change the ways of “girls and women who have been, or are, in social and moral difficulties,” then maybe “their means of giving service” should take place in open settings, such as the new training centers, but perhaps also clinics and hostels. By 1971, they had decided that when any young women or girls came to them, “efforts are to be made to develop their personalities in a less institutionalized setting.”

Living conditions were made more commodious. Walls were built to turn large dorms into smaller bedrooms, to give women more privacy. A handyman who had gone to work in one of the Laundries, Tim, recalled the day in the mid-1970s when a nun led him to a small outhouse. Inside was a grim scene. There was “a fold-down bed, a frame covered with a hessian cloth; you know what I mean, like woven. When you walk in through the door, straight in front of you is the bed. It was strung up against the wall. When you wanted it, you pulled it down from the wall and two straps would have held it and there was chains on the wall, you know, like manacles—it’s like a handcuff off a chain.”

This was the old punishment cell. The nuns no longer saw the need for it, so Tim was tasked with turning it into toilets. They got him to prepare another small unit at the back of the convent that would become a home for “battered wives” and their children. “In other words,” Tim said, “the nuns started to open things up.”

As the nuns could leave their convents after the second Vatican Council, they brought some of the longer-term resident women in the Magdalene Laundries on summer holidays, usually to little beachside chalets that the nuns had purchased. Some Laundries had televisions installed in the recreation rooms, and sometimes the radio played while they worked. Name-changing was abandoned in the 1970s, and longer-term residents, such as Brigid, were allowed to start using their own names again. For the first time since she was twelve, she was no longer known as Peter.

For some nuns, the change was bewildering. One winter evening in the 1970s, Brigid and her fellow women huddled together at recreation, awaiting the promised after-dinner entertainment. A nun had said that she was going to read them a story. “We used to like that,” Brigid said. The nun arrived but only to inform them of the bad news—there would be no story, as she could not bring herself to read that evening. She was shaken. This nun had recently started venturing out beyond the convent walls for the first time in decades. That afternoon she had been on an errand in Limerick city and caught sight of something unfathomable: A woman strode past her wearing a pair of trousers. “She was so upset by this,” Brigid said. The nun went to collect herself in her cell, saying only that “she was too upset to read us a story.”

The government were less circumspect about the changes at the Laundries. With the Laundries formally folded into the expanding State apparatus, civil servants ventured out in July 1973 to one of the Dublin Laundries on a “fact-finding visit.” With the expansion of State welfare provision, the nuns had requested grant payments under a new Disabled Persons Maintenance Allowance. After their tour, the civil servants noted how impressed they were by what the nuns were doing. “This institution is providing worthwhile services for a large [number] of women who are unfit for work,” because they were “OAPs [old age pensioners], mentally or physically retarded women, mildly handicapped and delicate women and women who are unstable for social or moral reasons.” The civil servants agreed to pay grants to the nuns, though at a lesser rate than if it was a government-run facility. They conveyed this to the nuns, wishing them “continued success in your very commendable work.”

The civil servants’ overly optimistic assessment might have been elevated by Ireland’s new political status. Seán Lemass had become dogged in his pursuit of joining the newly founded European Economic Community—the EEC, the predecessor to the European Union. Ireland’s first application in 1961 was rejected because it was seen as an underdeveloped nation. It took several more years and much campaigning, but on January 1, 1973, Ireland became a member of the EEC.

Whatever tentative early signs of progressive change there were, they came to an abrupt halt only months after the civil servants’ fact-finding visit. In October 1973, in response to war in the Middle East, oil-producing countries in that region put an embargo on the sale of their oil. This was known as the 1973 oil crisis. Ireland plunged back into recession. Interest rates rose, layoffs began, reduced working weeks were implemented. The government coffers were bare. There would be no women’s prison, no further advances in welfare expansion; the government’s progress was stalled. What national infrastructure had started to be remodeled was left half-done, like abandoned scaffolding with the sheeting left flapping in the wind. It was during this era of half-met promises of modernization that Katie grew up.

By the 1970s, the nuns defined their penitents as “victims of the following evil in society: prostitution, delinquency, drug addiction (non-medical assistance), sexual deviancy, alcoholism, crime,” and “family immorality.” Katie, whose family had drastically failed in their duty of care, fell into the latter category. She was sexually and physically abused by her father from the age of five. By the time she was twelve she had already had a miscarriage. It happened after someone gave her an ice pop. In her childish innocence, she thought for years that the ice pop had triggered the copious bleeding, which began at school. She stood before her teacher, bowed by the pain, and told her about the frightening thing that was happening. But the teacher did nothing.

The extent of the abuse she had experienced meant that she often could not hide it. “Like, I would have a black eye or I would have a split lip or broken arm or something like that, and my excuse always was, ‘Oh, I fell down the stairs’ or, you know, ‘I walked into a door’ ”—the kinds of excuses so clichéd that they now trigger immediate alarm bells. Yet most teachers ignored Katie’s battered and weary body.

Her father continued his abuse until he unexpectedly left. Maybe someone knew something? Perhaps he had been confronted by his wife? A neighbor? One of his own family? The circumstances that led to this disappearance must have been understood, as no one reported him missing. But whatever they were, they remained hush-hush; they were never mentioned—or not to Katie, at least. One day, he was gone. That was all that needed to be known.

His disappearance, however, was no reprieve for Katie. Her father left a legacy that tore through the generations. Katie told of how her father’s behavior had warped their idea of family, destroyed their sense of what it meant to care and what it felt like to be protected. In his absence, the lesson his sons had learned was that the man of the house was to be a tyrant. Katie’s home became a lair in which she was the prey.

Katie’s mother, also a victim of their distorted domesticity, was practically mute—“there in body, but she wasn’t there in the mind,” Katie said. And certainly, no one outside the house was raising questions about the rakish, fragile-looking girl. Her abuse took place inside this enveloping silence. Katie could not free herself from the web of subterfuge that mired her life, because that was the Irish way. “You know,” she said, looking back, “everything was done so secret, everything was secret, secret, secret, like, and you just, you dare not say anything to anybody, you’d be terrified of the consequences.” When this state of denial was momentarily breached, however, the repercussions were not what Katie had anticipated.

In 1977, when Katie was sixteen, she had a new teacher who had a psychology qualification, signaling her out as a woman ahead of her time. That is why Katie believes it was that teacher who refused to ignore the signs of abuse and dutifully reported something of her concerns to the authorities.

Some people came knocking at the door late one day. Were they gardaí? Maybe social workers? Katie does not know now, but they had come from some position in officialdom. These strangers wanted to speak to the adult. Katie’s father was still absent, and her mother was entombed in her gaunt mental state. So these men spoke in hushed tones to Katie’s older sister. Katie was to be brought to an address on Seán McDermott Street. No one spoke to Katie after this. “I was terrified, like, I didn’t know what was happening to me.”

Together, the two sisters boarded a bus, sitting side by side as it trundled into Dublin city center. When they reached their stop, they made their way into the north inner city. They were approaching a large, three-story redbrick building that expanded down the street. They knocked on its big, broad wooden doors, waiting for someone to answer. A nun appeared and ushered Katie in. Katie heard that big door creak once more as it shut behind her. “I’ll always remember it. I can still hear the creak of the door.” She turned around to see that her sister had gone. Katie was alone.

Katie was led through the convent. She recalled no small talk. They cut swiftly through the wide, hard-floored corridors. The high walls had deep recessed alcoves housing statues of religious figures that were almost life-sized, looming stoically above those who passed at their feet. They entered the parlor, where a woman was waiting.

She introduced herself as Áine. She said that she was a social worker, and that she had been expecting Katie. Unlike every other adult in her life, Áine wasted no time in getting to the point. “She told me that I was there because of my abuse situation at home and that they were there to help me, and I was supposed to stay there until I was eighteen—at a legal age where I could go off and do my own thing.” For the first time, Katie was asked directly about what had been happening at home.

Whatever satisfaction she experienced by unburdening the truth sealed inside herself was outshone by the sheer pleasure of basic home comforts: “The first thing I remember was I got fed. I was given a sandwich and a cup of tea, and to me that was, ‘Oh, my God,’ like, you know, ‘I’m going to get fed here.’ And I was given a bed, which—I know everybody did it in the old days, like everybody shared a bed, but there was four of us in the one bed. And [there] I got a bed and I got food and I wasn’t being sexually abused for this, so to me that was the world. I thought I was after striking gold… having a bed and three meals a day, that was gold.”

Áine had withheld the words Magdalene and Laundry; she did not tell Katie where she was, only that she was here now. Katie thought she was free of being used and abused: “This place, whatever it was, was like a palace.”

Because Katie arrived in the 1970s, she was not stripped of her personhood. She kept her name, her hair, and her clothes. Though Katie had not come with anything more than the clothes on her back.

Katie was brought to a dormitory. The beds were each separated by curtains, like in a hospital. Though the curtain gave them privacy it did not afford them space, as it skirted the bed and bedside locker so closely that there was room to do little else than get on and off the mattress. There were no penitents here. This was Ri Villa, one of the new training centers.

Another girl who was in the training center at Seán McDermott Street with Katie was seventeen-year-old Sarah. This was not Sarah’s first time in a place such as this. The year before, she had spent spring and summer in An Grianán, which in English translates as “sunny place,” revealing some of the over-extended optimism of this era. An Grianán was the training center at High Park Magdalene Laundry, run by a different order of nuns, not far up the road in Dublin. Sarah had been brought there by a social worker because her family life had likewise been engulfed by her father’s sexual abuse. Sarah’s mother was also an alcoholic, who had periodically dropped her children into industrial schools, usually when she had just given birth to a new baby. When she was home, Sarah took on the role of primary carer for her younger brothers and sisters. Just like Katie, Sarah remembers her family being sewn “in so tight that we just kept our secrets to ourselves. We shared nothing and gave nothing away.”

When Sarah came home from An Grianán, her mother was in the deep end of her alcoholism. Erratic and frenzied, she threw her daughter out. This wasn’t the first time. “My mam was forever throwing me out, and I’d be on the streets.” Maybe it was a social worker or a juvenile liaison officer who brought her to Seán McDermott Steet in 1977. Sarah couldn’t recall the exact details of how she came to cross its threshold that summer, only that she had nowhere else to go.

Sending a girl who had been sexually abused to a Magdalene Laundry was standard practice. It could have been their father’s, brother’s, uncle’s, priest’s, or neighbor’s sexual transgression, but it had stained the girls too. In fact, it seems to have stained only them. Girls like Katie were often made to understand that they had nonetheless committed a mortal sin. In such grim circumstances, while they were only children, no other institutions would accept them. While Ireland had been modernizing, changing, relaxing its moral outlook, girls like Sarah and Katie, who had been abandoned or abused and were in need of welfare and justice, still found themselves enclosed in the Magdalene Laundries. And in that way, Ireland’s secrets continued to be hidden away.

The monstrousness that Katie’s confession had momentarily exposed never became headline news, nor did it enter the criminal courts. The male members of Katie’s family were not questioned by the gardaí, let alone detained, nor were they vilified in the community. There would be no accused, no evidence, no victim. The Laundries were still places to hide everything that might shame families, communities, and the country at large; they sealed up all that was unspeakable. Her family continued their lives in Katie’s absence. The State continued in the fugue of silence that hung over it. As she put it herself, repeating the same familiar-sounding refrain that thousands of girls before her had uttered, once she was in the Laundry, “Nobody came looking for me, nobody cared what happened to me, there was no investigation or anything. I was gone, that was it.”

Katie and the other girls were woken at 6:30 a.m., and the tightly sequenced schedule of their day commenced. They would first clean their dormitories, then the bathroom. Every space had to be spick-and-span before they sat down to their breakfast of cereal and toast at 7:30. On Thursdays and Fridays, the girls had classes in the training center. On those days, teachers came from outside the convent. Thursday was domestic economy, and Friday was music. Katie looked forward to the music class all week. “I absolutely loved it, and I really looked forward to that. It was brilliant to me, this was fantastic. This was for about an hour. It was kind of a little way for us to all get together and just relax.” On Saturday, the training center girls still had to fulfill a heavy-duty schedule of domestic chores. They undertook a deep clean of the entire center, top to bottom. They stripped the beds, dusted every bit of furniture. They were fastidious, because nothing less was expected. The nuns would not tolerate dirt. Taking to their hands and knees, with their buckets, cloths, and brushes, the girls lathered the floors, scrubbing and polishing them with a fearful vigilance. They would get right under the toilet, behind it, in it, plunging their arms into the bowl and along the downpipe. They could not risk being guilty of a stain being left behind anywhere.

The sisters would then give the girls 50p pocket money. Every so often on a Saturday, they escorted the girls to the local shops where they could spend it, though not as they might have wished. The girls had to use it to buy replacement toiletries, like toothbrushes and toothpaste. They were also expected to buy washing powder to keep in their quarters.

The little groups shuffled out of the front door of the convent in a line. Katie recalled that bit of freedom as “a terrible time.” The local children mocked the girls as they passed, viciously asking, “Have you no mammies or daddies?” and even spitting on them. Sometimes the adults joined in. If they were not overwhelmed by shame inside the Laundry, they certainly were when they went outside it.

Other times the outside came to them. Because these girls were not the fallen, the convent now opened on Sundays so they might receive visitors. The girls would bake cakes with their home economics teacher in preparation for their weekend guests. No one ever came for Katie. Her sister never came back; her mother never contacted her. She could not understand it. How had she been totally forgotten by them? So on Sundays she would just sit and watch, silent and alone.

On the odd Thursday evening, the girls received another kind of guest: the volunteers. Katie recalled some of these do-gooders, students who were studying psychology or social work. Others had less professional motivations; this was their charitable deed.

These occasions were pure, unadulterated recreation. The volunteers came loaded with records and guitars slung across their backs. Treats and cups of tea were shared. Together they would chat and have jovial singalongs. The nuns would be there too, of course, partaking in the merriment and interacting with the girls with casual warmth. Katie enjoyed these times but also found herself detached from them. She could see the theatrics of this performance. “The nuns used to sit with us then, and they used to make it look as if we were really kind of like, ‘Oh, look at us, we’re a really happy family.’ ”

Katie sensed that the volunteers were particularly impressed by the nuns, dedicating their lives to the most vulnerable, that they were the girls’ “protectors.” She said, “It gave them a sense that we were so cared for, so happy; they were doing wonderful things for us.” But when the volunteers gathered up their bits and pieces and said their goodbyes and good lucks, the familial feeling faded, and “when they went, everything just kind of went back to normal.”

For Katie, despite these interludes, the classes, the regular food, and the luxury of having her own bed, she was finding it increasingly difficult to endure the ordinary cruelty of Seán McDermott Street.

On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, the girls from the training center were marched across the compound, passing the dormitories that held the other women, the penitents. Each category of inmate now shared the same destination to the rear of the convent: the laundry.

Katie was in the Laundries when its regime was less intensively abrasive than it had been for the generations of women who had entered before her. For all its recent innovation in segregating spaces and women, Seán McDermott Street’s underlying logic remained inescapable. While girls like Katie were treated differently in some ways, the older rules of Laundry life still lingered.

The laundry initially appeared to be any normal workplace. Women in aprons, industrious and orderly at their machines and stations. It was the little details that created the menacing undertone: The windows all had bars on them. And unlike a normal workplace, this one hummed only with the sound of industry. The women and girls were silent. Katie tried to befriend a woman beside her. Before she had even managed to muster up the few tentative niceties, she was cut off straight away. “Shhhhh! We don’t talk here.” Looking back, Katie was glad to have learned that lesson early; it probably saved her more hassle later, she said.

Katie had never before encountered strange and unsettling women like those she worked alongside in the laundry. They held their silence tightly, yet they emitted a loneliness that was palpable. As no more than a child herself, Katie recalled that even then, she could see the heartbreak etched into their faces. She said she “never saw them outside; they were never outside.” They seemed bound to the laundry.

The laundries were as hazardous in the 1970s as they had always been. Martina was also in the Ri Villa at Seán McDermott Street, from 1969 to 1971. Martina had been sent there by the courts at the age of sixteen as an alternative to prison. She was put to work in the ironing room. She had never ironed, never knew what it was to launder something. The nuns were frustrated with her inability to meet their exacting standards. Initially, Martina’s job was to pull the sheets through the huge metal mangles, turning its handle wheel. The sodden garments would pass between two rollers, wringing the water from them. Martina was too small and not strong enough to undertake this physically demanding job. She was, she said, always “breathless trying to pull the sheets… Sure, I was tiny, and then I was always getting the corners wrong. I could never get them right. I was always getting into trouble.” After pushing her, scolding her for her inability to maintain the factory pace, the nuns relented and moved her on to operate the compressor.

The nun in charge asked another woman, Irene, to show her how to operate the compressor. Slowly, Irene began to explain things to Martina. The two of them were still under the nun’s supervision, who did not seem to think that Martina’s training should interrupt the laundry’s tempo. “Hurry up,” she commanded. Perhaps she thought this was a fair warning, and maybe she didn’t realize Irene’s hand was still resting upon the crumpled sheet laid in the compressor, ready to be met with the thud of the heavy, searing metal lid. Either way, the nun slammed the compressor shut. A scream came from Irene like nothing Martina had ever heard before. The nun pulled back the compressor, and Martina says that her “whole insides turned out.” Irene’s hand had been so badly burned that the skin was gone. The nun sprayed something on it and told Irene to “shut up.”

It was 1978, and Katie had been at Seán McDermott Street for a year. For all their attempts at vocational reflection, the nuns still operated a spare the rod, spoil the child policy. Even though Katie had been warned on her first day in the laundry of the importance of silence, she sometimes still whispered to the girls beside her. For this she received strikes on the back of her legs with a cane from a nun, leaving raised red welts across her calves.

The nuns also struck her for misdemeanors in her work in the sorting room, such as not changing the polymarker, or for recording numbers incorrectly in the ledger, or for slacking in her duties. The supervising sister would deliver hard, stinging red slaps. Too slow! Slap. No talking! Slap. Mismatched polymarkers! Slap.

Initially, Katie’s greatest worry was being sent back to her family. “I was terrified of going back home. As bad and all as the Laundry was, I was terrified of going back home. And my fear was that if I didn’t behave myself or if I didn’t do what they told me to do or if I didn’t do the work properly, that they were going to get rid of me. They were going to send me back home again.”

But after that first year, she was living in fear of the next swipe across the face, and she came to loathe the Laundry, and all that she could see before her was another year of the same harsh monotony. Overwhelmed by hopelessness, Katie decided to take her own life. She sneaked two bottles of cough syrup from the cupboard in the kitchen, and one night she steeled herself before gulping them down, one after another. The side effect was no more than a deep night’s sleep; she woke the next morning feeling fine. And so it was on with the work for another day, and another week.

She began to assess the other ways out that she had observed, few as they were. Katie had heard that one of the girls ran away; another girl’s family had actually come to collect her. Then there was another girl who left for a job that had been arranged for her at a nearby hospital. But what life was there for Katie outside the Laundry?

The very next Sunday an opportunity presented itself. All week long the main entrance door was locked, but not when the visitors arrived in their dribs and drabs. Standing among the melee, Katie watched, waiting for the moment when the nuns’ complacency and her bravery would coincide. That would be her liberation. As the visitors milled about, Katie ducked out and walked into the daylight. But where to go now?

She stayed lost for two weeks, walking the streets of Dublin, cold, hungry, and homeless, gathering herself, deciding what to do. It seemed only two choices were before her: Either return to the Laundry, the place she had just escaped. Or return home, the placed she feared the most. She made her choice; she was homeward bound.

Katie was not given the welcome she hoped for. “My poor mother hadn’t even noticed I was gone because she was so badly beaten in her life that she was just living in her own little world, she wasn’t there. Do you know what I mean? She was there in body.” It seems that no social worker or nun from the Magdalene Laundry had reported Katie missing. And in that intervening year, no one had come to arrest her brother either. Upon seeing her in the house, he reasserted his dominance and wouldn’t let Katie stay.

It was then that she remembered the girl from the Laundry, who was said to have gone to work in a hospital in town. Katie went to the hospital and asked for this fleeting, practically anonymous acquaintance. Seeing Katie turn up like this annoyed the other girl, herself probably trying to scramble out of the nothingness from which they had come. Perhaps recognizing Katie’s desperation to find a foothold in life after the Magdalenes, and maybe understanding what it meant to really have nobody to care for you, she relented and fetched someone in charge—which meant, of course, more nuns. Katie told these nuns that she needed a job and somewhere to live. A little maid’s room was prepared for her, and they gave her a paid role working in the kitchen.

Katie soon had enough money to rent a flat of her own. She had independence, and with that came the time to sit with her thoughts, and the “memories of all the things that happened.” Now she was forced into the next phase, what all those who managed to leave the Laundries had to confront: learning to live with it.

Chapter 8 Silence

One of the more bewildering experiences when you travel outside your own country or corner of the world is having to pay in foreign currency. The texture and color of the paper is alien; the weight and shape of the coins are distracting in your fingers. Then there is the matter of conversion, because suddenly you have no idea of the value of something as familiar as a bag of groceries. You need to literally read the money to ascertain its value. As you fumble with the cash, you irritate those waiting behind you. There’s the little heat of embarrassment as you realize that everyone knows you are not from around here. I’ve never quite understood why it matters, but there is a weird discomfort to being baldly exposed as a stranger in a strange land.

That strangeness is also what makes traveling exhilarating, and part of what makes us grateful, having unsettled ourselves, to return to our old familiar routines. But what if you were from a land where the only currency is penance?

Even once they were no longer subjected to the institutional violence of the Laundries, the women were not liberated from their adversity. Life after the Magdalenes was often perplexing, especially for those who had been raised in the industrial schools. How do you, who are not a foreigner in the traditional sense, avoid giving away that you are the stranger in your own land? How do you become fluent in ordinariness when you have never been a citizen of everyday life? And how do you master the social cues when you cannot ask anyone for help?

In their accounts of those tentative and fragile early days after release, several women said that money was a particular challenge. Carol had been born in 1950 to a single mother and was removed by the courts to an industrial school when she was eighteen months old. She stayed there until she was sixteen and shortly thereafter found herself spending an extra two and a half years in a Magdalene Laundry. Carol said she was just aching to get out. She had heard stories about boys and boyfriends and the carefree stuff of girlhood. She used to think, “I would love to get out of here, try life, what it’s like.”

As was often the way, eighteen-year-old Carol was called to the office unexpectedly and told there was a couple waiting for her in a car outside. She was to go now, as she was to begin working for them. Though obviously no stranger to work, a more ordinary workplace was alien to her.

After her first week, the lady of the house handed Carol an envelope—it was her very first wage packet. “I was out there on me own; I hadn’t a clue about anything, not even money. When I got me wages… ‘What’s that for?’ I says to the woman in charge.”

The woman replied, “Those are your wages.”

But Carol was no clearer and so had to ask again, “What do I do with it?”

The woman told Carol to get in the car, they were going out. She drove them to the closest city, Galway. Carol followed the lady of the house as they climbed out of the car and now made their way down a bustling street, and she listened as this well-heeled lady, in a well-meaning moment, told Carol she could go into one of the shops to buy herself something. If the money had felt bizarre, that shopping trip only brought her further into this unknown territory. “Rather than go into a shop I’d hide outside, because I was never in a shop before—clothes shop, sweet shop, nothing—so I pretended I was in it, I was that scared. You know, even the thought of it now makes me very anxious.”

Even if Carol had managed to cover her fearful unfamiliarity, there was still the daunting matter of making financial sense of these exchanges. Marge found herself in a similar predicament. She had spent most of 1958 in the Magdalene Laundry in Galway, but she had already spent pretty much her whole life in institutions. Born in 1943 in a county home, Marge was subsequently raised in an industrial school after both of her parents died.

When she was released, Marge found that ordinary, routine demands were a reminder of all she had lost from a life spent confined within institutions. “When I had to work, I’d be so ashamed of not knowing things, words, especially arithmetic and things like that. And when I’d go to work and I’d come back from work, and you’d get your pay packet and you’d get a little slip in it and talk about your tax and everything like that and deductions and all like that. And you couldn’t understand it—you couldn’t understand, you know, and you wouldn’t know if you were being cheated or not.”

Even after everything they had endured, the humiliation, the degradation, the regimented way of life, those early days of freedom were “frightening,” as one survivor, Laura, recalled it. And, if she was honest, Laura went on, “I felt I wanted to be back in there again. You get the fear of God back in you because you were entombed in there.”

The nuns had not taught them about money or math, but it would be wrong to suggest that they had not been priming them in other ways. They had of course prepared them to be obedient Catholics: They knew the prayers, at Mass they knew when to genuflect and when to stand, and they knew how to bless themselves and what the rote responses were to the priest’s beckoning. They were trained to be traditionally useful. After all, they had been doing domestic work on an industrial scale. They had all the knacks for scrubbing the impossible stains in tile grout (gentle sanding, apparently), for removing blood from white coats (cold water first, hot water sets the blood), and starching nice shirts stiff. These lessons, if we can call them that, were not all the nuns had sought to instill in their subjects.

Elizabeth, who had been held at Sunday’s Well as a teenager in the 1950s, recalled being repeatedly told by the nuns that she could not be released until she was ready. Elizabeth refused her false name, bucked against her pointless labor and the potential infinitude of her detention. She had begged the nuns, when could she leave this blasted place? Their response was always the same: They had not built up her character enough.

Building someone up, and scaffolding their confidence, sounds positive. As far as the nuns were concerned, though, these girls had arrived bold and brassy from either the high life or the low life. They had rebelled from the natural order of Irishness. Their dispositions were unwieldy and must be tamed. Elizabeth pushed—“What does that mean, character?”—and the nuns told her, “You’ll have to learn to do as you’re told.”

Nora was in the Laundry in Northern Ireland for a comparatively short period of time after the Mother and Baby Home. Initially, she disregarded the personal and psychological impact of her incarceration. It was not that she found it benign—she understood that the regime was designed to degrade its subjects—but, Nora said, she already felt so low. “The Laundry didn’t have any bad effect because my self-esteem was nonexistent and it remained nonexistent.”

It now seems highly improbable that we will ever garner the testimony of the mothers and fathers such as Nora’s, who willfully employed the Laundries. For Nora, her mother’s rationalization was made perfectly clear, though. Her mother had her sent to the Laundry as punishment, Nora was certain of that. Yet she was convinced that her mother’s greater intent was “to make sure that I learned a lesson that this was unacceptable behavior. Except of course that it doesn’t teach you that at all. It teaches you lots of other things.”

Upon returning home, Nora found something was different; she seemed to have no ability to speak about where she had been. Her family had known exactly what had happened, yet they too seemed afflicted by the same stranglehold of silence: “It just was a nonevent, but a nonevent to be a bit ashamed of. And nobody else was talking about it, so I didn’t either… the rest of the family were as if nothing had happened… It was,” she lamented, “something to be ashamed of, because my own mother had done this to me.”

When Nora was pregnant years later, a legitimate pregnancy, she was chatting to her sister, who knew about Nora’s previous pregnancy and the subsequent adoption. That day, as they chatted, Nora’s sister asked how this pregnancy was going. Nora responded that she had morning sickness.

“Is it bad?” the sister asked.

“I don’t know, I’ve nothing to compare it to,” was Nora’s reply. Then she made the lie explicit. “I’ve never been pregnant before.”

Nora knew the truth, and she knew her sister did too. Yet there, in the privacy of her own home, with no one watching them, the truth was as unspeakable as ever.

The thousands of pages and hours of interviews that make up the archive of survivor testimony are filled with account after account of what it is like to hide who you are and where you have been. They learned not to draw attention to themselves, to withdraw just enough, so that they might disappear into the background of their own lives.

Everything must be kept quiet. Carmel said she also knew this, that she had to become a part-time fake and an imposter to make her way in the world. The other domestics at her first hospital job were mostly from Wexford. At first, she felt the flutter of old familiarity, because Wexford was the county where Carmel had been born and raised. The natural questions ensued, as the other girls tried to locate Carmel: who she knew, what were their overlapping connections and familiar haunts. Carmel was nervous. No matter what, she could not tell them that she had been through a series of the most shameful institutions: born in a county home, raised in an industrial school, dumped in a Magdalene Laundry. Carmel felt that they must “never, never, never” know about her past, but especially the Laundry, “because you were looked down on, you know.” She knew, as Nora Connolly O’Brien had observed, that being in a Laundry was a permanent mark of immorality—that you had done something truly despicable, that you were truly despicable.

She instead said she was raised in a boarding school. Why? they asked. “Oh, my father died at sea” came her response—a dramatic narrative flourish that I have often admired. It was a lie, as required, but one with an enigmatic allure, her own small rebellion against the demands of self-restraint.

Then there was Betty, who spent six years shuttling between three different Laundries from 1971 until 1977. She comes across as ebullient and upbeat in her statements. She said as much of herself. Betty described her affinity with positive people and her warm coterie of friends. She could not be open and easy everywhere, however. She found she had to tread carefully. Just as Carmel had discovered, Betty felt that the casual chit-chat at work was a danger zone. Betty remembered how she “used to kind of avoid situations now, like if they’re around the table now and somebody might be saying about their mother was sick or their sister, or do you know, all the conversations about family. I’d always try and pretend I’m just getting another cup of tea or something like that. I’ll change the subject, that way they wouldn’t have to ask me anything, you know.” The greatest horror would be to reveal, there in the banality of the tea room, that her mother was a “stranger” to her.

When you are repeatedly forced to retreat from social connection like this, loneliness is one of the abiding and ravaging consequences. Despite her desire to belong to someone, Betty said that if she was being courted by a man and he became effusive and confessed that he loved her, it seemed to instantly cauterize her mood, leaving her terse. The declaration of love meant he was “gone tomorrow.” “How could he love me, like, and my mother didn’t even love me? And I felt, do you know, you feel you weren’t wanted all your life, and what is this man now saying he loved me for? And I’m like, ‘Off you go.’ ”

That adroit ability to redirect conversations was easier to pass off at work, but once they started forming families, their home life could become another, more complicated frontline for half-truths.

Laura came from Galway, born in 1928 and reared in an industrial school. She spent two years in Limerick Laundry when she was twenty. The reason was familiar: not deemed ready for the world. After her release when she was twenty-two, Laura became steadfast in her staunch commitment to keeping her incarceration a secret. Later, when she had married, Laura said, “I couldn’t tell my husband that. I couldn’t tell my husband, never. I could never. I would have liked to have had a man that would understand me and be able to tell him all about it and well, as I said, it wasn’t my fault for being in there and things like that. But we couldn’t. That’s why I never told my children. I never have told the children.”

Michelle had been sent to a Laundry in Dublin for about eighteen months from when she was fourteen. She withheld this from her children until she was interviewed in 2013. She revealed that so much of what they thought they knew about her, their mother, was lies. But then she found the word lie did not sit right. A lie is born from a desire to deceive. What she was doing was something else. “I did make up lies, but they weren’t lies, they were actually shame. You don’t tell lies. You don’t tell lies to nobody. It’s shame, do you understand what I mean? You were afraid to tell the truth, so you shame yourself down to the lowest to get away with it.”

When she was seven, Marge was sent to an industrial school, which was soon her launchpad into the Laundry which, in turn, was her indoctrination into the realms of extreme reticence. “We weren’t able to talk in those days,” Marge recalled; opportunities for frank conversation were “very rare.” So, “you kept it inside.” Times have since changed, yet shame has not loosened its grip on Marge. She said that “even my sister, up to this day, I’ve never sat down and spoke to her” about any of this.

Sheila, who was released in the late 1950s after spending almost all of her twenties in Donnybrook Laundry, said that “you could never, never tell anyone you’d been in there. You could never tell it.” Yet Sheila had been brought to the Laundry by her own family members—who were members of the Legion of Mary.

How then do you respond to life when you have been drilled in disassociation? Antidepressants, suicidal ideation, sometimes harrowing acts of self-harm, attempts to take their own lives. For others, their institutionalized lives made them vulnerable to more abuse and neglect—bad boyfriends, violent husbands, shallow friendships—entrenching them further in their social isolation. That was certainly not the reality for everyone, but it was undoubtedly the case for some of the survivors.

In her fifties, Katie joined a choir. She looked on at the others as they assembled before their evening practice began and marveled at the ease with which they maintained warm and friendly acquaintances. They did not seem to find small talk daunting or arduous. They were able to answer innocuous throwaway inquiries like “How are you?” without saying, “My life is full of pain and hurt. I wish I was dead.”

Katie’s route home from rehearsal took her past the sea. One evening she looked out upon it and noticed the water was violently rough. Row after row of heavy waves were smothering the shore, and Katie felt the pull of the undertow and the water’s eviscerating power. “It looked so inviting.” She went closer, but then caught herself and whispered, “Katie, just keep walking, just keep walking.” And with that, she had willed herself home for another day.

Carol, Carmel, Betty, Laura, Michelle, Marge, Sheila, Katie. In presenting snippets from their lives after the Laundries like this, I do not mean to reduce these women and their experiences to a listicle. This is what it is like to read thousands of pages of testimony and see one woman after another snap her life into a few shards. It is to see that the fallout from the Laundries and a life lived in institutions is severe and often enduring; that the harm they did to those within the Laundry walls did not cease when their detention came to its abrupt end. All of that is often hard to spot because it was both hidden and overlooked.

Marge said she had always understood that this system was so designed to permanently exile women in exactly this way. They had been “locked away, shamed away,” and they were expected to “go to their graves” as “the silent people.”

Thousands of women, sent out into the world after the Laundries, fibbing and fabricating, erasing tranches of their lives. Each lie, each redaction a commitment to the mantra I am nobody, I am nobody, I am nobody. If they had been prepared by the nuns for anything outside the Laundry, it was this.

When I was growing up, I held a handful of errant lines from Seamus Heaney’s poem “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” in my mind:

Where to be saved you only must save face

And whatever you say, you say nothing

Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:

…

O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,

Of open minds as open as a trap.

I didn’t always say them in the right order and I certainly never said the whole thing, but I had what I needed from it. When I later sat down to properly read the entire poem, I was astonished, as well as embarrassed, to find that the words I had held close were not about what I had thought they were. Heaney was speaking, among other things, about the deft small talk used to evade Northern Ireland’s dangerous sectarian fault lines. Despite knowing they were directed at some other conversational camouflage, the rhythm of those lines had helped me understand something when I was younger about the adults around me, who seemed to speak in sayings—often funny, surreal, yet without apparent content, which to my child’s ear was mostly impenetrable. What was it they were talking about? Everything and nothing, it seemed.

When I set out on this project, I knew that the challenge I faced was how to research that which is not said. How do you excavate those sensibilities buried in the mind?

The thing about silence, though, is that it is encouraged and nurtured. In the first five decades of independence at the very least, the paralysis of silence was tightened by its great accomplices: gossip and scandal.

One of the most claustrophobic accounts of small-town Irish life was written by Edna O’Brien in 1989 for The New Yorker, a short story called “The Widow.” A widowed woman who becomes newly engaged is hounded by her community for being too confident, having that most dangerous of Irish dispositions, notions above her station. She would not get away with it. People begin to comment, to gossip. In a tragic twist, at the height of her torment from the pandemonium of local whispers, the widow dies in a car crash. Her neighbors come to see her as she lies in wake. Peering into the open coffin, without letting her death interrupt their judgment, they comment scathingly on how beautiful she looks, even as a corpse. She must be wearing makeup: “What a scandalous thing to adorn a corpse.” It must have been done, they concluded, at the hospital morgue, by “some chit of a nurse as wayward as” the widow “herself had been.”

When she wrote that story, Edna O’Brien knew all too well that when gossip failed, full-throated denouncement could follow. Edna O’Brien was born in 1930 in Clare, just when everything in the new nation was hardening. She wrote her first book in 1960. The Country Girls was a close and vivid portrait of girlhood and the tribulations of growing up in 1950s Ireland: alcoholic fathers, the impoverished farm life, an unforgiving convent education, class inequality. The girls made their escape because these lives of theirs could not contain their desires. They dreamed of boys, nice clothes, and glamorous places beyond their own little suffocating pocket of rural oppression. The book wasn’t trading in grubby sexual desire, but something about the openness of these girls’ longing was more than could be tolerated in 1960s Ireland. The Country Girls was banned by the censors, but that such a book was written by a woman, and a West of Ireland married mother at that, incensed the misogynistic passions of many people.

It is often said that O’Brien’s local parish priest collected copies and then burned them in the town square for all to see. The archbishop described it as “filth,” and a new charismatic Fianna Fáil politician, Charles Haughey, said that the book “should not be allowed inside any decent home.” Years later, O’Brien was back visiting her family home. She found a copy of the book in a moldering old trunk in an outhouse. This was where her mother had put it, though only after she had gone through it with her black pen and redacted “offending words” with the fervor of an amateur censor.

There was something didactic about this whole pitiless fiasco with O’Brien and her condemned novel. Women’s voices and women’s lives that could be seen or heard were to be handled with contempt. If a woman wanted to belong, she must contain herself—those were the rules.

Silence is also maintained through inaction, not asking, not pushing further on into a conversation in search of dangerous commodities such as facts. Nora said that when deploying her cover story, if she erred on a detail and got caught out in the lie, or when her cover stories no longer added up, she could rely on the fact that her interlocutor probably never thought that she, a nice, well-off girl, had been sent to a Mother and Baby Home, let alone a Laundry. And even if they did suspect something, Nora felt she was the kind of girl who could be believed: middle-class and from a respectable family. And the Laundries were so taboo that no one would ever be so brazen as to ask her directly, what happened to you? She could rely on the collective silence to protect her.

The thing about unwritten rules, though, is that, like most rules, you can never get everyone to fall in line. Rule-breakers persist, wittingly or unwittingly. Society itself, which is to say people—friends, family, neighbors, those in officialdom—police these transgressors when they bump up against the edges of acceptability and say too much.

A few survivors found this when they refused to be so discreet upon leaving the Laundries and felt compelled to share what they had been subject to. They were told to hush, stop making things up, to leave matters well enough alone, to stop with their “devil talk” and that they were “loony.” They were met with walls of denial at every turn. One woman, Bridie, recalled being told to “go ’way, it never happened.”

Of course, only certain kinds of women get listened to, let alone believed. The rejection of their claims as hoaxes was not just a dismissal of the Magdalene women as the classes of poor or troubled people—though it was certainly that as well. People wouldn’t believe them because they couldn’t believe them. “Nobody expected this kind of thing from religion,” Bridie said, and if people accepted that she had been in a convent, then she was chastised for not showing gratitude for being “taken in” by the nuns.

Imagine how painfully disorientating it must be to have been erased from the world, only then to be freed and to find yourself inhabiting a wrenching reality where the very people who had abused you were exalted. Priests were invited to bless everything from new Aer Lingus planes to freshly elected governments. They officiated in all of life’s rites of passage: baptism, Communion, confirmation, marriage, last rites, funerals. They ran schools, oversaw communities as their own personal flock, and shepherded family relations too. As the women themselves described, they were treated “like gods.” When I asked Father Barry—the chaplain at one of the Dublin Magdalene Laundries in the 1960s—what it was like to be a priest in that Catholic heyday, he glowed under the fond memory. In a way, this was all he wanted to discuss. He could hardly remember what the women at the Laundry looked like, or anything about the place, except that the nuns fawned over him, he got invited to dinners of notable locals, his views and authority were sought. As a priest he was Ireland’s equivalent of the “noblesse oblige,” he reminisced. Recalling that same vaunted manner with which priests strode through the streets, one survivor, Mary, described them not as nobles who were admired, but as akin to the Taliban, who were feared.

It was not just a warped deference to religion, but a pathological aversion to scandal that equally stalked the Irish mentality. In a bracing report on the widespread sexual abuse of children in industrial schools, Amnesty International Ireland emphasized that a fear of becoming embroiled in a scandal reinforced Ireland’s “culture of secrecy.” Giving one harrowing example of that once standard mindset, they quote a mother who found out in 1974 that her young son had been groomed and then sexually abused by their local priest. She discussed matters with her husband, and the couple went to meet with a different priest to report it. He in turn wrote a letter to the archdiocese to relay what he had been told. Another senior priest was then tasked with conducting a discreet review of the matter. He went to the boy’s home to speak with his father. He sat down and told him that the priest had admitted that his son’s story was true and that the priest would be sent for treatment. The case, it seemed, was closed. Though the boy’s mother saw the abusing priest around the town not long afterward.

Such a surreally muted response to the vilest conduct came to pass partially because the parents had made the decision to keep that dreadful knowledge tucked within the family and not report it to the gardaí. “In case it was scandal, I suppose,” the mother later said. “That’s the way we were instructed in those days—you didn’t give scandal—and we went out of our way not to let anybody know who it was.”

This incident certainly reveals the extent to which such egregious activities were known by the Church, and it shows the imprimatur of the priests. It also exposes something darker and more wretched. That puritanical equilibrium was maintained because silence had become a virtue to which people seemed to be tragically bound. In his short story “A Doctor’s Visit,” Anton Chekhov wrote the startling lines that “the strong and the weak were both equally victims of their mutual relations, unwillingly submitting to some directing force, unknown, standing outside life, apart from man.” In 1974, that abused boy and his abuser, the priest, were equal before this force. Such “logical absurdity,” Chekhov concludes, comes about only when one is willing to look the other way.

The absence of talk is a potent gesture. It takes on a force that envelops even the most garrulous among us. It is a statement about who belongs, whose lives we empathize with and whose loss we do not grieve or simply do not notice. It is also a statement about what stories are the most difficult to hear. So, even if this mother had wanted to blow the whistle, who was there to tell? Who was willing to listen?

Long after Nora had left the Laundry, when another furtive family fact was discovered, she found herself automatically obeying the “silence my mother imposed upon us.”

At home, while riffling aimlessly through the drawers of forgotten fiddly bits of domestic life, she found a letter. It was from her sister to her father. She had written to him many years before, though Nora didn’t say how long. The letter was to let him know that their brother had got a girl pregnant. The baby was born in England. The matter had been dealt with, which was to say the baby had been adopted, it seems. From what Nora could ascertain, her father had never revealed this illegitimate pregnancy to her mother. Perhaps that was an act of kindly protection, as he knew his wife’s unflinching views on such indiscretions. But why would he really have needed to tell her at all? What did Nora’s brother have to cover up? He was the father after all and never had to face the precipice that Nora was made to walk. As she said herself, “He didn’t have to carry the baby… He could walk away. And he did.”

Nora said nothing then and has said nothing since. When she was interviewed in 2013, her brother was still not aware that Nora knew about his nameless, disappeared baby. In saying nothing, she too had colluded with the cover-up. Her parents, respected local business owners, with children who had attended decent boarding schools, had two illegitimate grandchildren that they knew of, but never saw and never spoke of. “So, in theory,” Nora reflected, “it happened, but it didn’t happen.” It was as if the underside was never “experienced by my family.”

I had missed this detail upon my early reading of Nora’s lengthy transcript, so focused on her shame and silence that I missed the shame and silence all around her. It was not the last time the silences in Nora’s story would evade me.

In her testimony, the confronting and eloquent way Nora described the Laundries was visceral. Her responses seemed to articulate something about the ignominy that was shared by numerous survivors. She spoke for so many, I thought. What I hadn’t realized was that Nora still was not able to speak fully for herself.

She gave her interview in 2013 to a group of academics. Not long after this, in 2016, the Northern Ireland Executive commissioned a report into the history of the Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries in that jurisdiction. It was not so much that the system in Northern Ireland was different—in fact, for the Good Shepherd Sisters who operated the three Magdalene Laundries in the North, the border meant very little. That border does matter politically, however, and so the official reports that have been produced about the Laundries on the island in the last fifteen years have been conducted separately. What distinguishes the report produced in Northern Ireland is that it was undertaken by a team of historians who were already known for their interest in gender studies and skills in oral history interviewing. The final report was published in 2021, and it included detailed accounts of the Laundries as well as the extended segments dedicated to the voices of the women who were there.

In the five-hundred-plus pages of the Northern Ireland report, one woman mentioned that she was from the Republic of Ireland; she had been to a boarding school; her mother had sent her as punishment. While this woman’s identity was anonymized, this must be Nora, surely, I thought. There were more telltale details. The job she had in the Laundry was the same (packing room), as were her very particular self-asserting comments about the food (it needed black pepper) and the “mind-numbing” atmosphere. Then I read the one major difference. This time, speaking to researchers in 2018, Nora revealed that the baby she had at the Mother and Baby Home before being sent to the Laundry was her second “illegitimate” pregnancy. She had been sent to a Mother and Baby Home before, in fact, only a few years earlier, as a teenager.

Sixteen years old and away at boarding school, Nora had written to her mother to let her know that she had missed her period. Her mother understood the coded message loud and clear. She collected her teenage daughter and brought her to the doctor to confirm what she already feared: Nora was pregnant. Off she was sent to a Mother and Baby Home in the North.

That pregnancy with the boyfriend in England was Nora’s second pregnancy. In its own tragic way, this clarified something for me: Her mother arranging for Nora to go to a Laundry after the Mother and Baby Home had always struck me as incredibly harsh, even by the standards of the time. The measure was usually a last resort, for those intractable characters who had fallen more than once. With that second pregnancy, so soon after her first, Nora had become a “repeat offender.” In 1932, the Department of Local Government wrote that “these women appear to be feeble-minded and need supervision and guardianship. The Magdalen Asylum offers the only special provision at present for this class.”

In this later interview, Nora recalled the “petty nastiness” the nuns displayed on this second stay at the Mother and Baby Home. They let the other women know that Nora was a “more fallen woman than the rest of them.” This was not a slip that would be dealt with like the last time, via a short, secret sojourn. She had shown herself to be a serious recidivist, in need of serious reform.

That Nora came forward not once but twice to meet researchers speaks of her immense generosity as much as her bravery. It also reveals, I think, her persistent desire to be heard.

Mick had visited his local Laundry in Limerick as a child several times in the 1960s. He was attending a nearby boys’ school, and once a year at Christmas, the boys were put on a minibus and shuttled over to St. Mary’s Magdalene Laundry to sing for the women. “I suppose it was the ignorance of the time, but we didn’t care. We were just led along without asking questions,” Mick said. And he was sincere too about how detached his life seemed from those of the convent. “I always remember people there were always in the distance. I can never remember meeting anyone even though the hall would be full… I can actually half see them.” So Mick saw and did not see, he knew, but also did not know. Even there, confronting each other, there was no communication between them at all, he recalled. “There was always a gap between us. You know, we just didn’t mix. We didn’t say hello. They didn’t come up and say they enjoyed the show. None of that happened as far as I can remember. It was like passing in the night, now that I think of it. You know,” Mick realized, “I have never once thought about this in my whole life.”

Mick came forward to give this interview in 2010 after receiving a notice that had been put through his door by a postgraduate art student, Evelyn Glynn. Glynn had personally posted her call for interviewees in every mailbox in the surrounding area as she was looking for local people who remembered anything of the Limerick Laundry when it was in operation. It is an incredible piece of testimony, because Mick is summoning a silent past in a small window of time just after the Laundries had started to be discussed, but before a formal set of ways to speak about the Laundries, and the acceptable ways to remember them, had come into ascendance. Meaning his reflections lack a certain certitude and accusatory zeal.

Mick forgot this bit of his life not because it was horrible and harrowing and he had to stuff it right down with the things one wishes to neither acknowledge nor admit. He forgot it because it was prosaic, because he barely thought about it in the first place, a fact that seemed to perplex him during the interview because it was now quite clear to him that the Laundries had been dark and insidious.

As he recalled his youthful excursions to the Laundry, he was struck by other memories. “It’s drifting in now,” he marveled. “It’s amazing what you remember once you start.” His annual festive choir visits were not his only, not even his first, visits to the Limerick Laundry. Now he remembered that as a younger boy, he would regularly accompany his mother as they walked down the road to drop off their washing at the convent. “I think I can remember walking up with my mother and giving in the laundry, but even then, it was them and us, completely.”

Why, he wondered now, had it all happened like this? That groups of people could be so permanently estranged from one another. “You couldn’t talk to them. You see, you didn’t want to either. This is the sad thing. Isn’t this what it all comes down to, really?… None of us gave a damn. And if you did give a damn, nobody would listen anyway in the 1960s.” And so, now, while some “are blaming people for ignoring it,” he said, “everybody ignored it. We ignored it.”

We can talk about power, and who had it and who didn’t. We can tussle over who was to blame for this aversion to admitting there were dalliances, pleasure-seeking, dancing, misguided romances, broken hearts, and desperate, aching human need. But what happens when silence becomes good manners? How do we live when shame seeps into our homes and shapes our expectations of ourselves, but also the ones we love the most? What was it like when to become a respectable family your reputation had to be built upon secrets? People conceded to the silence around them—through inaction, enthusiastic approval, complicity, or complete indifference, they sustained the very system that ensnared them, and created the conditions for the Laundries’ taken-for-granted permeance.

When I try to envisage what all this meant in an ordinary home, I immediately think about people like Nora’s mother and father. Parents who, despite the numerous opportunities, seemed unable to say the only thing that mattered, the only words that their son and daughter needed to hear: I love you. Don’t go.

Love, though, is something that is learned through feeling, from experiencing it, of being given it. While survivors had been churned through loveless institutions, it isn’t clear that such lessons in love were in the ascendance more generally either.

Love was among the passions that were a threat to the project of national purity. There is so much talk of sex in the archives, the absence of it, the reality of it, the dangers of it, the aims of it. The union between two people was to be a mechanical and marital act that yielded the miracle of life, and no more. It was not for pleasure or intimacy; it could not be accidental or meaningless. Those kinds of acts were wanton. In the censorship of books, magazines, and films—that portrayed such charged romances—the Church and State and their many supporters had tried to eradicate this tantalizing feeling of love. In the 1920s and 1930s, ignorance was believed to be the source of “good moral behavior.” Sex, the public was told, caused venereal disease, violence, and worst of all, illegitimacy. Where was the place of love? As one woman, Mary, who survived both industrial schools and Sunday’s Well Laundry, told me, she felt they had spent their entire lives being taught only to love God and hate themselves.

There were 11,000 women in the Laundries; 56,000 women and girls in Mother and Baby Homes; 57,000 babies born there, of whom 9,000 died; 170,000 children reared in industrial schools; 20,000 people languishing each year in asylums. One in every 100 Irish people were contained in institutions. There was something all too common about what was happening in Nora’s family—decorum mattered over decency, and it demanded the disappearing of people and the keeping of secrets. It was a cultivated obliviousness. A point made in the most powerful and simple terms by one survivor, Martha, when she said that really, “the biggest sin in Ireland” was not sex; it was “talk.”

Overt silence was, Mick said, “a completely collective thing,” and, he concluded, “that was just the culture.” That was not said to shift any responsibility onto ordinary people, or families, or society. It was only to observe why something like the Laundries could happen, persist for so long, be industrial in scale, and yet people could seem shocked when they were to be revealed, as it were. It had come to be, for a while at least, that the whole nation was subsumed in a subterfuge of a scale that was beyond any one institution to control.

In homes, on the streets, and in the corridors of power, everyone knew: Whatever you say, say nothing. Yet the secret of the Magdalene Laundries was never forgotten. It was a reality that had to be defended against; open secrets are like that, they have “to be suppressed over and over again.” The rule of silence and custody of the senses was not just for the fallen but expected of everyone. Permeating the intimacies within families and between communities, silence lay across the country like a pall.

That is how an institution that held more people than the prisons, where the public, government, and businesses interacted with it via the laundry service, managed to slip into the realm of respectable silence. Describing this system as a product of collusion of Church and State, as has become the usual refrain, seems too active—collusion requires conniving talk, nefarious and pointed discussion, a clearly defined end goal.

It was instead a world of winks and nods, knowing looks, and looking the other way. Where ordinary people learned not to ask about those girls, never to mention their names, let alone grieve their absence. Such that sisters, aunts, cousins, neighbors, mothers, and even newborn babies could disappear, never to be spoken of again.

Chapter 9 Demise

John Kennedy was born and raised on a farm outside Limerick in the southwest of Ireland. His childhood was “very sheltered” and “steeped in religion.” At eighteen, he went to university in Cork to study dairy science, where he was a member of the Dairy Science Society—the pleasingly named “Cowpunchers.” Thereafter he took a job as a production manager and began building his reputation in the industry. In 1976, still only in his mid-thirties, an opportunity arose to buy an established local business. His aunt, Sister Anna, was a nun at a convent in Limerick. She told him that her order was thinking of selling their laundry, and would John be interested in taking it on?

St. Mary’s convent in Garryowen, Limerick, which included the Magdalene Laundry, was a place John knew well and felt warmly toward. At only a few weeks old, he’d been brought on his first visit, bundled up in the Moses basket to be shown off to his aunt. As children, he and his siblings visited her once a month and were doted upon in the parlor by the other nuns, who came carrying a big shiny biscuit tin. It was a treat the children had come to expect, and they watched with glee as one nun pried open the snug lid. When the weather was forgiving enough during the summertime, John and his siblings played in the grounds at the front of the convent, dashing among the lime trees in the grove, and trying in vain to catch the unsuspecting goldfish flittering in the pond. Despite there being an orphanage on the convent grounds, these fish were quite unused to rambunctious children pawing at them. John said that while he could hear those other children “in their playground over the railing, the difference between their lives and mine never crossed my mind.”

John and his siblings, however, did cross another threshold. “We used to be taken by my aunt over to the laundry and boiler house to visit the women there. Initially, when we were very small, they used to frighten us, because they would all crowd around us and all we could see was a sea of faces. But as we got older, we got over our shyness and used to love running around the place.” His aunt, Sister Anna, was also a great woman for the arts, and would help arrange operettas and plays with the women and girls in the Laundry.

What went on behind the convent walls of the Good Shepherd in Limerick, and who was there, was never a mystery to John. Perhaps that is partly the reason why when he was an adult, the nuns looked to him as a trusted person who might be able to help them.

In 1976, he drove round the back, bypassing the convent, parked his car, and walked straight into the laundry. He was there to look at the books. It was clear to John that the 1973 oil crisis had, as he put it, “brought the laundry to its knees.” Yes, they had an unpaid workforce, but their prices didn’t capitalize on this, as far as John saw it. Instead, he surmised that the nuns seemed to use this to subsidize the cost to the customer, rather than turn a fat profit.

This practice had not gone unnoticed by other laundry businesses. They had been losing contracts to the Magdalene Laundries across the twentieth century because of their unbeatable prices. The commercial laundries—with their outgoings on wages—could not compete, and with each lost contract, jobs were threatened. In 1945, the Irish Women Workers’ Union decided to take a stand. They wanted workers’ protections and a right to leisure. Women from fourteen laundries were out on strike for thirteen weeks. Over that time, they garnered the backing of the public and in the end won the right to two weeks of annual leave, the first of its kind given in Ireland. This was extended to every worker. The solidarity of this union fight, impressive as it so clearly was, did not encompass the women locked in the Laundries.

Today, for different reasons, the financial circumstances of the Laundries are one of the most contentious aspects of this history. With penitents essentially being enslaved, it is hard to see how the nuns failed to maximize their income. Otherwise, what was the point of the endless labor?

The perception of the Laundries as threadbare, and the nuns as frugal, is one that the nuns themselves have continued to reiterate. There is some proof of this. One of the most persistent means by which the Laundries poked their way into the realms of the everyday was through their charity appeals. Once a year the nuns took to the airwaves and made an annual radio appeal for donations. Advertisements were also placed in local and national papers. They were simple and direct, such as this one from 1955:

The Superioress and Sisters
of

THE MAGDALEN ASYLUM

Lower Gloucester St., Dublin,

Very earnestly beg the support of the

Liberal and kindhearted, to help them

With the upkeep of the institution
for 130 Poor Penitents, who receive
a home within its walls.

There was a steady flow of donations. Money came into convents from collection baskets across the country. Some people even left the Laundries lump sums in their wills.

Activists reject the impression the nuns gave, of only ever having meager finances to operate and maintain the Laundries. Given the scale of the operation, how could anything else be true? The thousands of women, the millions of items of laundry, and the many lucrative contracts: from the army, hotels, boarding schools, tennis clubs, prisons.

As a religious organization, the nuns were not expected to comply with the same financial reporting laws as set out for charities and businesses. This renders moot any chance to calculate the profits of the Laundries from regulatory documents. Other clever ways to assess the financial health of the Laundries similarly fall short. The profit that they generated cannot be calculated backward from any income tax, because the Laundries never paid that either. When it came to the money, as with much else, the Laundries were a law unto themselves.

Today, the nuns’ steely guard on their accounts has only added to the suspicion that there must have been money to hide. In their State investigations into the Magdalene Laundries, appointed officials working on behalf of the Irish government and the Northern Ireland Executive were permitted to look at the Laundries’ financial ledgers. Each concluded that the Laundries indeed did not seem to be a massive profit-generating business “and often operated close to, or at, a loss.” Though these are caveated claims, as the investigators admitted that the financial archive was “limited in extent.” Some religious orders said that their old logs and annals did not survive.

The Good Shepherd Sisters sold Sunday’s Well in late 1994, and it was to be turned into a university campus. Those plans were ultimately cast aside, and the once “splendid pile of buildings” that sat upon a steep hill overlooking Cork, and had been compared to Ireland’s Lhasa, were abandoned. The building was ravaged by several fires. According to the Good Shepherd Sisters, their old financial files could be no more than sieved in the embers of those blazes.

Like items from past civilizations that find their way to the surface in melting glaciers, telling bits of the Laundry have also reemerged, sometimes in unexpected places. The White House bar in Limerick is a classic but unassuming pub. The walls are tiled with framed photos, and there is a fireplace at one end, with a nearby shelf stacked decoratively with old tomes—ramping up the pub’s traditional atmosphere. The publican said he had bought the big old leather-bound ledgers as part of a job lot at auction, along with some furniture, when the local Good Shepherd nuns were clearing out. Line after line of handwritten notes and neatly ruled margins across these broad pages, about a foot in height and width, detailed the lists of customers and accounts from the Laundry in the 1950s.

Another order, the Sisters of Charity, at the Laundry at Donnybrook, where Eileen had been sent in the 1950s, claimed they had been beset by the same problem of lost files. The nuns still live on these convent grounds in tight rows of small gray bungalows, giving the place a feel more like a retirement village. At the back, though, the vacated laundry building had sat largely ignored for years. In 2018, a curious academic living locally gained access to the abandoned laundry. There, in a dust-caked filing cabinet, were the very financial records, from 1960 until 1987, that the nuns had declared lost. They were comprehensive, with every penny itemized, and a list of over nine hundred customers. Accountants were soon asked to examine the ledgers and they came to the conclusion that the Donnybrook Laundry’s accounts had a surplus, but only a moderate profit.

The surplus was spent on various necessities to keep the Laundry running: food, industrial volumes of soap, barrels of oil, new machines, and the small amount of pocket money paid to the women in the modernizing era from the 1970s. This left Donnybrook Laundry operating close to a break-even basis. Except for one discrepancy. The account for Donnybrook shows that a sizeable chunk of this surplus was transferred regularly to the Sisters of Charity’s main bank account. It was their dues. The profit margins, which also included donations and bequests, had been suppressed, rather than spent. The religious order was flush, but the Magdalenes’ bank balance had them operating on a subsistence basis. But in 1975, before the dues of IR£31,000 were paid, the surplus for Donnybrook was IR£59,332. That’s the equivalent of €541,334 or $636,115, today.

John Kennedy, who looked over similar columns of contracts, outlays, and overheads a year later in Limerick, was trying to make sense of the laundry as a business proposition. He saw that the volume of trade was strong, but that financially, what was coming in did not line up with what was going out. If the prices were the problem, John thought, then he could turn it around. He agreed to come in as a manager to see if he could improve the business, and then he would buy the laundry from the nuns.

It was clear to him that the laundry of 1976 was a far cry from the one he first visited as a child in the 1940s and 1950s—it was “a state-of-the-art industrial place of work.” In the first year and a half, the ninety-three women who worked there would stay on, but it was his intention, according to John, to transition the Laundry into a fully commercial operation with outside staff and with the women being paid the going rate. The nuns agreed.

The women were warm and welcoming to John. On the odd occasion that he would bring his small children with him to the laundry, one woman would set them up inside one of the trolleys and whiz them about the room as they squealed with delight.

He remembered as a child that the women in the laundry were constantly singing religious songs, but by the time he arrived in the 1970s, many of the regimented old ways were over, and the women had more camaraderie because they had been allowed to form an amiable community. Brigid confirmed this too. On three separate occasions she said, “We used to have great laughs sometimes.”

In those early days, as John familiarized himself with the space, he walked past a great modern washing machine. “That’s Butchy,” one woman said. It had arrived as a brand-spanking-new piece of equipment in 1965, after Vatican II. By 1965, the radio would play while the women worked. That year Ireland’s Eurovision entry was the dashing showband favorite Butch Moore. His song “Walking the Streets in the Rain” was a heartbroken croon about the sorrow of no one knowing how alone you are. The women loved it, as did most of the country. It was a No. 1 hit and played endlessly. They nicknamed their shiny new machine in Butch Moore’s honor.

John felt immediate affection for the women of St. Mary’s. Many of those who were still there by then were old and infirm, and sometimes the unwanted or long since forgotten. Brigid said John Kennedy was good to them, and the two of them became firm friends. With an abundance of affection, John said Brigid was a “big softie.” Every so often she looked to him and in a pleading drawl said, “I didn’t do anything wrong, Mr. Kennedy”—he could never get her to drop the Mr. Kennedy and call him only by his first name, he said. As they worked, they all told him stories of what it had been like there, the cruelty they had endured, the depths of their suffering, the feeling of being abandoned, the stigma that cloaked them. He absorbed all of these stories.

And so, as John had promised, the Limerick Laundry transitioned into being just that, a local commercial laundry, known from then on as the Pennywell Laundry, sitting at the back of the large Good Shepherd convent. It had outside staff, working alongside women like Brigid who were now official employees, paid the same as the others.

John wasn’t the only person taking on a newly appointed managerial role inside the Laundries, nor was Limerick the only Laundry with a growing paid outside workforce. As the convent Laundries entered the commercial sphere, they had to contend with the tribulations of the economy.

In 1984, during a long recession, Galway’s Magdalene Laundry, run by the Sisters of Mercy, closed. The local newspaper published the story, and the article was concerned with the sane, secular questions of a modernizing society. What was to become of the forty-strong workforce who now faced unemployment? Of this forty, the article reported there were seventeen Magdalene women. That the women were considered among the employed, and not the penitential, is a stark change from the reporting in previous decades, when they carried sermons that described the women as irresponsible children and giddy creatures. The nuns refused to offer an official comment. They let it be known, though, that they had begun to negotiate a fair severance package for the twenty-three paid employees with the union. The article stated that the seventeen women, some of whom were pensioners who “had lived in the Magdalen Home since they were teenagers,” were not union members. The nuns were “looking after arrangements” for them.

On May 22, 1971, Connolly Station in Dublin was thronged with reporters and photographers. They were all awaiting the arrival of the train from Belfast. Forty-seven members of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM) were returning to the capital from Northern Ireland with contraceptives, which remained illegal in the Republic. They were openly breaking the law, but believed, rightly, that they would not be arrested or punished. This stunt became known as the “Contraception Train,” and it was the beginning of the IWLM’s strident campaign against what they said was “a Church dictatorship.”

The Church railed against these activists in much the same manner as they had ostracized modern women in the 1920s and 1930s: They took to the pulpits to make their denouncements. In 1971, at a large outdoor public Mass that was reported in the newspapers, one of the bishops warned the congregation gathered below him that “probably never before, certainly not since the penal days, had the Catholic heritage of our country been subjected to so many insidious onslaughts on the pretext of conscience, civil rights, and women’s liberation.”

Contraception was the unifying issue for women’s rights activists, partially because they were campaigning against the farcical way in which contraception had recently become accessible in Ireland. From 1963, a doctor could prescribe the pill, but only to help women with irregular periods. The popularity of this option was such that one obstetrician is reported as having said that Ireland appeared to “have the highest incidence of irregular cycles in women in the history of the human race.” As long as the Catholic political posture was maintained, then this was a matter that the government and the Church seemed happy to ignore, but it was this hypocrisy that feminist activists were intent on exposing.

In three separate legislative changes, IWLM activists won some of the reforms that they wanted. The first two were in 1973. The infamous marriage bar was abandoned. From then on, women in the civil service, industry, and State bodies were no longer obliged to retire once they were married. Contraception was legalized in the same year, though only for married couples; at last, in 1985, contraception was made widely available and without stipulations.

An equally vociferous counter-resistance from a new generation of Catholic fanatics was mounted. If women could win the right to contraception, the fundamentalists would outdo them in the scale of their ambition. Determined to demonstrate the depth and significance of “God’s Law,” they aimed to trump meager legislation. The Catholic hardliners campaigned for an addition to the constitution known as the Eighth Amendment, designed to protect the life of the unborn as a foundational principle of the nation. The women’s liberationists could have their condoms, but they would never be allowed abortions. The Eighth Amendment passed into law after a public referendum in 1983. But their victory over secularization was short-lived. By the mid-nineties, Ireland, its economy, its people, its way of life, were suddenly in the throes of a progressive, even “radical,” social revolution.

Women were soon “abandoning the notion that their lot in life was to get married, to get pregnant, and to beget a large family.” In 1961, a mere 5 percent of all married women worked outside the home, but by 1991, this had gone up to 37 percent.

Mary Robinson, a progressive and long-time campaigner for women’s rights, was voted in as Ireland’s first female president in November 1990. In a stirring speech, she accepted her historic title before a crowded room and declared that the women of Ireland knew their time of change had come, and “instead of rocking the cradle, they [had] rocked the system.” There was an uproarious response of exuberant whoops and cheers.

The emotional charge behind ideas of immorality became limp and embarrassingly stagnant. Did an illegitimate pregnancy really forecast the moral decay of a nation? Illegitimacy was struck off the legislation in 1987. Officially at least, no one could be born, or pushed, beyond the pale of normality and made invisible. The trend against legally sanctioned marginalization continued. Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1993. Divorce was legalized in 1995 by popular vote in a referendum.

This is all the more remarkable as less than a decade earlier, in 1986, two thirds of the electorate voted against divorce, and as late as 1990 it showed no signs of supporting secularization either. In the 1990 European Values survey, Irish citizens stood out from their peers across the Continent—the vast majority believed in life after death and the power of prayer.

The government began to reflect further on its own responsibilities. A white paper produced in 1984 suggested that they needed to stop relying so heavily on the asylums and develop community-oriented care for citizens who were vulnerable and in need.

Perhaps there could be no better indicator of Ireland’s metamorphosis than when, at last, in 2003, a copy of the Carrigan Committee Report and all its associated files were lodged in the National Archives in Dublin. A document once considered so incendiary that it had to be de facto classified for seventy-two years at last joined the ephemera of times gone by.

The incredible pace of change was accelerated by the Celtic Tiger, an economic phenomenon that had found its feet in the early 1990s. After being considered a “semi-developed” and “third world” country as late as the 1980s, Ireland experienced an average GDP growth of 7 percent per annum in the 1990s. It was like a lottery win. This small island had somehow, in the changing fortunes of global economics, won investment, trade partners, and new industries. By the early 1990s, agriculture gave way as the dominant industry to the manufacturing and service industries that had first been nurtured in the 1960s and were rapidly beginning to proliferate. The parvenu ebullience of new wealth swept the nation. And like any unexpectant winner of a jackpot, the government spent their money in flashy ways. New roads and motorways, and grand works of public sculpture, were planned; cities were redeveloped; there were rises in public pay and minimum wages. The government also built Ireland’s first women’s prison, which opened in 1999. From then on, there would be no women clandestinely incarcerated; they would be legally imprisoned, with rights to due process, appeal, and transparency about departure dates.

With the demise of so much that had once been Catholic Ireland and the change in economic potential, the ceaseless flow of people emigrating came to an end, and the diaspora began to return home. For the very first time in its history, citizens from other countries wanted to move to Ireland. In 1996, Ireland began to experience net immigration, and so there was a lessening of Ireland’s overwhelming demographic homogeneity.

The people of the Church, such as nuns and priests, were also challenging the old orthodoxies. Some argued for a restatement of their purpose. The Church should be informed by social justice, actively supporting the homeless and the poor, rather than gathering them up like souls for heaven. Some nuns even took to the streets in the 1980s to protest against growing inequality. In 1995, one priest, Father Kevin Hegarty, wrote an editorial in the Irish Times asserting that the Church could learn something from the “secular, democratic society in which it operates,” in particular “the value placed on freedom of speech and expression.”

By the time he was writing in 1995, expressing dissent against the Church had become a common feature of the daily news diet. Across the 1990s, there was a series of scandals that shattered the last vestiges of the Church’s legitimacy. In a cascade of media exposés, either through sit-down interviews or newspaper exclusives, several priests were outed for breaching their religious vows or breaking the law by having affairs, fathering children, or for pedophilia.

The urgency and somber tone of the reportage also signaled that Church authority could be—and really, must be—questioned, and that their conduct was itself appallingly questionable, and had always been so. One after another, this concatenation of scandals felt like land mines violently exploding under the effigies of Irish statehood: the Church, the silence, the buttoned-up obedience. While belief in Catholicism did not wane, by the end of the 1990s the oppressive Catholic climate that had once been suffocating politics and the community had cleared.

The way I recall it, even as a child, it felt as though society was simultaneously coming apart and being put back together. You could not avoid it. The adults around me seemed enthralled by change. The homemade furniture and hand-sewn curtains that we had grown up with were all replaced. It was an incredible transformation; there could be no reminders of how we had lived.

Amid these circumstances, Dublin hosted the 1994 Eurovision contest. The interval show is usually some sort of camp composition of national heritage, and often the most overlooked performance of the night. Not so in 1994. This was to be the first showing of Riverdance. It began with the longing voices of dispossessed singers replaced by a thundering chorus line of Irish dancers. It was sensational. Afterward, it was all people could talk about. At my own Irish dancing lesson the following week, the planned practice had to be put on pause while we tried to reenact what we had seen, what we had felt. It wasn’t so much like a reinvention but a reengagement. Ireland: dynamic, modern, and suddenly culturally cool. This was the beginning of something. The country was overcome with remembering the old Ireland and a new celebration of those traditions. But there was also a great deal of forgetting.

The Irish for I am sad is Tá brón orm. The direct translation, however, is more non-determinative: There is a sadness upon me. Sorrow is transitory because it is not who you are, just where you are at. Tá brón orainn: There is a sadness upon us. Irish society had not been fundamentally cruel, or intolerant, or indifferent across the twentieth century. But a heavy mood of this kind had sat upon them.

By the 1990s, everything that had just been—the ways, the words, the guff of sin, evil, moral reclamation, the fallen—was suddenly archaic. In an instant, it was over. Everything was now in the past. The problem was, the past wasn’t the sole proprietor of the Laundries, not yet.

From the late 1960s, the Magdalene institutions had begun to close down, and the end of St. Mary’s Magdalene Laundry in Limerick was but one in the slow demise of the Magdalene Laundries. Dun Laoghaire in Dublin closed first in 1963, followed shortly thereafter by the nuns selling New Ross to another order in 1967.

A dwindling number of women and girls were sent, brought, coaxed, and cajoled through the doors with each passing year until the Laundries had fallen out of favor entirely, like the idea of the fallen woman itself. Just as morality changed, so too did domestic washing habits. The businesses slowed; people no longer needed a specialist service to wash and press cuffs and collars.

By the time John had fully taken over the commercial laundry in the mid-1980s, there were only three Magdalene Laundries left in operation: Seán McDermott Street, High Park, and Donnybrook. Many of the other Laundry buildings sat empty, and, lashed by the rain, they rotted. They were haunting but poetic in their decomposition. Crucifixes fell from walls, weighty old sheets lay crumpled, the paint came away in satisfying chunks. Others were repurposed, reflecting the need for other kinds of institutions: universities, schools, social housing, accommodation for vulnerable women and families.

Seán McDermott Street was the last Laundry to close. In its final days it held forty women. The oldest was seventy-nine, and the youngest was by no means young. A survey of the Dublin Laundries was conducted by a nun just a few years earlier. She counted 241, mostly elderly, women still in the three remaining Laundries, 80 percent of whom had been there for over ten years. A staggering 50 percent of the women had been there for over thirty.

A month before it closed in 1996, the Irish Times interviewed Sister Lucy Bruton. Sister Lucy was the last Reverend Mother of a Magdalene Laundry in Ireland, meaning she was the last person in charge of a Magdalene Laundry in the world. Among Seán McDermott Street’s last remaining washing contracts was one for Mountjoy, Ireland’s main men’s prison. A van would ferry the dirty and clean loads back and forth across the north inner city once a day. The laundry was primarily operated by a hired workforce, though the women still had menial tasks—described by Sister Lucy as “industrial therapy,” which I take to mean keeping the women busy with the only thing there was to do within the walls: ironing towels and pillowcases.

Of the forty women, only nine had no known relatives. Relatives were allowed to visit the other thirty-one, though they rarely did, according to Sister Lucy. She said that she would periodically ring families to let them know how the women were, but still, visits were not forthcoming. Sister Lucy revealed that in recent years, a family had called to inform one of the women that her mother had died. They had delayed sharing the news until after the funeral, as they were worried that this exiled family member might attend. Sister Lucy seemed to be at pains to remind readers that the nuns had taken in those whose families did not want them, and whom society would not accept. “Many of the women didn’t have a hope in hell without us.”

During his time, John recalled there was a commotion late one afternoon at Limerick Laundry. A man had arrived at the front door, red-eyed and determined. Over his heavy gray suit he wore a black armband to signal that he was in mourning. His father had died, and the funeral was that day; in fact, it was still ongoing. Everyone had repaired to the pub for some drinks after the Mass. Then, someone among the mourners whispered to the grieving son a secret that the father had taken to his grave, almost. Did he know that he had an aunt, his father’s sister? The son had never known anything of this woman’s existence. She had been up in St. Mary’s Magdalene convent for decades. Stunned, that man went to his car and drove straight from the wake to the convent. He wanted to see her immediately and would not leave without her. From then on, now that he knew of his aunt’s existence, he brought her home to his family on regular holidays and weekend breaks.

The newspaper interview with Sister Lucy, along with a French made-for-TV documentary and an incredible radio documentary called Close the Door that includes the voices of some of the forty women in the Laundry, made up the temperate coverage of this last Laundry’s closing. There was no debate; it was remarkably decorous. This whole ugly business had wended its way to a civilized conclusion.

The archives from the 1990s are riven with scandals about all the other unspeakable topics that were, by then, flung out in the open. The industrial schools, the hypocrisy of the religious, the Mother and Baby Homes, infanticide, abortion, familial abuse. Each of these shook the nation and altered its character. Yet the Laundries remained almost entirely absent from this moment of exposés. And they would have stayed cloaked in the shadows had it not been for an error the nuns at High Park made when looking to sell that plot of land in 1993.

Seventy-five death certificates, 155 bodies. They could find no names for forty-five of the women; they were simply listed as “Magdalen.” Nameless souls buried under a grubby patch of grass on a now pricey piece of land in Celtic Tiger Ireland. It was then, as it is now, illegal not to register someone’s death. But not all rules are made equally.

High Park’s nuns were indifferent to the demands of administration because, I presume, they thought everyone was still indifferent to these women’s lives and deaths. Was that not why they had been sent there in the first place?

What almost amazes me more about this sorry episode is that anyone at all mentioned that the nuns hadn’t filed the paperwork—that those undertaking the exhumation in 1993 made the nuns’ oversight known. With the growing power of government bureaucracy in the 1990s, the rules of law came to take primacy over the codes of Catholic conduct. So, in the summer of 1993, the undertakers raised the matter officially. They did not have the correct paperwork to exhume the bodies. Work had to stop. The Department of Environment did not cause a stir, though. A new death certificate was issued that would act as a blanket cover for those whose bodies had been found, as well as any others that might still be in there. In September 1993, all 155 were finally exhumed.

There was a decent amount of newspaper coverage of the High Park exhumation for a week or so. “Reburial of Convent Women Defended,” “Tears for Tragic Magdalen.” It was certainly a news story, but nothing amounting to a scandal.

A group of three people formed the Magdalene Memorial Committee. They held a public meeting and mounted a campaign. There was a small gathering of people on O’Connell Street, Dublin’s main thoroughfare. A book of remembrance was opened for the public at the post office. The memorial committee wanted a plaque to commemorate all women who had been sent to Magdalene Laundries. They needed the support of Dublin City Council, who happily issued a statement of solidarity. The council said they were grateful to this group for remembering those women who were once deemed fallen. However, they noted, “You should not make the mistake of judging the standards of the past by those of today.” And so, while the council agreed to commemorate the women, they did so while also “praising the nuns for their work.”

The Magdalene Memorial Committee successfully managed to have a plaque mounted on a bench in Dublin’s St. Stephen’s Green Park in April 1996:

To the women who worked in

Magdalen laundry institutions
and to the children born to some members
of those communities—
reflect here upon their lives

Mary Robinson, who by 1996 had established herself as the beloved president of Ireland, as trailblazing a role model as the people had hoped she would be, was invited to unveil the small bronze plate one Saturday in April. It could hardly seem like a more triumphant moment, there in the spring sunshine. It was described by one politician on the day as “historic.” All of which only underscores how strangely dissonant this endeavor was.

While they stood there that spring, memorializing the Laundries, the last Laundry was still in operation. Sister Lucy and her colleagues were still overseeing forty women engaged in “industrial therapy” and would continue to do so until the end of the year. For all this heated debate about women’s rights, about misogyny and the oppressive nature of Irish Catholicism, no civil society campaign to close the Laundries stirred into existence. There was no political lobby backing their abolition. But the Irish were ready, perhaps too eager, to put the Laundries in the past before they had even faded into history.

1996, that’s when Ireland closed the last of its Magdalene Laundries. I have used that line many times when speaking on the radio and when I have been invited to give talks. It sucks all the oxygen out of the room when you say it, because what else is there to say? It’s an incredible feeling to possess an audience like that and bring them over to your point of view: This went on too long; it was all too recent. The year 1996 was also when the Spice Girls were on MTV parading girl power, a woman was president of Ireland, the Berlin Wall had been toppled, a New World Order was beckoning. It was tempting to redeploy it here too. To reiterate that everything about the Laundries, the washing, the erasure, the containment, had ended at last in 1996. But I had come to understand it as something closer to what a colleague of mine used to call the “killer stat,” the shocking number that grabs attention and wins the argument. But at what expense? The convent laundry businesses had been shuttered, that much is correct. The problem with this stunning fact and its simple reduction is that it creates a belief that isn’t true: that the Magdalene Laundries ended.

In 1996, a regime had ceased, a culture was transformed. If our concern is the fate of the women, though, then there wasn’t an ending, not really.

In her flutter of exit interviews given to mark the closure of Seán McDermott Street, Sister Lucy reflected that the nuns should not have “tried as hard to hold on” so tightly and for so long to the women who came to them. Today the nuns would feel braver, “pioneering change,” because now it was understood, “you don’t hide people away.” She also accepted that while “I don’t think we drove anyone to madness… we institutionalized them.” The difference between these two points may be minor. In the survey of the population of Laundries in the mid-1980s, conducted by a nun, 80 percent of the women were “deemed mentally handicapped,” yet when they had entered the Laundry decades before, only 4 percent of the women were noted as such.

When Seán McDermott Street closed, some of the remaining forty women were shuttled up the road to High Park, where the convent remained but the laundry business had closed ten years before. Others stayed and were transferred into another part of the Seán McDermott Street site. These last women of the Laundries were now to convalesce, in the care of the nuns, until they died. Similar fates awaited those women still languishing in other Laundries. Before the sisters sold Sunday’s Well in 1994, they built sheltered housing for those nuns and “ladies” who were still resident in the convent, though the laundry operation had ceased operation there in 1977.

It would be naive to suggest that they should have been released without question. To where? And to whom? Sister Lucy was probably right. These women were deeply, psychologically institutionalized. For better or worse, this was the only life they knew. But I cannot help thinking of what so many women who survived Laundries said when reflecting on the worst and most severe feature of Magdalene life. Their greatest pain was being rejected, being made to feel that they belonged to nobody, and feeling that nobody was coming for them. They lived with the fear that they would never escape, that they would waste away within the Laundries, nameless and forgotten, condemned to die anonymously, effaced from the world.

The New Ross Laundry is now a secondary school. Initially I had gone to New Ross because I had wanted to trace for myself the weekly pilgrimage that Carmel and so many other girls took through the town toward the Church for their weekly confession. I did that, but I realized that I was only following the path of the living. Opposite the former Laundry, it looks as though the town ends abruptly, with a low horizon of green hills beyond. The only other thing to see is an ornate stone entrance into a humble graveyard. I knew that among those busy rows of aging headstones had been a broad plot for the Laundry’s mass grave.

On what descended into a torrentially wet day, even by Irish standards, I went back to the graveyard to pay my respects. Slowly walking against the wind and pelting rain, I paced through row after row of heavy gray headstones. I had naively assumed that, given that the grave itself logically had to be larger than the other single and double plots, the one for the women from the Laundry would have been easy enough to identify. When at last I found it, it had three sheening black marble headstones sitting across the top of a large, graveled plot, maybe fifteen feet in width. In recent years, a group of tenacious advocates and survivors had worked to get the names of the sixty-six women buried in the plot etched on these headstones. The last woman who is named on it died in 2015. I felt the most terrible wave of dread and sorrow. The Laundry she had been in was closed in 1967. That woman likely spent a lot less time working in the Laundry than she did inside the convent, praying, offering devotions, maybe knitting and crafting little religious tokens.

Speaking later, as a woman in her seventies, Eileen still remembered other young girls arriving in her first harrowing weeks at Donnybrook Laundry in the 1950s. They had come from the industrial school, so while she felt abandoned, it was clear that these girls had no one at all. Eileen left, but these women didn’t. Over fifty years later, she continued to visit them. Old and timid creatures, by then lifelong friends. When another survivor, Michelle, thought of them, the women left behind, she said that by now they were so lost to themselves that they probably “don’t even know their own names” anymore.

Even today, a small number of these once “fallen” women still linger within the nuns’ cloistered world. At the last official count in 2013, there were 115 women across three of the four orders who ran the ten Magdalene Laundries. The nuns did not respond to my inquiry as to how many former Magdalene women they still had in residence today. The government have appointed an official, a special advocate for survivors of institutional abuse, who is tenacious in her dedication to the hundreds of thousands of Irish people who had been confined in institutions. But here were women who are still institutionalized. The special advocate did not know how many there were, nor did the activists I asked. Nor did the government. These women, few as they must be, seem to have been lost within the convent world forever.

John is no stranger to speaking out on the Magdalene Laundries. He wants people to know that the women he knew worked unimaginably hard, that they suffered, and for all of that, they were still good. He hopes that the man who came and retrieved his aunt, and others like him, would be honored, because so few people have honored these women.

John and I toured this former Laundry together, now the Limerick School of Art and Design. More than a little residue of the building’s original grandeur remains: the striking sheen on the oak staircase, the Maltese crosses engraved at banister ends. John pointed at the Victorian tiled floors as we sauntered down a long and imposing corridor. Once the tiles were so glossy they were like mirrors, he said.

I have visited a number of former Laundries and have seen photos inside several others. I am struck by their similarity. Each of them purpose-built, their architecture follows the same blueprint. Vast industrial rooms, with pitched roofs, skylights, lattices of rafters. In each of them the spatialized logic of a factory allows for the systematic flow of business: sorting room, wet room, ironing, packing, dispatch. They may now be teaching rooms, cafeterias, and woodwork spaces, but only the contents have changed.

When John and I spoke prior to our meeting, he asked, had I ever heard of a man named Father Richard Devane? Of course—in fact, I told him I thought more people should know his name. It turns out Richard Devane was John’s great-uncle. If this was a work of fiction, this might be a coincidence too far. John Kennedy was the heir to Richard Devane’s populist Catholic legacy. But all John saw was old women with sad stories who were also funny and kind and who had been forgotten. To “speak freely” about this past, he said, “is no more than all these poor women who lived anonymous lives and who were buried anonymously deserve—that is, that their story should be told.” Though he did not do that immediately, not during the twenty-seven years he managed the Laundry, not even immediately after his retirement.

In 1996, the Laundries closed. But the time to speak out had not yet begun.

Chapter 10 Redress

On Tuesday, May 11, 1999, the then taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, convened an urgent press conference. States of Fear, a three-part documentary series investigating the industrial schools, had been airing on national television. Each week, audiences had been rapt and repelled in equal measures, as they were invited to peer directly into the recesses of the society they had grown up in. Two episodes had broadcast already, and preempting the final installment that evening, Bertie Ahern wanted to speak to the nation first. If the 1990s had been a decade of dredged-up scandals, in the last months of the twentieth century, States of Fear pushed the government into action.

The statement he made was unequivocal. On behalf of the State, he apologized to anyone who had spent time in the industrial schools. He was sorry for Ireland’s “collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue.” Now something was to be done. A Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in Ireland was to be established, and thereafter a redress board would pay compensation to survivors.

When the details for the commission were later debated in parliament in 2001, the overall scheme was welcomed, but there was dissent from some politicians, including a representative on the opposition benches, Enda Kenny. Kenny was a member of Fine Gael. Fine Gael was the direct descendent of Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal party, which had disbanded and re-formed under this new name not long after their disastrous loss to Fianna Fáil following the 1932 election.

Enda Kenny chastised the limits of the commission. “Looking back in ten years’ time, it will be perfectly obvious that there are glaring issues which are not addressed in what the Minister has brought before us.” As one example, he asked, why had Magdalene institutions been excluded? He told the chamber that girls had been transferred there from reformatories, industrial schools, and orphanages. Some had been sent as teenage girls, and there were others who had been sent at the age of eighteen, “some of whom remained in them until the day they died. Although they may have had the legal right to leave those Laundries, they were not aware of it,” he said. What was to be done for them now? The government view was that there was a separation of Church and State: “The Laundries in question were operated by Catholic religious orders. Accordingly, it would not be appropriate for the State to establish a public inquiry into their operation, and there are no proposals to do so.”

When the commission was established in 2002, men and women made their applications, gave evidence, and told of what happened to them in the industrial schools. And then some women came forward, revealing how they were sent to some other interminable place when they were twelve, or thirteen, or fourteen—where they washed and scrubbed and prayed. Catherine was one of these women. In her late sixties by then and still living in the US, she applied to the redress board. Catherine was invariably told that the commission was only focused on child abuse in State-funded institutions and that the Magdalene Laundries were outside its remit.

In the US, Catherine had worked providing home assistance to an elderly woman in exchange for room and board. When the woman in her charge reached her nineties and needed full-time nursing, her family put the house on the market to fund the expensive change in care arrangements. In poverty and facing homelessness, Catherine applied for an Irish State pension. “Well, I wasn’t going to sue the nuns,” Catherine said, “even though they were horrible to me.” Although she felt she had cause to “sue them for, what shall I say, pain and suffering, mental pain and suffering,” all she wanted was what was due to her financially. “It was hard work I broke my back at, without a dime, that’s all I wanted.” As her four years in the Laundry were not considered by the government to have been proper employment, Catherine could only receive a pension that was calculated on the few brief months she worked in a hospital after the Laundry. After the exchange and bank fees, her pension of $7.11 came each week from Ireland. It was, as one friend of Catherine’s put it, that she had been “abused in the past, abandoned in the present.”

One politician after another rebuffed any suggestion that the State was responsible for what happened to Laundry survivors. In 2009, the Minister for Education, Batt O’Keefe, firmly dismissed again any claim they might make to the State redress scheme, let alone to ask for a separate State investigation. “[T]he Magdalen Laundries were privately owned and operated establishments which did not come within the responsibility of the State. The State did not refer individuals to the Magdalen Laundries nor was it complicit in referring individuals to them.” The women had been “employees,” he said.

In response, and in quick succession, a number of people formed a series of campaign groups: Magdalene Survivors Together, Justice for Magdalenes, and the Irish Women Survivors Support Network, which represented survivors among the diaspora in the UK. They were led by either activists, survivors, or academics. Each of them operated with a slightly different approach, but they shared an aim: The Laundries must not be forgotten, and survivors of those institutions deserved justice. At this time, it was repeatedly suggested that upward of thirty thousand women were held in the Laundries.

A delegation from Magdalene Survivors Together was invited to meet government officials in 2009. The topic had reached a fever pitch, and the women emerged from the building to be met by a cluster of journalists and cameras. They reported that they felt there was now a promise to investigate the Laundries. Yet very little happened thereafter. Another group, Justice for Magdalenes, was frustrated by what was becoming the government’s customary apathy. They became more bellicose in their retaliation and ran a campaign to raise awareness, making tactical use of press releases to keep the Laundries in the news. In May 2011, Justice for Magdalenes made a submission to the United Nations Committee against Torture. They outlined in exacting detail that the Laundries were potentially a human rights abuse because the State had failed in its duty to protect the rights of children and women. The matter necessitated an investigation, they said. On June 3, 2011, the Committee against Torture responded:

The Committee recommends that the state party should institute prompt, independent, and thorough investigations into all allegations of torture, and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment that were allegedly committed in the Magdalene Laundries, and, in appropriate cases, prosecute and punish the perpetrators with penalties commensurate with the gravity of the offenses committed, and ensure that all victims obtain redress and have an enforceable right to compensation including the means for as full rehabilitation as possible.

Eleven days later, on June 14, the government announced that a committee of investigation would be formed. Its chairman was a newly appointed senator, Dr. Martin McAleese—hence it is most often referred to as the McAleese Committee and subsequently the McAleese Report. The stated aim was “to clarify any State interaction with the Magdalen Laundries and to produce a narrative detailing such interaction.”

In his career prior to the Senate, Dr. McAleese had worked first as a dentist and then as a financial controller. While these two positions could not seem further apart, both the dentist and the accountant deal in black-and-white. Taking on the chairmanship of the committee that would come forever to bear his name was not Martin McAleese’s first leap into public life. He is also the husband of Ireland’s former president Mary McAleese, who had succeeded Mary Robinson in 1997.

Each of the four religious congregations cooperated with the inquiry. McAleese and his committee, a team made up of civil servants and researchers, were given full and unfettered access to an array of material in their archives. Though one order, the Sisters of Mercy, had only scant material from the two Laundries they operated during the twentieth century, the committee found that the other orders had kept excellent records of correspondence, annals, and financial ledgers.

The investigative team also combed government archives and reviewed ordinance survey maps, video footage, blueprints, photographs, contemporaneous newspaper coverage, and electoral registers. They met with 118 survivors and a small number of elderly nuns who had worked in the Laundries.

It was an impressively swift report given that it was mapping seventy-two years of complex institutional bureaucracy. While there was a committee behind him, the report was quite singular in its authorship, as apparently Martin McAleese largely undertook the writing of the twenty chapters. McAleese submitted the report to government, and it was published in February 2013.

Across its hefty one-thousand-plus pages, the report’s headline declared that the State had aided and abetted the Laundries, directly facilitating their existence. It found that 10,012 women and girls had entered the Laundries. Of them, 26.5 percent were referred to the Laundries by State agencies. The rest were entered via priests, family members, or the Legion of Mary, or were described as “self-referrals.”

Not much else happened that day. The government announced that it was going to reconvene two weeks hence to discuss the report more fully. There was frustration and misgivings that a State apology had not been immediately forthcoming.

Enda Kenny had reached the position of taoiseach in 2011 in a time of turbulence. The economy had crashed from its great heights with the 2008 recession.

Kenny’s leadership of Fine Gael began in opposition in 2002. As a public presence, Enda Kenny is a variant of the stoic Irish male. Not the brooding and implacable type but even-tempered and pragmatic, which had meant that in the media he was sometimes chastised for his lack of showmanship as a leader.

After his ascension to taoiseach following the 2011 election, he was profiled for Time in 2012. It was the cover story—on which the iconic magazine title appeared in lurid green. The interviewer was taken by how realistic and honest Kenny was. The reporter accepted Kenny’s somewhat poor public persona, saying that Kenny was “often wooden in broadcast appearances and Dáil debates,” but insisted that he was an “effective and engaging communicator in smaller groups.”

And on the afternoon of February 19, 2013, Enda Kenny was tasked with standing up before the parliament, before the survivors assembled in the public gallery, and before the nation and international media to deliver the apology for the Magdalene Laundries. It was almost exactly three years to the day since Batt O’Keefe had declared the Laundries to be a business beyond State control or concern.

In total, the taoiseach’s apology lasted for nineteen minutes. He spoke in a firm tone with a gentle West of Ireland lilt, and his words were unreserved. These women had experienced a “profound and studied indifference.” Despite the carefully chosen language, the fellow politicians seated that day weren’t swept up by the pathos. There was some shuffling at first, then a late arrival ambled to his seat. Enda Kenny explained the reason for the two weeks’ wait: “I was determined… that this government—this Dáil—would take the necessary time not just to commission the report but to actually study it and having done so to reflect on its findings.”

While he did that, he had also taken time over those two weeks “to meet personally with the Magdalene women. To sit down with them, face to face, to listen to their stories. It was a humbling and inspiring experience.” Someone’s mobile phone began to trill. “As I sat with these women, as they told their stories, it was clear that while every woman’s story was different, each of them shared a particular experience of a particular Ireland: judgmental, intolerant, petty, and prim.”

After listing the disturbing insights into twentieth-century Irish social values, he went on, “We forgot you or, if we thought of you at all, we did so in untrue and offensive stereotypes. This is a national shame, for which I again say, I am deeply sorry and offer my full and heartfelt apologies.”

Until that point, it had been a sturdy speech, with all the formal empathy required of a State address. As he began to circle his conclusion, Kenny looked to the gallery, and he abandoned the big sweeping themes of a national speech, speaking for the nation and on behalf of citizens and history when he said, “At the conclusion of my discussions with one group of the Magdalene women, one of those present sang ‘Whispering Hope.’ A line from that song stays in my mind: When the dark midnight is over, watch for the breaking of day.”

This was when something unexpected happened. Enda Kenny’s voice broke. “Let me hope that this day and this debate…” He gulped back a small hard ball of emotion that seemed to be gathering faster now, almost beyond his control. “Excuse me,” he said. His voice tightened, he coughed, and his next words were thinner and compressed as he ran through his closing line, “… heralds a new dawn for all those who feared that the dark midnight might never end.” Looking momentarily overcome, he landed back on the bench and took some water.

The survivors took to their feet and applauded. The parliamentarians then took to their feet and raised their heads toward the gallery and applauded the women in turn.

When I met Enda Kenny, he said he knew immediately after receiving the McAleese Report that he would give an apology. After the report was published, he went to the Irish Embassy in London to meet the aforementioned group of survivors. One woman told him that he could never understand what had happened to them because he had never known terror as they had. Over four hours, they told him of the overwhelming dread they lived with; they explained what it was like to be confined and subject to daily humiliations, which still haunted them now. Then, spontaneously, at the end of the meeting, the women joined together and sang “Whispering Hope.” Enda Kenny said that “it went straight through me.” His reaction had not entirely shocked him. He could be, he said, a bit of an “emotional slob” at the best of times. On that day, one after another, he heard their stories, their “sadness and loneliness, resilience and courage,” their “courage to speak up for themselves.” Once he had decided that the poetic line from “Whispering Hope” would be the conclusion, “I knew I was going to have difficulty with the end of it.” The apology could only be “a real tangible gesture” if it was an emotionally honest one.

For many survivors, the effect of those words was immediate. The speech was “extraordinary,” some said. “It is the most incredible speech I’ve heard from a taoiseach… in my lifetime.”

Maureen Sullivan is a tenacious activist and one of the best-known and most recognizable Magdalene Laundry survivors. She had been in the gallery that evening. Speaking to reporters as she left the parliament, she said, “He didn’t hold back on anything. He really did us proud. Now we can get on with our lives, now that we have an apology and they’ve taken responsibility. It’s just fantastic. We can start a new chapter in our lives. It’s been the best day ever. I have to give the man credit; we never expected a sorry like that.”

It seemed at last the women had their long overdue moment of vindication, the catharsis of justice, and a conclusion to this tragic episode of Irish history.

The opening line of the McAleese Report was reassuringly measured, indicating that the committee had come to understand the complexity of this history: “There is no single or simple story of the Magdalen Laundries.” And yet, even with their misgivings about narrative neatness, the report set out categories, taxonomies, and grids, enumerating this history, hewing the vast scattered archive into the cold, solid shape of an official account and a single story. McAleese decided the report had an obligation to also “set the record straight,” to “establish an objective picture.” Given how mythologized the Laundries had become, the report stated, they are as much storied as they are misunderstood. “The Committee has, in this Report, drawn on all available information and sought to record as comprehensive a picture as possible of the operation of the Magdalen Laundries.”

When injustices of the past have technically come to an end and yet were not subject to justice in their own time, forensic archival work—of the kind McAleese was capable of—has the potential to offer the long-awaited reckoning. Yet McAleese seems to have decided to counter the vexed public discourse by forging his way upon the less-traveled path of neutrality. This was going to be a fact-finding mission rather than a fault-finding one.

But how to speak factually about a past that was once unspeakable? The first chapter of the McAleese Report, “Terminology,” is a brief three-page sidebar that explains the logic behind the report’s language. Women who were admitted to the Laundries were going to be referred to as just that: “the women who were admitted to the Magdalen Laundries.” To say that they were detained or confined seemed to risk a new danger: “bias.” So he had to “avoid language” that might stigmatize the nuns, the Laundries, or the women. With this guiding logic, it was decided that the women should not be referred to as penitents or inmates; nor, however, should they be understood as survivors, let alone victims.

The report sought to settle how many women died and how long they had been detained. The official numbers in the McAleese Report estimated, “on the basis of available information” from eight of the ten Laundries, that 879 women died in the Laundries from 1922 onward. Those women who had been transferred to a hospital or nursing home before they died, and so did not technically die inside a Laundry, were excluded from this number. Those who died in the Laundry, but had entered prior to independence, were also not included. This 879 figure is based on the nuns’ records, and if the incident in 1993 at High Park revealed anything, it is that there are far more bodies in the ground than there are paper records of their lives and deaths inside the convent. Seventy-five death certificates, 155 bodies. That is at just one Laundry.

Activists who have undertaken the grueling labor of counting names on gravestones estimate the number of deaths in the Laundry could be closer to 1,837. Even this number is likely to be conservative, and it is certainly not static. As late as November 2024, I found death notices for women whose address was given as the Good Shepherd Limerick.

For those who left the Laundries, their average duration of stay was said by the McAleese Report to have been a little over three years and two months, while the median length of stay—that is to say, the supposedly more refined and weighted measure—was stated to have been seven months. The women themselves have balked at this median figure. Nora found it implausible. “I hear a lot of talk now,” she said in 2013, “about people only being in for three months. I saw one person leave in the year I was in there. So I find this three-month thing very, very, very strange, but nobody had a release date.”

That duration-of-stay calculation also excluded the 762 women described in the report as “legacy cases,” who had entered prior to independence. Counting them might “bias” the data, the report concluded, as they stayed decades. However, it seems the committee did include the much shorter lengths of stay (days and weeks) of the women and girls who from the 1960s were sent to Laundries on remand from court.

The problem of the McAleese Report’s definitive length-of-stay metric in particular is that it stops counting the days after 1996, when the Laundries technically ended, disregarding the women who were still there—women like Brigid.

Brigid left at last when she moved next door into a small apartment complex run by the same nuns who had managed the Laundry. John Kennedy would still visit her in her meticulous little room, filled with neat, orderly religious trinkets. Though even while she had visitors, she kept her radio on throughout, fixed as it was on a station that played only Mass. So while her day went on, she always had the low drone of prayers in the background.

Brigid met McAleese during his preparatory research for the report. Of the 118 women he met, fifty-eight were women like Brigid, who were “under the care of the Religious Orders.” McAleese and members of his team visited her at St. Mary’s convent grounds in 2012. From what has been relayed to me about that meeting, the women felt cowed by the alien officiousness of the occasion. Having lived lives of silent isolation, they were assembled into a focus group and asked if they had “ever suffered physical or corporal punishment.” Maybe they were so strictly bound to their survey questions that these officials didn’t manage to hear the story of Brigid’s life, that she had been brought to the Laundry as a twelve-year old girl, sixty-four years earlier. But they could see that she was still there and that she would die there. Despite this, the length of stay in the McAleese Report was calculated based on those who did manage to leave, for whom the nuns had a listed exit date. Of the 10,012 women and girls the investigating committee had on record, only 6,151 cases (55 percent of the total number) had exit dates. To overlook this absence of exit dates as some sort of administrative oversight was to misunderstand the threat of the Laundries entirely. And it was to discount, in every meaning of the word, lives like Brigid’s.

What had happened to Brigid was a mystery to me for a long time. I spoke to two people who knew her, who would be able to tell me at last what was her final route out. I wonder now if I had already sensed the answer, yet still, learning that she had remained in the convent, with the radio humming background prayers all day, undid me. Ridiculously, I have sometimes prided myself on being able to take unexpected bad news in my stride. Not after that. I found myself split open like an exploded reactor—spewing uncontainable grief.

Everyone I heard speak publicly on the matter of the Laundries seemed to know exactly what the problem was, and what prescription this past now required. They were assured, measured. That is of course the job of lawyers, activists, and government officials, to find their line and then stick to it. I had always considered reaching out to Enda Kenny to request an interview because I had found his apology so singular in the genre of State apologies. Yet it was Brigid’s story that had persuaded me, practically compelled me, to contact him. I found myself yearning to speak to someone else who had heard these stories, listened to the women, and felt the unresolved suffering the Laundries had caused, and found that all that could be done was to grieve, to cry.

There is nothing contained within the final McAleese Report that indicates any mendacity or heartlessness among McAleese and his committee, but the realities of the Laundries are preposterously underplayed. That is because the women themselves have only a meager place in the report that concerns them. In chapter 19, the flatly titled “Living and working conditions,” beginning on page 925, we are at last gratefully released from the report’s technical drudgery of legislation, methods, and statistical analysis. We finally hear from the women who had been inside the Laundries.

The report acknowledges the taut, austere schedule of silence, prayer, and nothingness. The gratuitous bleakness of the women’s lives in the Laundries is accepted. These women, “in many cases little more than children,” lived in “fear” and “confusion”; they felt “abandoned,” and it was “distressing.” The Laundries were “frightening and lonely places” and a “harsh and physically demanding work environment.” The majority of the 118 women who spoke with McAleese were said to have described the atmosphere in the Laundries as “cold, with a rigid and uncompromising regime of physically demanding work and prayer, with many instances of verbal censure, scoldings or even humiliating put-downs.” Many also had spoken of the “deep hurt they felt due to their loss of freedom.” These statements were not evidence of anything. The women’s words were cut into little snippets and presented as “memories” and “stories.” They appear like confetti after a wedding, a decorative sprinkle after the business is done.

Before the report draws to a close, the nuns are given a right of rebuttal, invited to respond, and as a result, have the last word on the Laundries. Their lengthier statements sit idly and unqualified. The nuns tell of women who “were in their care,” “residents” of the Laundries, which were a “refuge.” The stripping of names had lost its sacrificial purpose. The nuns had wanted only to protect the women’s identities; the nuns worked alongside the women, rather than watched over them. The “Committee found no evidence to contradict” the “position” of the nuns.

Alongside such soft language of hurt feelings, heightened emotions, and misunderstood intentions, the report also draws the reader’s mind further into a more definitive realm: what had not happened. While the Laundries were tough and regimented, they were not systematically abusive. And the report made a direct comparison with the debasing horror of the industrial schools: “The vast majority [of survivors of Magdalene Laundries] also told the Committee that the ill-treatment, physical punishment, and abuse that was prevalent in the Industrial School system was not something they experienced in the Magdalen Laundries.”

In the Laundries, “discipline was mainly exercised through persuasion and verbal correction,” what the report describes using more terminology as “non-physical punishments.”

This is to misunderstand that being detained without any sense of leaving was a permanent frenzy of psychological terror; that being insulted, put down, and reduced to nothingness was often impossible to recover from. The McAleese Report sent a powerful message: The matter of the Laundries had been exaggerated, or as one newspaper marveled, the Laundries were “more benign… than may be popularly believed.” In the preceding months and years, this attenuated depiction of the Laundries took hold as a reliable alternative view to the one that had been put forward by activists and survivors: The Laundries had not operated for profit. The Laundries had not held women for long periods of time. The Laundries had not been punishing or tortuous. There were not that many women there, and they could have left if they had wanted. In the narrative of the McAleese Report, the relentless, repetitive, terminal awfulness of the Laundries was now ironed out and folded up into the “sober formulaics of officialese.”

Emboldened by the finality and clarity of the report, the government let the UN know that they had “disproved” the “previous assumptions” about the Laundries: “No factual evidence to support allegations of systematic torture or ill-treatment of a criminal nature in these institutions was found… The facts uncovered by the Committee did not support the allegation that women were systematically detained unlawfully in these institutions or kept for long periods against their will.”

This has remained the official response to questioning. The government’s repeated indifference subsequently tarnished the initial significance of Enda Kenny’s apology. It felt to some activists that the entire investigation had been an act of “obfuscation.” In November 2013, Justice for Magdalenes, who had stirred the initial UN intervention in 2011, found themselves writing again to the United Nations to demand a new inquiry, which never came.

The history of the Laundries seems quantifiable. Some Laundries processed almost a thousand garments a week, between the hankies and the tablecloths. There were sentences served in days, weeks, months, years, lifetimes. Thousands of women and girls. What initially seemed like an admirable desire to swerve bias and speak only to the facts became a commitment to speak only to that which could be counted, correlated, and cross-checked. That factual narrative of the Laundries was based on a narrow idea of factual material, namely the archives of the State and the nuns. This is what ultimately gave the committee its biggest blind spot: They had lost the capacity to assimilate what the Laundries were and what had happened to the women there. It seemed that no one questioned whether human suffering on a mass scale is reducible to something as flat, static, and final as metrics. How do you calculate the cost of a life not lived? How do we begin to remember a history like that, when it has not yet come to a conclusive end?

After the McAleese Report was published, Enda Kenny invited the president of the Irish Law Reform Commission, Mr. Justice John Quirke, to devise a compensation scheme for the survivors of Magdalene Laundries.

Quirke’s task was not to ascertain wrongdoing, nor was it to sift over anything that had happened in the past, as McAleese had. Quirke needed to assess the impact of the Laundries on survivors today. Based on his assessment, he would then advise the government on the style and scale of a compensation scheme, which in Ireland is referred to as redress. He approached his role like a detective leading a case. He assembled a large team who spoke with 337 women—three times as many as the McAleese Committee—who had been in Magdalene Laundries.

Women who met with Quirke described it as validating to have someone both listen to them and believe them. One woman, Kathleen, had been a teenager when she was sent to a Laundry from an industrial school. Immediately, Quirke told her to simply address him by his name, John. She said, “It was very easy to understand him; he assured me that I would be okay for the rest of my life and I was never to be ashamed of my time in the Magdalene Laundries. He assured me it wasn’t my fault.”

The women equally made an impression on Quirke too. Their testimony was “valuable,” and, he added, “It has often been shocking.”

What seemed to perturb him most were the emotional and physical injuries carried by the women who had once been locked up, and how they had compounded over time. The words “frail,” “vulnerable,” and “at an advanced age” echo throughout his report.

So many of the women shared the same fate of living on, and often below, the poverty line, he wrote. Some of the women that were in rental accommodations regularly struggled to pay their landlords. Others with homes reported that these were often cold and damp because they did not have the money to pay for the indulgence of heating. As much as 66 percent of the 337 women reported serious health issues; 91 percent of them said they wished they could see their primary care physician more often. Many believed that regular counseling would help ease their lifelong mental anguish. The majority had poor or bad mobility but believed that if they were given walking frames, or had stair lifts, the quality of their lives would be immeasurably improved. Quirke’s report is explicit: The distinct pattern of ailments and needs was a result of the Laundries. These women had worked on their feet all day, slept in damp dormitories, inhaled vaporized chemicals, and endured the searing psychological imprint of their abandonment.

It had been near impossible for these women to have worked their way out of deprivation, because so many had what Quirke described as an “education deficit.” A total of 90 percent of the women who met with Quirke had primary-level education but little more. Their life chances had been skewed toward suffering. The wound of their institutional lives was still raw. His conclusion was clear: “I am satisfied that the traumatic effect of admission and incarceration within the designated Laundries has had such an adverse effect upon the education, perceived reputation, subsequent health, life, lifestyle, confidence, and self-esteem” of “the Magdalen women.”

Quirke advised that the women be paid a lump sum, based on the time they had spent at the Laundry. For less than three months, a woman would receive a minimum of €11,500, and the value of the payout increased by €1,000 for every month thereafter, capped at €100,000.

These sums may seem dazzling, and it is easy to be dubious about financial redress of this kind. Money is offered where words fail, or where they fail to be given. The scale of compensation outlined in his report was intended “to reflect the wish of the Irish community to reduce the hurt and pain suffered by the Magdalen women by providing them with monetary payments and with sufficient health and other State benefits to ensure that the remainder of their lives will be made as comfortable as is reasonably possible.”

Quirke sought to ensure that in their old age the survivors would have a stable income, like any retired citizen. Each of them was also to receive a State pension, which in 2013 was of €230.30 a week, and free healthcare—though this last element never materialized and remains a matter of protracted campaigning.

Overall, Catherine was relieved by this outcome. Enda Kenny’s apology alleviated her of the long-held feeling of shame. And the monthly pension at last gave her the means to do the things she had always wished. “Not big things,” she said, but she was able to take up impromptu invitations for coffee with friends, get her nails done, and donate to charities, most of them Catholic. This might seem surprising, that Catherine had remained not just a Catholic, but a devoted one who, even in her penury, gave to the Church. Some women defected from Catholicism, having endured the sharp end of its ideologies too directly and for too long. Yet many, like Catherine, remained faithful, saying things like “We are sufferers. But now, thank God, we are survivors,” or “Please God, let it never happen again, you know, that it could never happen again.”

By 2014, Catherine’s health was declining. For years she had fretted that when she died, she would be given no more than a pauper’s grave, but having the lump sum alleviated those fears. When she died in 2016 at the age of eighty-one, there was enough to pay for her cremation in the US, and to have her ashes repatriated to Wicklow, where she was buried alongside her mother.

The government intended to share the cost of redress with the Church. In April 2013, the Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, held an informal meeting with eleven representatives from each of the four congregations that ran the Laundries to discuss the redress scheme. Not so long before this, a visiting minister would have been a supplicant, beseeching them for their religious approval. Minister Shatter told the sisters that the estimated cost of compensation would be between €34.5 million and €58 million, and he invited them to make an “appropriate contribution.” Minister Shatter also told them that the women expected them to pay into the scheme. The nuns’ financial contribution would communicate their commitment to reconciliation. Shatter left the assembled sisters with time to consider how much they would contribute.

The Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Sisters of Charity, and the Good Shepherd Sisters each returned to the minister to inform him that they would not support the redress scheme.

“Unfortunately, we are not in a position to make a monetary contribution to the fund.”

“We will not be making a direct financial contribution.”

“Unfortunately, we are still not in a position to make contributions to any redress scheme, and our financial circumstances are unlikely to improve in the future.”

What they favored was a “pastoral approach,” whereby they would counsel “former residents,” as the head of the Good Shepherd congregation described them, who “have painful memories of the time spent in our care.”

By finding no legal wrongdoing, no flagrant human rights abuses, and by emphasizing everything that did not happen, the McAleese Report exonerated the nuns. It provided them with substantial evidence to confirm their own spectacular indifference to the question of reparation. The cleaving open of this history gave the nuns the prospect to show grace and express contrition. Instead, the nuns offered the kind of apologies that had the superior asperity of a schoolmaster and might be summed up, if not too glib an assessment, as: I am sorry you are upset. The Good Shepherd Sisters’ words in the wake of the report were: “We acted in good faith providing a refuge and we sincerely regret that women could have experienced hurt and hardship during their time with us.” They added, “It saddens us deeply to hear that time spent with us, often as part of a wider difficult experience, has had such a traumatic impact on the lives of these women.”

In March 2013, two unnamed sisters, who were part of an anonymous order that had run Magdalene Laundries, offered a rare, unfiltered interview to a US Catholic magazine. Shortly thereafter, more sections of the transcript were read out on a late-night religious Irish radio program called The God Slot.

The reporter said that at the outset there was an atmosphere of “apprehension,” and the nuns’ answers were clipped at first. They made it clear that they held a deep sadness that the Laundries were what they were going to be remembered for. They asked for people to consider the history in relative terms. What they had done had once been praised, revered; it was also quotidian. They were not willing to change roles now and refused to be employed as fodder in Ireland’s Day of Atonement. In their own words, “The sins of society are being placed on us, the scapegoat, and we are being sent off into the desert because that’s the only way they can get rid of the stigma.” As they insisted in their apology, the Laundries were merely “part of the system and the culture of the time.”

Whether it was the shield of anonymity, or the garrulous flood that sometimes comes from breaking down old barriers, their initial apprehension waned. The big sums suggested for redress were “excessive,” they said. What would elderly women need of such fortunes? And elderly women who were mostly, they seemed to suggest, likely to be feckless with the money. In this brief and bitter torrent, one of the nuns went so far as to make the scurrilous implication that it was “generally accepted that people who got redress,” referring to those who received compensation from an earlier commission into industrial schools, had “wasted it, so what does redress and money do?”

Should they at least offer a more straightforward apology? the interviewer asked. Their response betrayed more of their old self-righteous justification.

“Apologize for what? Apologize for providing a service? We provided a free service for the country.”

“It was a service there, to help women.”

Even while the two nuns admitted that they had never been inside a Laundry, they could not imagine it as anything more than a service. This matters, this idea of service: What would these women have done had it not been for the Laundries? They still have to believe this, that their order, and others like them, were dealing with needy girls, to whom they gave “shelter, board, and work.”

What is also so curious is how these two nuns described the nature of this service. Whether knowingly or unwittingly, in this interview they huddle the history back inside its erroneous popular image. Some of these women had been destitute, and Ireland had been breathtakingly poor, they noted, or these women had special needs. But the majority were in the Laundries because of the stigma of unmarried motherhood, they said. “We were the last in a long line of providers,” they said, used by families to hide “fallen women” after they became pregnant. Was this so different today? they implored. Would parents today not at least harbor a heavy disappointment at the news that their teenage daughter was pregnant? That might well be the case for some people today, but this was not the exemplar that helps explain the Laundries.

Nora, Carmel, Brigid, Eileen, Catherine, and Katie, along with the many other women whose accounts we have heard, came from very different backgrounds, and they entered the Laundries for vastly different reasons. Pregnancy outside marriage, yes, but mostly for being lively girls, abused and abandoned daughters, or because their families were pulled apart for not fitting the mold of what a family should be. Each of them was an affront to Ireland’s cultural sensibilities and political aspirations. Each of them was denounced and exiled. They were silenced, either for sins they were deemed in danger of committing, or for sins committed by their families and hoisted onto their shoulders. These were no longer little girls, or daughters; their lives were reduced to burdens, stains, and stigmas. And for a while, at least, they became the class of women and girls who were never spoken about again.

Thousands of pages of testimony, the hours of documentary interviews, and even the McAleese Report highlighted this persistent error in perception: Women had been stigmatized as the “fallen women,” but that was a “wholly inaccurate characterization” which was “not borne out by the facts.” Yet the nuns have tried to reinstate this image.

To maintain their trimmed and tidied alternative version of history, to keep the nuns from the guilt and shame of the system they oversaw in the name of all they believed in, the true essence of the Laundries cannot be exposed, let alone be named. It is little wonder then that the nuns have also let it be known that they find the reclaiming and renaming of the Magdalene convents as Laundries offensive and reductive. “Laundry” makes it seem as though the nuns were overseeing slave labor rather than offering care and charity. “They weren’t Laundries as such, they were refuges,” the nuns insisted, recoiling from the moniker Laundries during the interview as if it were coarse language.

I failed in my attempts to get the orders who ran the Laundries to speak to me. Even so, it is possible, likely even, that on an individual level many nuns blanch when they think of the abject misery of the Magdalene Laundries that were once within their vast estates. But formally, publicly, the demand that they apologize has had a regressive effect—sending them back into defensive posturing.

For the nuns now to break their stoic composure and engage in the kind of reflection demanded of mere mortals would be to admit that they had wronged—that prayer, silence, obedience, devotion, and forced chastity were damaging. It would begin the destruction of their religious economy. To acknowledge that they erred on such a scale would cast their entire enterprise, the sacrifice of their lives, into irredeemable doubt. So they find that they must keep adorning what the writer Janet Malcolm once called the “blinders of narrative.”

In June 2018, a large public event was held called “Dublin Honours Magdalenes” at Dublin’s Mansion House, a stately eighteenth-century building that is the official residence of the mayor. A total of 230 survivors arrived in private coaches that had been hired for the occasion. As the women walked toward the entrance, they were cheered and clapped at by a celebratory crowd of hundreds of people, mostly women. They held up handwritten signs with embracing statements like WELCOME HOME, LADIES. It seemed, as one journalist remarked curiously, as if the story of the Laundries was now having a carefully crafted Hollywood ending.

The number of survivors is dwindling. In January 2025, I spoke to Patricia Carey, who had been appointed in 2024 to a newly created government role as a Special Advocate for Survivors of Institutional Abuse. In less than a year, she had personally spoken to over seven hundred survivors of all of Ireland’s institutions. Carey said that if she had to guess how many of those were from Magdalene Laundries, it had probably been about ten.

Despite this, the Laundries have since gone rapidly mainstream. We can see them solemnly reenacted in films. There are novels, memoirs, songs, poems, a dramatized BBC miniseries. The Laundries have intrigued YouTube sleuths, TikTok historians, and true crime podcasters. Where once they garnered not so much as a mention across the thousands of pages of books on twentieth-century Irish history, now no book on this period can be taken seriously if it does not include them. That plaque on the bench at St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin is now in the commemorative company of other similar ornaments of public memorial. A national museum and research center based inside the former Seán McDermott Street Laundry is promised. There is daily chatter about this topic on social media, though in the last few years it is more often discussions of the books, podcasts, and movies about the Laundries.

The Laundries have been discussed, dissected, and pronounced upon. Given the sense of cultural saturation, people began to describe to me the way the Irish feel about the topic today using the same dismaying term. They have Laundry fatigue.

That sudden scale of contemporary engagement with this history captures the bewildering paradox of this whole affair. This problematic past has been solidified into the paraphernalia of remembrance. Yet when it comes to the Magdalene Laundries, the only thing still left to do is to remember them.

Conclusion Remembering

My mother moved to Dublin on a horse and carriage from the West of Ireland in the 1950s. Her father had secured a job as a gardener for a closed order of Carmelite nuns with a large plot of farmland. She grew up in the squat, pebble-dashed gardener’s cottage inside the convent grounds. As a child, I attended Mass in the tiny stone church there each Sunday at 9 a.m. without exception. Afterward, I went with my mother to pay our weekly visit to the nuns. We waited in the parlor, and then they appeared on the other side of a cast-iron grille. They could not hug, of course. So some poked their knobbled, arthritic fingers through the gaps, and I would do the same, the pads of our index fingers touching. They were hobbit-like, each of them shrunken from a life lived behind walls. Later, as an adult of five feet, three inches, I towered over the ones who were still alive.

Every townscape was complete with blocks of religious complexes like this one, as well as church spires spiking the sky. But the area my family came from, where this convent was, and where I was then raised, was like the Holy Mothership. Abutting the back wall of the gardener’s cottage, and therefore also the wall of the convent, there was a seminary. Adjacent to that was the archbishop’s residence, grandly known as the Bishop’s Palace. There were convent schools for girls, the Christian Brothers’ schools for boys, and a religious-run school for blind children. There was the national—and so, of course, Catholic—teacher training college. Most of these huge buildings were clustered together. Just up the road was the final piece of this Catholic architecture, the Magdalene Laundry.

The women who were sent there remembered walking down to the local shops, dreading the chance that they might encounter the local children who would goad them.

My mother died too long ago now for me to have been able to ask for her memories of the Laundry. I decided then to ask my aunt, my mother’s younger sister, if she had ever seen the women from the nearby Laundry. She recalled without hesitation how they came on Sundays to visit our Carmelite nuns, a little afternoon outing on their day of rest. This means they had to trail right past the front of my nanna’s cottage.

Because my mother’s family lived rent-free in a gardener’s cottage in what was a fairly salubrious middle-class patch of Dublin, they were, I think, if not ashamed, always slightly at odds with the place. Maybe that feeling just came from within, but I sensed that my mother never forgot that they were a class below the community around her. One response of my nanna’s was to ensure that her children, her good girls, exhibited faultless manners, my aunt told me. Good mornings and how do you dos were to be cheerily sung out to everyone they met on the street.

Then this strange procession of women would appear. As an adult, my aunt now realizes that many of them had Down syndrome, while others were just old. My nanna told her young daughter that she was not to look at these women, ever, and that she was barred from uttering a word to them. As a child, my aunt said that she could not fathom this—it contravened everything they had been taught about public decorum. She was to act as if the women were not there and did not exist.

When she told me this, I felt the most uncanny sensation, as though wrapping paper had been ripped off something parceled up deep within me. That strange shuffling line of old women. I had spent a short amount of time when I was six years old living at my nanna’s while my family moved house. We all bundled into the cottage, and I loved being part of this peculiar place and its simple routines. I looked forward to going out with my nanna every evening to lock the twenty-foot gates, which were painted in a deep brown shade that matched the Carmelite nuns’ habits. My grandfather had died a few years before this, but the nuns let my nanna stay on, still living rent-free for the rest of her life. The only job she had was to bolt those gates at the end of each day.

During the day I would sometimes sit on the floor in front of the cottage’s square living room window and set myself up with pens and paper on the smallest in a nest of tables. Every so often, I would look out on the quiet idyll before me. There was the tiny stone church, the convent block behind it, the priest’s palatial bungalow just up from that, and then the bit of farmland. I ogled who came and went. Because it was such an inauspicious place, known only really to the locals, the same cast of characters traipsed in and out. The elderly neighbors mostly, and only infrequently at that. Which meant that when an odd gang trooped up the avenue, even at six years old, I noticed it.

That was what I remembered that day I spoke to my aunt. She had exposed not so much a memory, but a solid feeling of having noticed unusual people. But who were they? This would have been around 1990, yet I can’t even get the nuns at the local Laundry to confirm if they were indeed still visiting my nanna’s nuns then. I think I saw them, but had I seen them? Surely after all these years of researching the Laundries it could not be that I had seen them too and then forgotten them. It felt that I was experiencing the dynamic of collective memory in miniature. If I had seen them, if there had been Magdalene women, I could not bring them into focus. I have never been able to bring them into focus; they have remained a blur in my mind.

I began to wonder when this murky past had revealed itself to me. And on that, I am certain it occurred a few years later. I was back at my nanna’s. I am not sure how it happened, if she had left on one of Ireland’s two television stations, but I watched Ryan’s Daughter. Set in a small town in a stark West of Ireland landscape prior to independence, the film portrays how the wife of the hospitable and much-admired schoolteacher has an affair with an English soldier. The townspeople turn on her. Justice must be seen to be done, but they had no stock with criminal justice, with its codes of law, due process, and innocence until proven guilty. So the community decide, through feeling, through nurtured know-how of tradition, that a ritual shaming must take place. They come to the house and cut off her hair.

I was so startled by the braying mob and the haircutting, and I relayed this to my nanna. That was just how it was, she said. That was how they lived. And then she went on, giving me the firmer example that set me on this path. In a throwaway manner, she said, “You knew when a girl got into trouble, because she would disappear one day, and no one ever spoke of her again.” My memory fades again here. I can see her back as she walks away into the kitchen. She had said what she needed to say. The conversation was over. I have no idea if I responded. But that line was planted in my brain and stayed there, festering and fretting. Women disappeared. Their existence disavowed. The collective silence closing in, as if these girls had never lived at all. But where did they go?

Where my nanna hailed from, the problem of disappearing people was acute; they seemed to suffer from intolerance and indifference to life on an epidemic scale. The statistic that one in every one hundred Irish people were institutionalized is awful enough, but when you disaggregate by region, in the West of Ireland it was likely closer to one in every forty. This was a pattern that no one could escape, including my nanna’s family. Her mother fell off a moving horse and cart in the 1920s. She survived, but not enough. I am not sure how long they waited before they sent her to the asylum. She died there a few months later. Her death certificate notes that she suffered from “inanition,” which is the loss of social and moral vigor, but the final death was caused by “melancholia.” She was forty-nine years old.

The woman who would have been my nanna’s mother-in-law, a woman whose name I do not think I have ever known, was another childbearing West of Ireland woman. She was also sent to the asylum. As far as I can ascertain, this woman’s removal happened before my nanna had a chance to meet her. The rationale of this disappearance seems to have been the onset of the menopause. My great-grandmother’s unavoidable plight of hormonal fluctuations seems to have become too much for those around her to bear. I have no idea what became of her.

In 2009, when there had been a period of pronounced hand-wringing about the horrors of the past, the author John Banville wrote what remains one of the most eloquent and uncompromising statements on the topic of Irish silence. “Never tell, never acknowledge, that was the unspoken watchword. Everyone knew, but no one said.” That was true, yet there it was. My nanna had said it. The girls were sent away, women and girls all around her were disappearing.

Maybe the only warning system women like my nanna had was the quick, quiet admission of knowing and not knowing, that they might slip out when chatting to their grandchildren. Maybe their granddaughters in particular, who they thought were set to inherit that same treacherous world of powerful, pious organizations and passive, collusively silent communities. But this generation has not been another successor of silence—or so it seems.

One evening, at a work dinner, I was sitting beside an Irish legal academic who expressed how impressed he was with the volume of public discussion about the Laundries over recent years, how well covered and exposed the history now was. What was it worth, I said, if the facts of what the Laundries were remain obscured? And if it is only the original, scurrilous rumor that we have recovered—that the Laundries were for the most vilified cases of pregnancy outside marriage? His response was instant. “Who cares about the details as long as we know it was wrong?” he blasted. Retaliatory as the response was intended to be, I was envious of the astute concision of this line. It struck me as a perfect distillation of the problem of Magdalene Laundry history in general.

Facts, and sometimes truth itself, can be discarded when we are mired in the need to blame, to settle scores, and to judge the wrongdoers. This generation has not earned that right, however. The Laundries slid out of existence, their buildings empty and crumbling by the time people had come round to talking about them. We started remembering only when the coast was clear. Even at that, the collective consciousness seemed only willing to squint at the Laundries. Faced with the horrors of the past, two accusatory narratives triumphed. There is the caricature of demonic nuns and powerful priests who besieged Ireland. Or the image of a cruel society that thoughtlessly dumped people. Neither are convincing, because it is clear that the Laundries were not nearly this discreet. In framing history this way—innocent and guilty, black and white, us versus them—we ensure our safety in the present, because we have disowned the past. But what story remains untold?

Carmel ended up in the Laundries because the nuns decided that even though she was eighteen, she was not ready for the world. To escape the Laundries, she had to escape Ireland.

For giddy acts of truancy, Brigid paid the ultimate price. When she ventured back into society, she was an adult woman in a world that she could not negotiate, within a community unwilling to accept her.

Without explanation or discussion, Eileen traveled to the Laundry because some strangers had deemed her predelinquent, too vulnerable to the seduction of the world around her. And so she could no longer be in the world at all.

To stave off the whispers, to shield her family reputation from a scalding torrent of public shame, Nora, her pregnancies, and her babies were hidden. Only Nora made it back.

Parenting was contingent on love, on money, on respectability. Children like Catherine could be deposited in one of Ireland’s array of institutions because any one of these sources had run dry.

Girls like Katie were directed to the Laundries like refugees, because their State had abandoned them.

Father Richard Devane was one among a collection of utopian visionaries who campaigned obsessively. Sometimes utopia requires cleansing.

Women joined the nuns compelled by a noble belief that they could do good, that they could find belonging, a higher purpose, and professional standing.

Some nuns felt stung by the immorality of the Laundries, until they were absorbed by them.

The courts, police, social workers, priests, and parents sent women and girls there, and they sent their laundry in after them.

They washed, they scrubbed, they spun, and they pressed.

Everything was secret, secret, secret.

In their unfettered deference, Irish people genuflected, lit their candles, muttered their novenas, and undertook their penitential obligations. They prayed to God and feared the Devil.

The logic of the Laundries was the logic of Irish life.

No babies were born there.

Hundreds of women died there. No one came to collect their bodies.

Women are still there now. Will someone come and collect their bodies?

The Laundries were accepted as the end of the line and an integral part of life. They went without saying, and now we must find a way to live with it, all of it.

On the long road of researching this book, as I visited Waterford, Wexford, Dublin, Cork, Mayo, and Limerick, people I spoke to from the generations above me, who had grown up during the middle part of the twentieth century, often uttered pleading whispers, statements like We thought it was right. Or We didn’t think about it at all. They were submerged in a world of warped morality, they suggested; it was a depraved solution in deprived times. We can see now that it was wrong. We saw it differently then. We thought it was for the best. Sharply echoing this sentiment, an academic colleague who gave a public talk on the Laundries in Dublin told me that during the Q&A an older member of the audience said that when it came to the Laundries, she was “sick of the righteous indignation” of this generation.

They had lived alongside this system without questioning it, only to find out, on reaching older age, that they had been coexisting with a mass injustice. Some survivors have said the Laundries were Ireland’s Auschwitz. How do you reconcile yourself to that after the fact?

Confronting exactly this problem was the philosopher Gillian Rose. Rose had been a consultant when the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum was being transformed. In her 1993 essay, “The Future of Auschwitz,” she wrote of her concern that visitors were invited to remember this past, being shown how to see it, where to look, and where not to look. Is it not also possible, she asked a colleague, that the experience of remembering this past need not be entirely focused on the “infinite pain of the victims”? Could they also invite visitors to “engage in intense self-questioning: ‘Could I have done this?’ ”

No, was the response, “no museum curator could permit such a radical questioning of the visitor’s identity and agency.” This was not to be seen as a potentially enduring, even repeatable, horror of history. It was singular and disgusting.

The generations that follow are not to blame for the Laundries, but we are entirely responsible for how they are remembered. The opposite of subterfuge is not discourse and talk, it’s candor. We may now speak about the Laundries, but how we remember them and all they represented matters, especially because the direct descendant of collective silence is sometimes collective forgetting. I came to understand that what people were whispering to me was their own variant of Rose’s demand: We lived with this. And so could you.

Exactly how many women and girls were sent to the Laundries, we cannot be sure. Accounting for how many women died remains ongoing work. But what happened to women in the Laundries, and why it happened—about that there can be no misunderstanding.

In the 1920s and 1930s, a Catholic citadel formed around Ireland. The Laundries looked like the design of a single organization driven by an excess of avarice—but they were not. The nation was vulnerable, and society turned inward, one step at a time. Either through active support or unthinking complacency, Ireland arrived at a place that was excessively exclusionary and unflinchingly hostile to outsiders. If there were really any fallen people back then, it was not them—the women and girls—but the proverbial us. Ordinary people who had fallen into the rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking about what was going wrong and who was to blame. Anxious people who had fallen for muscular populist politics. Or the oblivious way people had fallen into collective silence.

Even at that, it might still be easy to judge, to think of the Laundries as emerging out of some sensibility that was “foreign to human nature.” But really, what had people wanted back then? For life around them to reflect their values? For their children to have a future? Their homes to feel secure? After much turmoil, they had wanted to be on the winning side of history. The only thing they needed to do to improve their lot was to keep those people, those ideas, those ways of life out. That story is more frightening now, because we can see ourselves in this past. We are emotionally and politically much closer to this history than we usually allow ourselves to think. Always, and inescapably so.

The story of Ireland’s descent is a story of how, slowly but surely, society—any society—can turn inward against itself. This is not just an Irish problem, of course. All societies, even the most stable, can slip into extreme intolerance. There was nothing exceptional about what happened. So many of us have inherited nations that were mounted on extraction, eradication, and banishment. We are in an age of historical reckoning. The legacies of empires, colonialism, genocide, enslavement, and mass environmental damage confront countries across the globe. How to make amends for the lingering legacies of injustice is contested, fraught, and, necessarily, ongoing. But remembering is also a source of reparation.

In 2013, a journalist approached Carmel, who was by then sixty-eight and still living in England. The journalist was swept up in the air of victory—an official report, a moving apology, surely these were clear signs that the victims of history had been vindicated. She asked Carmel if she at last felt closure for her years spent in a Magdalene Laundry. “Closure?” Carmel seemed unimpressed by how badly this journalist had understood the problem.

“There never will be closure,” she said, “till I’m six foot under. It will be with me all my life. The redress board money, it might have helped me financially but not mentally. It’s here all the time. Something in every day will remind me of my life. A phrase, a word, a hymn, a piece of music. There’s always something in my life that will remind me of my past life, and that’s where I will never get closure, never will. I’ve moved on, yes, I’ve moved on a bit. But I’ll never heal.

“I hope when the youngsters in generations to come read their history books, they will know all about what happened to us unfortunate people, and that the nuns knew they could do it to us because we had no one to tell our stories to, no one to call out to for help. That’s the sad part of it.”

For such a long time, I had felt that I was a historian of utter misery and despair, a chronicler of the most abhorrent State neglect. I was troubled by the ethics of writing about other people’s suffering. Over time, though, I came to share Carmel’s optimism about history writing, about its compassionate potential. History that charts decades of incessant cruelty, despairing as that is, can also be a reminder that no matter how far and how long we have drifted from justice, there is always a way back, once we are willing to act. But mostly, history is a way to remember; it makes us capable of seeing that which might otherwise have gone overlooked. Nothing can undo the past or bring the dead back to life, but we can acknowledge that they lived.

Decades later, when Edna O’Brien was asked to describe the fallen woman in her story “The Widow,” whose neighbors despised her for her persistent refusal to be silent and invisible, she said her protagonist was among “the foolish, unconventional women, the yearners, because they don’t belong in the confined and confining spaces they happen to be born into. They are quite often punished for their supposed flightiness.” She was “a heroine at the mercy of the vigilante, who by not losing her wild spirit, has surpassed them.” That was what I also came to realize: I had been a witness to a triumphant reversal in fortunes. Apart from their rare outbursts, the nuns have continued to observe a vow of silence. That stolid refusal to speak might feel like a villainous act. Yet I could meet with survivors and hear their accounts, read thousands of pages of testimony, watch documentaries, and listen to them on television and radio as they aired the stories of their institutionalized lives. We all can. By every objective standard, the women and girls sent to Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries suffered abuse and injustice. Despite all they endured, many of the women have conquered that which sought to control them. Whatever victory there is over this past, that is the women’s. But the history, that belongs to us all.

Acknowledgments

This book bears only my name, but it simply would not have been possible to complete an undertaking like this if it had not been for the support of so many people, and I am grateful to be able to name and thank them here. My first thanks go to all the women who broke the silence around us all by coming forward to have their life histories recorded for the archives, and my gratitude to Justice for Magdalenes and the Waterford Memories Project for making these archives easily available. I am immensely grateful to Evelyn Glynn, who was particularly generous in giving me access to Brigid’s previously unpublished transcript and for sharing her own experiences with me. Elizabeth Coppin, Maureen O’Sullivan, Mary Smyth, and Samantha Long each generously gave me their time, answered my questions, and shared their stories with me—thank you.

The research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK, though I would never have had the confidence to apply for that grant if it had not been for Peter Matthews’s early encouragement. In the later stages of research and writing, I was the recipient of a Giles St. Aubyn Award from the Royal Society of Literature, which made a significant difference at an important juncture in the fieldwork.

A number of activists and experts patiently answered my many pestering questions, and I am indebted to them for their guidance: Mark Coen, Conall Ó Fátharta, Chris Hamil, Brendan Kelly, Donna Rose, Eoin O’Sullivan, Patricia Carey, Jimmy Martin, John Kennedy, and Jennifer O’Mahony. Katherine O’Donnell supported the project when it was no more than an idea and remained unfailingly helpful throughout, and I want to extend a similar thanks to her Justice for Magdalenes Research colleagues: James Smith, Maeve O’Rourke, and Claire McGettrick, born Lorraine Hughes. I was also lucky to have expert research assistance from Dr. Jowita Thor and Dr. Deirdre Foley.

Noelle Dowling at the Dublin Diocesan Archives was a gift to anyone trying to make sense of Catholic Ireland. I am glad to have visited the archives while she was there, with the door kept open to researchers. Ciarán Cooney and Killian Gordon at RTÉ Archives both helped me access important public letters and radio and television clips. I am also grateful to archivists and librarians at the National Library of Ireland, Limerick School of Art and Design, National Archives of Ireland, Central Catholic Library in Dublin, and the Irish Jesuit Archives. Monika Hinz at O’Donnell + Toumey very kindly routed out previously unseen photos of Sunday’s Well for me, and thanks to them for giving me permission to reproduce some of those photos in this book. Similarly, Helen Bermingham at the Galway City Museum went above and beyond to secure me the two photos of the Magdalene Laundry bags, which she allowed me to reproduce here. Thanks also to Ivana Bacik and Chloe Manahan for trying to help me track down information, and Jen Dunbar at New Decade TV & Film for sharing material with me.

For providing tips and leads, I want to thank Paul Gavin and Aidan Beatty. For helpful conversations: Anne-Marie McAlinden, Enda Delaney, Roseanna Doughty, Kieran McEvoy, Senia Pašeta, Máiréad Enright, Jacinta Prunty, Karen Hanrahan, David Hayes, Julie Laursen, and Gillian O’Brien.

Thanks to the ESRC, I was afforded the opportunity to develop this research in creative ways. A sliver of this history was worked into a dance theater production with the artist Sinéad McCann, The Ireland We Dreamed Of. Together, we also developed two sculptural text pieces for our exhibition with Ethna Rose O’Regan, What Does It Mean to Know? Thinking aesthetically about this research pushed my thinking and my writing, and I am enormously grateful that Sinéad was willing to go on that journey with me.

The BBC New Generation Thinkers scheme gave me the opportunity to make a radio program based on my research, “The Legacy of the Laundries,” where I first got to tease out some of the ideas and themes of this book. Working with the BBC and their producers has been a great privilege. And it was that opportunity with the BBC that brought me to the attention of Matt Turner at RCW. I feel lucky to have such an incisive and supportive literary agent. Similarly, I am indebted to my editor at Bodley Head, Alice Skinner, for her perceptive judgment and thoughtful guidance. They have both taught me so much and instilled in me so many important lessons about writing. Many thanks as well to Mary Chamberlain, who carefully copyedited the book. I am also grateful to my US editor at Simon & Schuster, Emily Simonson, for her enthusiasm and encouragement.

I wrote this book while I was a Nominated Fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities, based at the University of Edinburgh. A particular thank you to Lauren Galligan, Ben Fletcher-Watson, and Lesley McAra for hosting me there. The annual Punishment and Society symposium has become something of a spiritual home for me, and my friends and colleagues there have helped shape my thinking about all it is that we do and why it matters. I am also grateful to have been invited to present at various universities, including Oxford, Edinburgh, Oxford Brookes, and Queen’s University, Belfast, where I was able to workshop sections of the book.

Several people kindly read early drafts and provided discerning and constructive critiques that undoubtedly helped refine the research and the writing: Maria Luddy, Ben Collier, Jamie Buchan, Aidan Beatty, Ali Fraser, Rodge Glass, and Laura Kelly.

Friends who sustained me with hikes, dinners, days out, nights in, good chats, and who also sustained my plants by watering them while I was away: Ben and Jamie, Ben, Shane, Ana, Anna and Alasdair, Dom and Grace, Colette, Aoibheann, Marion, Eve, and Briege. I am also grateful to Shona Minson for her support and advice at a critical time in the project’s completion.

My in-laws took care of my children on more occasions than I can recall. Joan and Terry, thank you so much for everything.

My greatest thanks are reserved for my brilliant husband, Michael. He is my first reader, my most honest critic, and the best person I know. I feel so lucky that we get to go through this life, side by side. And to my two children, who patiently watched and waited while I wrote this book. They only interrupted me to beg and plead that they could type their names on my computer (because when you are four and six, typing on a computer has an enormous allure). So at last I can relent and say yes! And as a small sign of my enormous love and gratitude for them both, let them type their own names here: Connell and Rua. (Rua would like you to know that she also did the and.)

About the Author

DR. LOUISE BRANGAN is an Irish academic who researches injustice and punishment. She is an AHRC and BBC New Generation Thinker and winner of the Royal Society of Literature Giles St. Aubyn Award. She lives and works in Scotland.

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www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Louise-Brangan

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Notes

PROLOGUE

1. a dire place for poor orphaned children: The orphanages in Ireland tended to be used by the middle classes.

2. The Legion of Mary saw: The Official Handbook of the Legion of Mary (1953) Concilium Legionis Mariae, p.1.

3. In their self-appointed: This was sometimes known as “souperism.” This term referred to Protestants who offered soup to starving Catholics during the Famine. In return, these Catholics were expected to convert to Protestantism.

4. They set about: Irish Catholic Directory 1944, p.242.

5. There were numerous: Joseph Cunnane (1959) “The Doctrinal Content of Irish Marian Piety,” The Furrow, Vol. 10: pp.89–103; James Donnelly (2005) “Opposing the Modern World: The cult of the Virgin Mary in Ireland,” 1965–85, Éire-Ireland, 40(1), pp.183–245.

6. Despite rearing them: Uncatalogued letter in box of letters to Archbishop Byrne Re: Legion of Mary, Dublin diocesan archives.

7. By the 1950s, the Legion: Diarmaid Ferriter (2005) The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000, Profile Books, p.274.

8. This was not hidden: In a letter to the Irish Times reminiscing about the make-up of Donnybrook’s main street, one person wrote “the butcher was there too, and in a side-street, Darcy the dairyman. A post office at the Donnybrook fair end, the Magdalen Asylum, and Cornelius Kennedy’s public house round off my memories.” Irish Times, 22 September 1966.

INTRODUCTION: FORGETTING

In their dispatches: Freda Adler, 1983. Nations Not Obsessed with Crime, F. B. Rothman.

and if the paltry number: Ian O’Donnell (2013) “Penal Policy in Ireland: The malign effect of sustained neglect,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 102(407), 315–323.

“policeman’s paradise”: Conor Brady (1974) Guardians of the Police, Gill and Macmillan, p.240.

harmonious, practically utopian: Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball (1968) Family and Community in Ireland, Harvard University Press.

In 1958: Kevin Smyth (1958) “Priests and People in Ireland.” In the Furrow, Vol. 9: pp.135–152.

While the prison population: The Irish government reflected that “this rate appears to be the highest in the world,” Commission of Inquiry on Mental Illness (1966) Stationery Office, p.xiii. The Irish psychiatric hospital census in 1974 “reported that the Irish have the highest ‘first admission’ mental hospitalization rates –particularly for schizophrenia—in the world,” Nancy Schepper-Hughes (2001) Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental illness in rural Ireland, University California Press, p.24.; Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell found that “in 1933, for instance, there were 2,500 more girls in Irish industrial schools than across Britain in its entirety.” Ian O’Donnell and Eoin O’Sullivan (2012) Coercive Confinement in Ireland: Patients, prisoners and penitents, Manchester University Press, p.24.

Taken together: Ibid. p.7.

a staggering rate: Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell (2007) “Coercive Confinement in the Republic of Ireland—The waning of a culture of control,” Punishment and Society, 9 (1): 27–48; see also World Prison Brief: USA.

The Laundries were the end: I broadly take this idea of the termini from the criminologist Richard Sparks, who used it to describe the extreme forms of prison segregation and the “recurrent capacity of” our systems to control, “to develop the deepest places—ends-of-the-line; holes; termini.” See Richard Sparks (2002) “Out of the Digger: The Warrior’s honor and the guilty observer,” Ethnography, 3(4), pp.556–581.

By the end of the eighteenth century: Maria Luddy (2007) Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940, Cambridge University Press, pp.76–77.

Nor was their purpose detention: Ibid. Chapter 3.

By the early twentieth century: The only Protestant Magdalene asylum that remained was Denny House. However, “by 1921… [that] Magdalen Asylum had been transformed into a mother and baby home, exclusively for Protestant women experiencing a ‘first fall.” While the institution continued to be referred to as the Dublin/Leeson Street Magdalen Asylum/Home, it no longer operated as a Magdalen Home style institution.” See Chapter 23, “Denny House,” The Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Final Report (2021).

There were thirty-five orders: Margaret MacCurtain (1995) “Late in the Field: Catholic sisters in twentieth-century Ireland and the New Religious history,” Journal of Women’s History, 7(1), pp.49–63.

running hundreds of institutions: Irish Catholic Directory, various years.

On occasion, the nuns would: Leanne McCormick, Sean O’Connell, Olivia Dee and John Privilege (2021) Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries in Northern Ireland, 1922–1990—For the Inter Departmental Working Group on Mother and Baby Homes, Magdalene Laundries and Historical Clerical Child Abuse [hereafter MBHML/NI].

some aberration after independence: James Smith (2007) Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment, University of Notre Dame Press; Maria Luddy (2008) “Magdalen Asylums in Ireland, 1880–1930: Welfare, reform, incarceration,” Wohltätigkeit. Ländliche Gesellschaften in Europa, 1850–1930, Peter Lang, p.293.

Together, they took a conniving: Clara Fischer (2016) “Gender, Nation, and the Politics of Shame: Magdalen laundries and the institutionalization of feminine transgression in modern Ireland,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 41(4), 821–843.

They wrote to newspapers: What is referred to in the academic literature as “coercive confinement” or an “architecture of containment.” Ian O’Donnell and Eoin O’Sullivan (2012) Coercive Confinement in Ireland; James Smith (2007) Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries.

The story follows one man: When the book was published, the author Claire Keegan rejected the suggestion that her novella was about the Magdalene Laundries. That was, she said, a backdrop for her story about a man having a midlife crisis. Guardian, “Claire Keegan: ‘I think something needs to be as long as it needs to be,’ ” 20 October 2021.

Across the decade: Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to Establish the Facts of State Involvement with the Magdalen Laundries [hereafter the Committee report will be referred to as the McAleese Report], Chapter 10, p.xvi. The McAleese Report notes that “as late as 1984, the daily average number of women in custody in Irish prisons was only 37 (compared to 1,557 men).”

A paltry number compared: Some women were held in Limerick prison. After the 1950s, as prisons were closed due to low prisoner numbers, a space for twenty or so women was set aside in the basement of the young male offenders prison at Mountjoy in Dublin. According to the historian of Irish women’s imprisonment, Christina Quinlan, that was “probably the worst accommodation available within the prison system.” Christina Quinlan (2003) “The Women We Imprison,” Irish Criminal Law Journal, 13 (1):2–7.

The Irish government’s official calculation: This figure is based on only eight out of ten Laundries; it excludes 762 women who entered the Laundries prior to independence. That is to highlight just two of the major exclusions that undermine the decisiveness with which the government’s official numbers were presented. See Claire McGettrick, Katherine O’Donnell, Maeve O’Rourke and James Smith (2021) Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A campaign for justice, Bloomsbury Publishing, p.115.

There were no pregnant: Pregnant women were not permitted in the Laundries either. McAleese Report, p.xxv. The Irish government published a subsequent investigation into Mother and Baby Homes in 2021: The Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Final Report [hereafter MBH Report]. This further confirms that from their inception, pregnant women were not admitted to Magdalene Laundries as a rule, with the exception of a Protestant-run Magdalene asylum, Denny House, though this was not a Laundry, MBH Report, p.16. Of the 14,607 admissions to Madgalene Laundries that the McAleese Committee noted, 313 women (3.9%) of these had been transferred to a Laundry after having given birth at a Mother and Baby Home. And the MBH Report suggests that of the 57,000 women received into Ireland’s network of Mother and Baby Homes, no more than 1% of these were subsequently sent on to a Magdalene Laundry, p.47. Similarly, and importantly, the MBH Report added that “No Irish mother and baby home ran a commercial laundry—probably because the maintenance payments by local authorities made this unnecessary,” p.17.

Wittgenstein once wrote: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1933), Harcourt.

The Laundry nuns: Jacinta Prunty (2017) The Monasteries, Magdalen Asylums and Reformatory Schools of Our Lady of Charity in Ireland 1853–1973, The Columba Press, p.281; Mark Coen (2023) “ ‘Cheap in the End’: A history of Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry,” in Mark Coen, Katherine O’Donnell and Maeve O’Rourke (eds) A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and church–state power in Ireland, Bloomsbury Academic, pp.65–99.

eyewitness accounts: This was also the ambition of Evelyn Glynn and Justice for Magdalenes when they made their archives and interviews publicly available. One member of Justice for Magdalenes later wrote that they took this decision as they hoped the interviews would “inspire artists, and provide enough material for the work of historians and social scientists in their analyses of the interviews.” See “Magdalene Testimony from Donnybrook Laundry,” in A Dublin Magdalene Laundry (2023), p.111.

The public came and went: Francis Finnegan (2004) Do Penance or Perish: Magdalen asylums in Ireland, Oxford University Press, p.48.

The Laundries were a cog: Ibid. p.47.

It could be that, as the writer: Richard Flanagan (2024) Question 7, Vintage.

CHAPTER 1: DISAPPEARED

Industrial schools were founded: Bruce Arnold (2009) The Irish Gulag, Gill & Macmillan, p.13.

In homes across Ireland: Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse Report (2009) Vol. 1, p.41.

Their behavior as free girls: McAleese Report, p.70.

Carmel returned to the Good Shepherd: In 1932, in an ethically dismal experiment, the psychologist Harry Harlow used 120 rhesus monkeys to examine the impact of parental attachment. Harlow’s lab team constructed two models: a soft, cuddly surrogate mother and a cold, wire-mesh equivalent. When placed in the room with both options, each baby monkey rejected the metal monkey mother in favor of the softer, albeit inanimate and unmoving, alternative. Harlow and his team went further. They constructed a new set of four monkey mothers. This time each of them was entirely soft, but each was violent in its own way. One blasted great gusts of air, another shook furiously, a third one was sprung so that it would periodically fling away the infant that had attached itself to it. The fourth faux monkey mother had brass spikes that darted out, sharply prodding the infant cradled upon it. It was a perfect material distillation of parental rejection and recalcitrance. Yet after each violent interaction, the infant monkeys once again returned to these creations, what the lab team called “monster mothers.” Harlow showed that from our earliest days, we have a deep need to be parented. Deborah Blum (2011) Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the science of affection, Perseus Books Group.

Women and girls lived in complete: Laura Kelly (2023) Contraception and Modern Ireland: A social history, c.1922–92, Cambridge University Press.

And so girls passed: MBH Report.

The actual response to the book: Padraic O’Farrell (1990) The Burning of Brinsley MacNamara, Lilliput Press.

Her daughter’s pregnancy: In the 1920s, the Farmers’ Union wanted the State to take less responsibility for girls who were pregnant outside marriage as they believed it would reduce their taxes. They wrote that “one feels that there must have been something wanting in parental control and that they should not be permitted to evade a natural and positive obligation to maintain her.” MBH Report, Chapter 4, p.18.

Even at that, being discharged: MBH Report. Though this seems to have been a practice most enthusiastically championed in Galway, in the West of Ireland.

Women at Mother and Baby Homes: “Almost half in Enniscorthy [Lunatic Asylum] whose admission forms make reference to childbirth or miscarriage were single. Some of them never left the asylum afterward and no mention is made of what happened to their children.” Áine McCarthy (2001) “Hearths, Bodies and Minds: Gender ideology and women’s committal to Enniscorthy Lunatic Asylum, 1916–25,” The Irish Women’s History Reader, Routledge.

In truth, those entering the Laundries: In the Irish State’s commissioned investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, they found that children born in Mother and Baby Homes sometimes became residents in Magdalene Laundries as teenagers or young adults, MBH Report p.47.

For many of the girls: Sister of Our Lady of Charity (1969) “The Apostolate,” p.1. [Dublin diocesan archives DDA/AB8/b/XLIV/86/5/1].

They were suspected: Letter to Archbishop Byrne from a nun, uncatalogued and undated. The letter references the Regina Coeli women’s hostel, which opened in 1930, and Archbishop Byrne died in 1940, so the letter was sent in this ten-year period.

“Removal,” they knew: Internal government letter, sent on behalf of the Minister of Education, 12 February 1942.

If the industrial school: Shane Kilcommins, Ian O’Donnell, Eoin O’Sullivan and Barry Vaughn (2004) Crime, Punishment and the Search for Order in Ireland, Institute of Public Administration, p.22.

Adult men sentenced: In 1975, the average life sentence was 7.5 years, Diarmuid Griffin and Ian O’Donnell (2012) “The Life Sentence and Parole,” British Journal of Criminology, 52(3), pp.611–629.

After just two and a half years: It is reported that roughly one in ten women and girls entered the Magdalene Laundries “voluntarily.”

Unmoved, the social worker: Sister Ethna McDermott, Province Leader of the Good Shepherd Sisters, Witness Statement, 11 January 2016, provided to the Inquiry into Historical Institutional Abuse 1922–1995 (Northern Ireland), p.48.

The Laundries were the only way: Irish Times, “Last Days of a Laundry,” 25 September 1996.

It was believed that they would: 8.1% of known admissions of women and girls came on remand, as part of their probation, or were sent by either the courts, prison or gardaí. According to the McAleese Report, “The youngest girl known to have entered a Magdalen Laundry by one of these routes was 11, while the oldest was 60,” p.207.

He could not fathom why: Richard Devane (1924) “The Unmarried Mother: Some legal aspects of the problem,” The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, p.185.

The use of temporary release: Louise Brangan (2021) “Pastoral Penality in 1970s Ireland: Addressing the pains of imprisonment,” Theoretical Criminology, 25(1), p.44–65.

CHAPTER 2: DISCONTENT

The Irish delegation agreed: Though the final Irish border was not agreed upon until the end of 1925. See: Margaret O’Callaghan (2000) “ ‘Old Parchment and Water’: The Boundary Commission of 1925 and the copperfastening of the Irish Border,” Irish Studies Journal, 5(2):27–55.

A small but thuggish: Anne Dolan (2018) “Politics, Economy and Society in the Irish Free State, 1922–1939” in Thomas Bartlett (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, pp.323–348, Cambridge University Press, p.324; Fearghal McGarry, “Revolution, 1916–1923” in ibid. p.289.

A former math teacher: Dermot Keogh (1944) Twentieth Century Ireland: Nation and state, Marin’s Press, p.77.

He had no taste: Ronan Fanning (2015) Éamon de Valera: A will to power, Faber.

The Catholic Church already: Daithí Ó Corráin (2018) “Catholicism in Ireland, 1880–2015: Rise, ascendancy and retreat” in Bartlett (ed.) The Cambridge History of Ireland, Cambridge University Press, pp.726–764, p.726.

They denounced anyone: Irish Times, Pastoral Letter of the Irish Roman Catholic Hierarchy, 11 October 1922.

Ireland was a young nation: Census of Ireland, 1926, “Table 1: Total persons, males and females in Saorstát Éireann at each of the nine Censuses from 1841 to 1926, classified according to age groups.”

Literature had become outrageously: One reported sermon expressed disgust at the “crude realism” of modern literature, Evening Herald, “The Virtue of Chastity—Modern evils,” 23 March 1936.

In the dance halls: Kathern Holt (2021) “Redefining Twentieth Century Ideals of Irish Womanhood: Dorothy Tyrconnell Forrest, Erina Brady, and early Irish modern dance,” Feminist Modernist Studies, 4(3), 332–345; Kevin Corrigan Kearns (2023) A Year of Glory and Gold: 1932, Ireland’s Jazz Age, Gill Books; Irish Independent, “Bishops Condemnation of Dance Abuses: Bishops on evil of dancing,” 7 October 1925.

Catholic magazines railed: Catholic Bulletin, “Editorial,” January 1926, p.15.

These getups: Irish Independent, “Evil Literature: Irish people and Catholic Truth Society,” 4 March 1924.

For Catholic leadership: Irish Independent, “Bishops Condemnation of Dance Abuses: Bishops on evil of dancing,” 7 October 1925.

These modern women: Irish Independent, “Women Jurors: Time wasted trapezing to the courts,” 1 March 1927.

The Church hierarchy warned: Irish Independent, “Sermon by Archbishop Gilmartin,” 12 May 1925.

Purity meant living: Irish Independent, “Hierarchy’s Condemnation of Dance Abuses,” 7 October 1925.

Engaging in the intellectual: Evening Herald, “The Virtue of Chastity—Modern evils,” 23 March 1936; Connacht Tribune, “Archbishop of Tuam’s 1926 Lenten Pastoral,” 20 February 1926.

While there were “hysterical denunciations”: Senia Pašeta (2003) “Censorship and Its Critics in the Irish Free State 1922–1932,” Past & Present, 181: pp.193–218.

a “cloak for sin”: Irish Independent, “Foreign Dance and Indecent Dress,” 12 May 1926.

Families should be tightly: Aidan Beatty (2016) Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–1938, Palgrave Macmillan; Eileen Hogan (2010) “Earthly, Sensual, Devilish: Sex, ‘race’ and jazz in Post-Independence Ireland,” Jazz Research Journal, 4(1), pp.57–79; Bryce Evans (2015) “ ‘How Will We Kill the Evening?’: Degeneracy and ‘second generation’ male adolescence in Independent Ireland,” in Catherine Cox and Susannah Riordan (eds) Adolescence in Modern Irish History. Palgrave Macmillan, pp.151–175; Diarmuid Ferriter, Occasions of Sin: Sex and society in modern Ireland, Profile Books.

Since the formation: These lay community groups formed because they wanted to “secure the new State for the Church and to reinforce the Catholic Irish identity,” Maurice Curtis (2010) A Challenge to Democracy: Militant Catholicism in Modern Ireland, History Press, p.8. Curtis also points out that Irish vigilantism was emboldened by Rome’s call for “Catholic action” in this period.

Together, they formed: The Catholic Bulletin, “The Voice of the Church,” January 1926, p.77.

One of the most consequential: Martin Walsh (2019) Richard Devane SJ: Social commentator and advocate 1876–1951, Messenger Publications; Aiden Beatty (2019) “Where Does the State End and the Church Begin? The strange career of Richard S. Devane,” Studi Irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies, 9(9), pp.443–464.

Even prior to independence: Richard Devane, 1925, “Indecent Literature: Some legal remedies,” Irish Ecclesiastical Record, p.4.

They marched to People’s Park: Richard Devane, 1950, The Imported Press: A national menace—some remedies, James Duffy, p.10; Richard Devane, 1925, “Indecent Literature: Some legal remedies.”

Devane is reported: Irish Independent, “English Sunday Press Publicly Burned in Limerick,” 31 October 1911.

Devane then orchestrated: Walsh (2019) Richard Devane SJ, pp.45–47.

Devane knew that: Rather than being a top-down imposition of Church orthodoxy, the charge against immorality and the desire for restrictions on these new forms of entertainment were supported by local communities. See John Porter (2018) “The Public Dance Halls Act, 1935: A re-examination,” Irish Historical Studies, 42 (162), pp.317–335.

That was the other problem: A kind of cosmopolitan tolerance was seen as dangerous. In an article in the Ballina Herald, 13 December 1930, a public debate was reported where it was said that “Toleration in general was desirable,” but “when Catholic fundamental principles were invaded, toleration would be a weakness, if not a crime.”

The loose manners: Report of the Committee on Evil Literature (1927), Dublin: Stationery Office, p.9.

From 1922, he sat at his typewriter: Devane (1924) “The Unmarried Mother”; Richard Devane (1925) “The Dance Hall,” Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Vol. 37; Richard Devane (1927) “Suggested tariffs in imported newspapers,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review of Letters Philosophy and Science; Richard Devane “Illegitimate Children Bill,” in Irish Independent, 2 December 1930.

He also methodically pointed: Richard Devane (1925) “Indecent Literature: Some legal remedies,” Irish Ecclesiastical Record. He also wrote elsewhere that “for the first time in centuries Irish Catholics have the opportunity of fixing their own legal standard of public morality”; Devane (1924) “The Unmarried Mother.”

Those women and girls: Ibid.; Devane (1927) “Suggested tariffs in imported newspapers.”

In fact, he mused: Richard Devane (1924) “The Unmarried Mother,” p.187.

He was appalled of course: Richard Devane (1942) Challenge from Youth: A documented study of youth in modern youth movements, Browne & Nolan.

He believed that for this: “Richard Devane” [The Irish Jesuit Archive, IEIJA J44/1 (1)–(9)].

Maybe he was even: The Irish Jesuit Archive [J44/15(1)–(30); Admin/12/14(5); Admin/12/2(1–7)].

His clique of fringe: Irish Statesman, 1928, p.464.

One bishop, upon receiving: The Irish Jesuit Archive [Admin/12/15(3)].

With the augury of suffering: Úna Newell (2015) The West Must Wait: County Galway and the Irish Free State 1922–1932, Manchester University Press.

Impoverished even before: “Distress and Unemployment in Saorstát Generally,” Department of an Taoiseach, S4278A, NAI, cited in Lindsey Earner-Byrne, (2017) Letters of the Catholic Poor, Cambridge University Press. p.20.

Staring down the barrel: Anne Dolan (2018) “Politics, Economy and Society in the Irish Free State.”

then had to shrink: Mel Cousins (2003) The Birth of Welfare in Ireland, 1922–1952, Four Courts Press, pp.31–32.

Wages fell: Statistical Abstract, 1931, p.66, cited in Cormac Ó Gráda (2002) “ ‘The Greatest Blessing of All’: The old age pension in Ireland,” Past & Present, 175(1), 124–161; Ian Miller (2024) “Hunger and Starvation in Modern Ireland,” in Mártín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman (eds) Irish Food History: A companion, Royal Irish Academy. Yet they cut income tax from 25% to 15%, Fred W. Powell (1922) The Politics of Irish Social Policy,1600–1990, Edwin Mellen Press, p.166. In February 1924, it was officially recorded that 31,250 unemployed people were not in receipt of any form of social assistance. Though within the administration, it was believed that the true number of people who were unemployed but not receiving benefits was closer to 80,000, Linday Earner-Byrne and Olwen Purdue (2022) “ ‘Please Pardon Me for Taking the Liberty’: Poverty letters as negotiating spaces in 1920s and 1930s Belfast and Dublin,” Cultural and Social History, 19(5), pp.567–585, p.569; “Distress and Unemployment in Saorstát Generally,” Department of an Taoiseach, S4278A, NAI. Cited in Lindsay Earner-Byrne (2017) Letters of the Catholic Poor, p.20.

And across the 1920s: Linday Earner-Byrne and Olwen Purdue, (2022) “Please Pardon Me for Taking the Liberty,” p.569.

“famine-like conditions”: In July 1924, the Freeman’s Journal reported: “75% of the people had now no potatoes, their chief diet for the last 2 months, and the harvest prospects were never worse in living memory. There is no employment.”

considered the worst year of the Great Famine: Meath Chronicle, 20 August 1924, quoted in Irish Times, “The Forgotten Famine and How it Put the Fledging Irish Free State on the Brink,” 9 April 2020.

As they owned land: Miller (2024) “Hunger and Starvation in Modern Ireland.”

The newspapers also insisted: Irish Times, “Poverty in West Cork,” 1 April 1927.

She too had starved: Miller (2024) “Hunger and Starvation in Modern Ireland,” p.643.

More echoes of the famine: Table: The Population of Ireland, 1600–1926, in Cormac Ó Grada (1979)“The Population of Ireland 1700–1900: A survey,” Annales de démographie historique, 1979. Statistiquesde peuplement et politique de population pp.281–299, p.283.

Campaigners such as Devane: This is close to what Stuart Hall and his collaborators described as a crisis of hegemony: in times of economic decline and social unrest, previously minor matters come to be identified as the cause of society’s problems. Stuart Hall, John Clarke, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts (2013) Policing the Crisis—35th Anniversary Edition, Palgrave Macmillan.

In fact, if “centuries of oppression”: The Drogheda Independent, “Catholic Action,” 11 January 1930.

In Ireland’s time of weakness: Irish Independent, “Hierarchy’s Condemnation of Dance Abuses,” 7 October 1925.

The nation could begin: Drogheda Independent, “An Ríoghacht, The League of the Kingship of Christ,” 27 December 1930. Richard Devane (1931) “The Dance Hall: Moral and national menace,” The Irish Ecclesiastical Record ; The Catholic Bulletin, 1922 March, pp.157–159; Edward Cahill, SJ, “Notes on Christian Sociology,” Irish Monthly, 5 January 1925: “it is the duty of a Christian State to remedy, by prudent legislation.” In 1932, Cahill went on to publish the lengthy text, The Framework of the Christian State.

Catholicism was not just: Drogheda Independent, “Catholic Action,” 11 January 1930.

At the end of the 1920s: Irish Independent, “Hierarchy’s Condemnation of Dance Abuses,” 7 October 1925; Rev. M. Garaghy SJ, (1922) Idols of Modern Society, Office of the Irish Messenger; Richard Devane (1925) “Indecent Literature.”

In 1926, the Catholic Truth Society: Irish Independent, “Evil Literature Scandal,” 5 June 1926.

They hoped that: Irish Independent, “Evil Literature Teachers’ Proposals,” 1 March 1926.

One historian described: Jason Knirck (2012) “A Cult of No Personality: W. T. Cosgrave and the election of 1933,” Éire-Ireland 47(3): 64–90.

Even in 1922, Cosgrave: Irish Times, 9 September 1922, quoted in Stephen Collins (1996) The Cosgrave Legacy, Blackwater Press, p.35.

They maintained a marriage: Deirdre Foley (2020) “ ‘Women are Citizens’: Women’s groups and the Commission on the Status of Women in Ireland, c.1967–1979,” PhD thesis, Dublin City University.

Most Irish women: Maryann Gialanella Valiulis (1992) “Defining Their Role in the New State: Irishwomen’s protest against the Juries Act of 1927,” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 18(1): pp.43–60.

Divorce was prohibited: Butte Independent, “Dail Eireann Places Ban on Divorce,” 3 April 1925. While Cosgrave was a committed Catholic and proudly introduced the bill, behind the scenes he had been wary that such a bill, being overtly Catholic, would marginalize Irish Protestants. Yet he was contacted by a bishop and warned about the risk of losing Catholic support in his constituency if he was not seen to ban divorce. Letter from Dr. Downey to Cosgrave, 17 September 1925, to which Cosgrave sent an apologetic reply, 21 September 1925. Cited in J. J. Lee (1989) Ireland 1912–1985Politics and Society, Cambridge University Press, p.158. The ban was later reinforced in 1937. Diane Urquhart (2020) Irish Divorce: A history, Cambridge University Press.

He initially tried: Asked whether he would consider appointing a state censor to combat “the evil effects of… undesirable publications,” O’Higgins stated that “Under the existing law there are ample powers to deal with the sale and distribution of obscene literature.” Dáil Éireann debate—Tuesday, 3 November 1925 Vol. 13 No.1.

They claimed to speak: Dáil Éireann debate—Wednesday, 5 June 1929 Vol. 30 No. 7

If Ireland was ever: Irish Times, “Fianna Fáil’s Appeal: Mr. de Valera on taxation. Is government too costly” 4 January 1932.

Fianna Fáil “want to try”: Dáil Éireann debate—Wednesday, 30 May 1928 Vol. 23 No. 19.

News of the murder: Donegal News, “Let Us Have Peace: Mr. E. Blyth at Cavan,” 3 September 1927.

The national mood: Pašeta (2003) “Censorship and Its Critics,” p.215.

Increasingly, people felt: The newspapers at this time reported that the public consensus was behind censorship, e.g. Meath Chronicle, “Evil Literature,” 22 January 1927.

This was only one in a wave: Irish Independent, 21 May 1928; Irish Times, 29 May 1928.

Customs officials: Pašeta, “Censorship and Its Critics,” p.214.

Sir John B. Keane, a barrister: Seanad Éireann debate—Thursday, 11 April 1929 Vol. 12 No. 2.

Namely, they had studied: Catholic Bulletin, “Editorial,” January 1926.

Instead, it became one step: Meath Chronicle, “Evil Literature,” 22 January 1927; see also Peter Martin (2006) “Irish Censorship in Context,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 95(379), pp.261–268, p.263.

It was felt that only: Catholic Bulletin, “Archbishop of Tuam: Editorial,” March 1931, pp.209–217.

A local insurgency: Some of the protesters asked what would a Protestant know of the reading tastes of a pure Catholic community? Others suggested that a librarian does not simply hand out books; they feed the mind and could direct, and therefore also misdirect, it. Irish Times, “A Librarian for Mayo: A Protestant unsuitable,” 2 December 1930.

Catholic morals required: The Archbishop of Tuam wrote that “in the case of our Catholic people,” their doctors must have “been trained in Medical Schools where Catholic doctrine on all the very grave issues of Catholic Medical Ethics are explicitly and fully taught.” Catholic Bulletin “Archbishop of Tuam: Editorial,” March 1931.

“As I explained to Your Grace”: Letter from Cosgrave to Archbishop Gilmartin, 11 March 1931, quoted in Lee, (1989) Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and society, p.166.

Others, like George Bernard Shaw: The Irish Statesman, “The Censorship,” August 1928, p.206.

Those vocal morbid purists: Lindsay Earner-Byrne (2008) Reinforcing the Family: The role of gender, morality and sexuality in Irish welfare policy, 1922–1944, The History of the Family, 13(4), 360–369 p.361; Clíona Rattigan (2012) What Else Could I Do? Single mothers and infanticide, Ireland 1900–1950, Irish Academic Press.

As one government commission: The Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor, Including the Insane Poor (1927) p.69.

These fears fed fantasies: OL: Folder 02/0/00103A, minutes of evidence of 1927 Relief Commission: Seán O’Farrell, 11 February 1926, cited in Donnacha Lucey, (2015) The End of the Irish Poor Law? Manchester University Press, p.86.

As if citing Richard Devane’s: OL: Folder 01/0/00103A, minutes of evidence of 1927 Relief Commission: Monahan, 9 February 1926, p. 26–84. In ibid. p.87.

Otherwise, they would continue: Department of Local Government and Public Health, Annual Report, 1932, p.129.

But as they voraciously imagined: Cork Examiner, “Good Shepherd Convent: Charity sermon to-morrow,” 7 May 1932.

She was lustful: Department of Local Government and Public Health, Annual Report, 1932, p.129.

The concept even stretched: Cork Examiner, “Good Shepherd Convent: Charity sermon to-morrow,” 7 May 1932.

CHAPTER 3: PURGE

It also gave them an opportunity: Smith (2007) Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, p.6.

It begins in a tone: Finola Kennedy commended the Carrigan Committee Report for charting the scale of sexual crime against children. See her article, “The Suppression of the Carrigan Report: A historical perspective on child abuse,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review. 89(356): pp.354–363.

Their concern was the: Report of the Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts (1880–85) and Juvenile Prostitution (1930) [hereafter, Carrigan Report], p.4.

These were the sort of usual suspects: Carrigan Report, p.13.

Of central concern was: John Henry Whyte (1971) Church and State in Modern Ireland 1923–1970, Gill & Macmillan, p.31; see also Maria Luddy (2007) “Sex and the Single Girl in 1920s and 1930s Ireland,” Irish Review, (35): 79–91.

“Though our enquiry”: Ibid. p.8.

These immoral characters: Carrigan Report p.12; p.22.

The “girl of 16”: Ibid. p.17.

These were the girls who: Ibid. p.38.

The report beseeched: Ibid. p.15.

Children leaving industrial schools: Ibid.

When it came to male sexual: Ibid. p.15; p.41.

As part of the punishment: Ibid. p.31.

What a relief, then: Department of Justice Memorandum, pp.10–12 [NAIJUS/90/8/50].

The assistant secretary of the Department of Justice drew: Memorandum from Assistant Secretary on Carrigan, 9 November 1931, p.10 [NAIJUS/90/8/50].

At the end of 1931: Keogh (1994) Twentieth-Century Ireland p.58; Lee (1989) Ireland 1912–1985, p.195.

In the new year of 1932: Lee (1989) Ireland 1912–1985, p.168.

They dissolved: Though they required the five seats from the farmer’s party and the thirteen independents to secure a majority.

Upon their ascent: Irish Independent, 15 March 1932, quoted in Whyte (1971) Church and State in Modern Ireland, p.48 fn97.

High tariffs were placed: Peter Neary and Cormac Ó Gráda (1991) “Protection, Economic War and Structural Change: The 1930s in Ireland,” Irish Historical Studies, 27(107), pp.250–266, p.250.

In 1932, when the government: Donald S. Connery (1969) The Irish, Eyre & Spotiswoode, p.21; Kevin O’Rourke (1991) “ ‘Burn Everything British but their Coal’: The Anglo-Irish economic war of the 1930s,” Journal of Economic History, 51(2), pp.357–366. Protectionism was an outworking of the Catholic economic ideal: frugality. The Irish Free State would be organized around subsistence farming, an ascetic life for a people intent on achieving purity of mind through “practicing simple virtues,” and humble habits. Leitrim Observer, 6 August 1932; Mary Daly (1992) Industrial Development and Irish National Identity, 1922–39, Gill & Macmillan. See Chapter 5.

But Minister Geoghegan: The Catholic hierarchy were sent a copy of notes made by the Minister for Justice. The hierarchy met to discuss it on 17 January 1933. Letter from 20 January 1933 from Bishop of Limerick, David Keane, to Minister for Justice Geoghan [NAI D/JUS H247/41B].

They fretted: Letter from Rev. M. J. Browne to Minister Geoghegan, 13 November 1932, [NAI H247].

One consultant cleric: Ibid.

Richard Devane’s early ideas: Rough notes made by the Minister for Justice after an interview on 1 December 1932 between the Bishop of Limerick, the Bishop of Ossory, the Bishop of Thassos and the Minister [NAIJUS 90/80/51].

To make an amendment: Seanad Éireann debate—Wednesday, 12 December 1934, Vol. 19 No. 8.

As one member of the upper: Seanad Éireann debate—Wednesday, 6 February 1935 Vol. 19 No. 15.

You must trust us: Minister for Justice, 1934, letter to Special Committee of the senate; letter to Senator Brown 17 January 1935 [NAIJUS/90/8/50].

They relented: Seanad Éireann debate—Wednesday, 6 February 1935 Vol. 19 No. 15.

This included a near total: The possession of contraception was legal; however, importing any form of contraception or selling it was illegal.

The 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act: Though prostitutes were also sent to prison and to the Asylum, as well as the Magdalene Laundries.

There was an acceptance that: Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931) had decreed that State power was to be checked and that Catholic societies should be organised around Church teachings.

If you believe your fellow citizens: A magazine for the more hardline zealots carried regular articles that rejected the idea that the government and not the Church would now be the leader in all matters, economic, educational and moral. See, for example, Catholic Bulletin, Editorial, January 1926.

School education was: Whyte (1971) Church and State, p.20.

And when it came to matters: Letter from Minister for Justice Gerald Boland to McQuaid, 29 March 1952 [AB8/B/XLIV/86/5/, Dublin Diocesan archives].

As this system of subsidiarity: Gerry McNally (2007) “Probation in Ireland: A brief history of the early years,” Irish Probation Journal, 4(1), pp.5–24.

or as one Minister for Education: Dáil Éireann debate—Thursday, 19 July 1956 Vol. 159 No. 9.

This too was done with: Dermot Keogh (1989) “The Jesuits and the 1937 Constitution,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 78, No. 309, pp.82–95.

As Cosgrave had feared: Cosgrave said this during the 1932 election campaign; see Dermot Keogh (1994) Twentieth-Century Ireland, p.60.

Travelers to Ireland: Connery (1969) The Irish.

One author, writing in a 1954: John Kavanagh (1954) “Emigration, a letter,” in The Bell, quoted in Whyte (1971) Church and State in Modern Ireland, p.30.

It was said some priests: Whyte (1971) Church and State in Modern Ireland, quoting Tim Pat Coogan (1966) Ireland Since the Rising, Frederick A. Praeger, p.28. One interviewee I spoke to told me that an older relative was a priest who was inclined to do this as well.

He extolled that: Richard Devane (1939) “Summer Time: An Imposition and an Anomaly,” Irish Ecclesiastical Record.

If it meant keeping: He received some positive and supportive correspondence from one of the bishops on this ([44/15/(1)–(30)].

The reaction to this: In her 2003 article, “Leaving Home: Irish press debates on female employment, domesticity and emigration to Britain in the 1930s,” Louise Ryan writes that “while emigration was initially seen as a necessity, by the 1930s many young people began to view it as a preference: ‘At a time when politicians were praising family life in rural Ireland, when de Valera was exalting the countryside “bright with cozy homesteads,” the people of the West were streaming away, leaving the traditional way of life as fast as they could.’ ” Ryan is quoting here from Jenny Beale (1986) Women in Ireland: Voices of change. Ryan goes on to say that in the ten years between 1926 and 1936, 7,255 men emigrated from Ireland, compared to 9,420 women, p.389.

Yet no movement rose: Sandra McAvoy (1999) “The Regulation of Sexuality in the Irish Free State, 1929–1935,” Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland, 1650–1940, Cork University Press. There were meager pockets of resistance, such as a campaign against the 1937 constitution, for example, see Maria Luddy (2005) “A “Sinister and Retrogressive ’Proposal: Irish women’s opposition to the 1937 draft constitution,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. And just as people and contraband slip over the border walls of the most enclosed authoritarian states, contraception still slipped into the country. Kelly (2023) Contraception and Modern Ireland.

But it was not a “repression”: Tom Inglis (2005) “Origins and Legacies of Irish Prudery: Sexuality and social control in modern Ireland,” Éire-Ireland, 40(2), pp.9–37 at p.24. In this period, rather than an immediate takeover of Irish society by Church and State post-independence, Ireland experienced what Stuart Hall once called “the slow build-up towards a ‘soft’ law-and-order society.” For the public, fear and fragility had “functioned as a mechanism for the construction of an authoritarian consensus” and “a conservative backlash” to a changing and uncertain world and the sense that society was “coming apart at the seams.” Hall et al. (2013) Policing the Crisis, pp.1–4.

A cultish obedience: Louise Fuller (2005) “Religion, Politics and Socio-cultural Change in Twentieth-century Ireland,” The European Legacy ; Síle de Cléir (2017) Popular Catholicism in 20th Century Ireland, Bloomsbury, p.50.

In their homes, they committed: Síle de Cléir (2017) Popular Catholicism in 20th Century Ireland.

The Catholic calendar: Daithí Ó Corráin (2018) “Catholicism in Ireland, 1880–2015: Rise, ascendancy and retreat,” in Thomas Bartlett (ed.) The Cambridge History of Ireland, p.719; Louise Fuller (2005) “Religion, Politics and Socio-cultural Change in Twentieth-century Ireland.”

As Edna O’Brien: Paris Review (Summer 1984) “Edna O’Brien, The Art of Fiction No. 82.” Conversations with Edna O’Brien.” The Irish sociologist Tom Inglis has described how “secular civility became almost synonymous with Catholic morality… Attaining social prestige in Ireland became reliant on… being a good Catholic.” Tom Inglis (1998) Moral Monopoly: The Catholic Church in modern Irish society, Gill & Macmillan, pp.157–158.

They played with danger: This sermon was published in the Evening Herald, under the headline “Magdalen Asylum—Great Irish Charity that needs help,” 28 February 1933.

“They are people who”: Seanad Éireann debate—Wednesday, 11 May 1955 Vol. 44 No. 15.

They didn’t send these: Richard Devane (1924) “The Unmarried Mother.”

“leprosy of sin”: Irish Press, “Financial Help Needed—Carmelites appeal for Magdalene asylum,” 8 February 1937.

This way they could hold: Chris Hamill (2024) Ireland’s “architecture of containment,” PhD thesis, pp.114–117.

CHAPTER 4: PENANCE

1. The weighty folds: One 1970s documentary on Irish nuns described the familiar sound effects of a nun as she moved through the world: “she creaks and rustles and clanks along.” Radharc (1971) Are Nuns Human?

2. She was off to note: In the McAleese Report they give these as the admission categories which were recorded in the logbooks of the Good Shepherd nuns. Chapter 4, p.52.

3. Each year Sister Angela: Our Catholic Life (1956) “Sisters of the Good Shepherd,” Roman Catholic Diocese of Limerick, pp.20–21; Documentary Review: The Good Shepherd and its work (1957).

4. The nuns wrote that: Our Catholic Life (1956) “Sisters of the Good Shepherd,” Roman Catholic Diocese of Limerick.

5. With every penitent: Chris Hamill (2024) “Ireland’s ‘Architecture of Containment’: An examination of the Magdalene laundries through design and experience,” PhD thesis, p.147.

6. The swirling vaporous air: Jacinta Prunty (2017) The Monasteries, Magdalen Asylums and Reformatory Schools.

7. Their cast-iron wheels: Ibid. p.506.

8. Burns from machines: McAleese Report, Chapter 12, p.585.

9. On the first page: McAleese Report, Chapter 19, p.986.

10. “Work, work, work”: This staccato sentence “work, work, work” and “pray, pray, pray” repeats across several interviews in the archive of testimony.

11. The other women: MBHML/NI, p.37; Prunty (2017) p.478 fn164.

12. These purposefully kept: Sister Mary of St. Teresita (1939) The Social Work of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd: An explanation of the origin, spirit and social work, together with an analyzation of a few cases, Cadillac Press, p.129; Cork Examiner, “Charity Sermon in Cork,” 22 February 1927.

13. In fact, just as the Laundries: Mary Rogan (2011) Prison Policy in Ireland: Politics, penal-welfarism and political imprisonment, Routledge; O’Donnell and O’Sullivan (2012) Coercive Confinement in Ireland.

14. With the end of the civil war: Kilcommins, O’Donnell, O’Sullivan and Vaughn (2004) Crime, Punishment and the Search for Order in Ireland, pp.47–61.

15. “I think we must all feel”: Dáil Éireann debate—Wednesday, 29 February 1956, Vol. 154 No. 7.

16. When Carmel arrived: Mary Rogan (2011) Prison Policy in Ireland.

17. In the Practical Rules: Practical Rules for the use of the Religious of the Good Shepherd for the Direction of the Classes (1898), Angers.

18. “We were the living dead”: This was a quote from Mary Norris, who was sent to Sunday’s Well in the 1950s. ABC News Report, 17 January 2003.

CHAPTER 5: ERASURE

In 1966, Sister Mary Declan: Inside Ireland (1966) BBC Documentary, BBC Archive. The documentary follows thirteen-year-old Evelyn Folan in the course of an ordinary week. And here we see a school assembly welcome Sister Mary Declan, a missionary nun, to give her presentation to the girls.

Radiant with ambition: Yvonne McKenna (2006) “Entering Religious Life, Claiming Subjectivity: Irish nuns, 1930s–1960s,” Women’s History Review, 15(2), p.197; see also Yvonne McKenna (2006) “Embodied Ideals and Realities: Irish nuns and Irish womanhood, 1930s–1960s,” Éire-Ireland, 41(1), pp.40–63. Yvonne McKenna undertook oral histories with nuns, and in her article “Entering Religious Life,” she provides a rich survey of the heroic fantasies and professional ambitions that the nuns recalled as a draw to religious life; Ellen Regan and Deirdre Raftery (2023). “ ‘It Was in the Very Air We Breathed’: The impact of faith-based education in Ireland on the growth in missionary vocations and volunteer aspirations, from 1950,” International Journal of Educational Development, 10 ; Karen Hanrahan has published a compelling account from her research into Irish nuns who left their orders: “ ‘They Just Ignored My Tears, They Ignored My Unhappiness’: Former Irish nuns reveal accounts of brainwashing and abuse,” Conversation, 26 May 2023.

One nun said a family: McKenna (2006) “Entering Religious Life,” p.193.

Every day, a young Elaine: Ibid. pp.203–204.

In 1901, there were 8,031: Brian Title (1983) Church, State and the Control of Schooling in Ireland, 1900–1944, McGill–Queen’s University Press.

They also discovered: McKenna (2006) “Entering Religious Life”; Yvonne McKenna (2006) Made Holy: Irish women religious at home and abroad, Irish Academic Press; Jacinta Prunty (2013) “Where Compassion Went Awry,” Tablet: The International Catholic Weekly News, 16.

Idleness was akin to wickedness: Sisters of Mercy (1869) The Customs and Minor Regulation of the Religious Sisters of Mercy, O’Toole & Son, p.51.

The aspirant sisters: Sisters of Charity (1912) Rules and Constitutions of the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity, Tipografia Cuggiani, pp.8; The Constitution of Irish Sisters of Charity (1927), p.93 and p.6 [DDA/AB8/b/XLIV/86/5/1 Dublin diocesan archives].

It was mind-numbing: Karen Hanrahan (2023) “They Just Ignored My Tears.”

One nun recalled: Yvonne McKenna (2006) “Embodied Ideals and Realities,” p.51.

Every moment of the day: Sister Mary of St. Teresita (1939) The Social Work of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, p.133.

In the chilling words: Irish Sisters of Charity (1927) pp.74–75.

As a novice, she remembered: MacCurtain (1995) “Late in the Field,” pp.34–44; and Margaret MacCurtain (1997) “Godly Burden: The Catholic sisterhoods in twentieth-century Ireland,” in Maryann Valius and Anthony Bradley (eds) Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, pp. 245–256.

For some eager new postulants: Ireland’s Dirty Laundry (2022) RTÉ, New Decade Productions.

As one Catholic magazine: Irish Rosary (1897) “The Magdalens of High Park.”

They achieved this by: Cork Examiner, “Charity Sermon in Cork,” 22 February 1927.

“correct values”: Sister Mary of St. Teresita (1939) The Social Work of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, pp.1–2.

they could make good: The nuns’ vows were chastity, poverty and obedience. Their work as religious sisters was frequently described as a “heroic” charity and, in this way, the nuns perceived themselves to be doing theological social work. They went about it without fanfare and despaired at the snazzy new professional social workers and philanthropic bodies of the twentieth century. Those groups were invested in material wealth and bodily health—the nuns’ idea of charity had a much grander metaphysical ambition. Man’s worth was not calculated here on earth, but in heaven. For the nuns, like all Catholic orders, secular charitable organizations were next to worthless, and maybe even dangerous. The secular charities were fumbling about in minor matters and fueling the notion that mortal desires and material comfort were worthy. The true spirit of charity was about moral reclamation so that sinners could reach eternal life. See Cork Examiner, “Charity Sermon in Cork,” 22 February 1927; Letter from Archbishop McQuaid to Sisters of Our Lady of Charity High Park, 23 November 1954 [AB 8/B, Dublin diocesan archives]; Irish Times “Magdalen Asylum,” 12 October 1930; Our Catholic Life (1956) “Sisters of the Good Shepherd,” Roman Catholic Diocese of Limerick, p.20; Limerick Leader, 23 January 1937.

The next morning the pair of nuns: Patricia Burke Brogan (2014) Memoir with Grykes and Turloughs, Wordonthestreet, pp.72–73.

“I walked in; I was brought down”: RTÉ Radio, Doc on One (1992) Magdelene Laundry Institute for Outcast Women.

Each night from then on: Burke Brogan, Memoir, p.37 and pp.62–63.

This was an essential task: Prunty writes that the “the term ‘surveillant(e)’ does not carry as negative a force in French, where it generally means supervisor, superintendent, guardian, caretaker, the person who watches over or looks after; the schoolmaster on duty is termed the ‘surveillant.”” See Prunty (2018) “Documentary Sources for Magdalen History and the Challenges,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 107(427), pp.267–292, p.275.

Elderly women, middle-aged: Burke Brogan, Memoir, p.73.

On a practical level: Sister of Our Lady of Charity, experimental statutes, 18 March 1970 para.21 [DDA/AB8/b/XLIV/86/5/1]

In that “search for God”: Sister of Our Lady of Charity, “Spiritual Life” pp.6–7 [DDA/AB8/b/XLIV/86/5/1].

“My spiritual life”: Burke Brogan, Memoir, pp.73–74.

If they were to successfully: Practical Rules for the Use of the Religious (1898), pp.116, p.196.

She went on repeating: Irish Times, “Revisiting the Nightmare,” 5 October 2002; see also MBHML/NI.

“Cutting of hair” was top: Magdalen Home Rules and Horarium, cited in McAleese Report, pp.986–989.

To cut their hair: “Guide for the Religious Called Sisters of Mercy” (1866), quoted in Luddy (2007) Prostitution and Irish Society, p.105.

The nuns were also taught: Practical Rules for the Use of the Religious (1898), p.111, p.115. Though the whole section dedicated to “Punishment” reveals the calculated and mannered logic the nuns were supposed to adhere to.

This ritual was repeated: Waterford Memories Project, interview with Marina.

Who encouraged them at school: Olivia O’Leary (2023) “Behind the Veil: The story of the Irish nuns,” BBC Radio 3, The ESSAY; see also Deirdre Raftery (2012) “The ‘Mission’ of Nuns in Female Education in Ireland, c.1850–1950,” Paedagogica Historica, 48(2):299–313.

“Until the penitents forget”: Abstract Report and Statistical Sketch of the Magdalen Asylum, High Park, Drumcondra (1881) (Dublin), p.17, quoted in Maria Luddy (1997) “Abandoned Women and Bad Characters’: Prostitution in nineteenth-century Ireland,” Women’s History Review, 6(4), pp.485–504.

Officially, the nuns today have: “Spiritual Life” at p.2 [DDA/AB8/b/XLIV/86/5/1]; see also the interviews from Jacinta Prunty and Sister Duggan on Ireland’s Dirty Laundry (2022), RTÉ, New Decade Productions.

The constricting code of conduct: Prunty (2017) The Monasteries, Magdalen Asylums and Reformatory ; RTÉ Radio One, Close the Door, 12 March 1990.

Patricia Burke Brogan and Margaret Lee: John Lanchester (2008) Family Romance, Faber. In a short but moving piece in The Conversation, Karen Hanrahan tells the story of five nuns who left the convent, including her own mother: “They ignored my unhappiness.”

These two women: Burke Brogan (2014) Memoir ; Witness statement, Sister Ethna McDermott, pp.35.

Every day they worked: Ireland’s Dirty Laundry.

The dead woman was then: “Defenders of the Church and the nuns favor the term ‘communal grave’ as ‘mass grave’ summons up images of Bosnian massacres or concentration-camp victims,” Irish Times, 11 October 2003.

There were no inscriptions: Evelyn Glynn (2009) Breaking the Silence, interview with John Gilligan.

When the probation office: Probation Office (1941) Memo: Women and Girls who come before the court on criminal charges.

“hidden and buried from the world”: Sister Mary of St. Teresita (1939) The Social Work of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.

Though cremation was not… canon law: 1176: “Deceased members of the Christian faithful must be given ecclesiastical funerals according to the norm of law. Ecclesiastical funerals, by which the Church seeks spiritual support for the deceased, honours their bodies, and at the same time brings the solace of hope to the living, must be celebrated according to the norm of the liturgical laws.”

The urns were reported: Evening Herald, “Magdalenes are Reburied,” 11 September 1993.

It turned out that the remains: Letter from Massey Undertakers to Eugene F. Collins Solicitor, 13 July 1993; letter re the cost of coffins to High Park Convent, 1 September 1993.

Even by then, after these women’s bodies: Irish Times, “Restoring dignity to Magdalens,” 21 August 2003. One woman, Bessie Henderson, was taken home by her grandchildren and given her own burial. Evening Herald “Tears for Tragic Magdalens,” 13 September 1993.

Reflecting on this disturbing event: Anne Enright, “Antigone in Galway,” in the London Review of Books, Vol. (37) 24, 17 December 2015.

CHAPTER 6: ESCAPE

1. Friendships were explicitly: “Magdalen Home Rules and Horarium,” cited in McAleese Report, p.988.

2. In the Limerick Laundry: Irish Press, 24 July 1963.

3. Ads were placed: Evening Echo, 18 November 1968; Irish Examiner, 23 November 1954.

4. Cork would flock to it: The Magdalenes and I, interview with Mary Norris.

5. Weeks later: Evening Echo, 28 December 1983.

6. The nuns insisted that: Irish Times, “Last Days of a Laundry,” 25 September 1996.

7. The doors were not: Prunty (2017) The Monasteries, Magdalen Asylums and Reformatory Schools, p.115.

8. “If they really wanted to escape”: America Magazine, “Ireland Apologizes for Magdalene Laundries,” 27 February 2013.

9. In 1928, one such story: Connacht Tribune, “Patient’s Escape from Magdalene Asylum,” 25 August 1928.

10. The nuns quickly cottoned: COPE Galway (2018) Remember, Respect and Record: The Magdalen women of Galway, interview with Hugo McEntee.

11. The artist Alan Counihan: RTÉ Radio, Doc on One (2015) Ghosts of Grangegorman.

12. Midwives were often told: MBHML/NL, p.382.

13. The rebuttal for the defense: Irish Catholic, “Simplistic to present the 1980s as a dark and repressive time,” 31 October 2024.

14. When it closed in 1977: McAleese Report, Chapter 3, p.33.

CHAPTER 7: WELFARE

Between 1949 and 1956: Diarmaid Ferriter (2005) The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000, Profile Books, p.463.

Throughout all European nations: Mary Daly (2006) Slow Failure: Population decline and Independent Ireland, 1920–1973, Wisconsin University Press, p.58.

As one writer observed: John O’Brien (1953) The Vanishing Irish, W. H. Allen, see also Enda Delaney (2007) The Irish in Post-War Britain, Oxford University Press.

But that last piece: Enda Delaney (2000) Demography, State and Society: Irish migration to Britain, 1921–1971, Liverpool University Press; Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea and Carmel Quinlan (2004), The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s, Mercier Press; Cormac Ó Gráda (1997) A Rocky Road: The Irish economy since the 1920s, Manchester University Press; Brian Girvin (1997) “Political Culture, Political Independence and Economic Success in Ireland,” Irish Political Studies, 12:1, 48–77, p.61.

Emigration was a misery: Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, Reports: 1948–1954 (1955) Stationery Office, p.137.

It functioned as an additional: Bryan Fanning (2007) Immigration and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland, Manchester University Press.

By the 1960s, English prisons: For the number of Irish men and women received into English prisons in 1961 see Matthew Russell (1964) “The Irish Delinquent in England,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 53(210), 136–148; and for Irish prison statistics see Ian O’Donnell, Eoin O’Sullivan and Deirdre Healy (2005) Crime and Punishment in Ireland, 1922 to 2003: A statistical sourcebook, Institute of Public Administration.

New Fianna Fáil leadership: Though Lemass was a founding member of the party and had once been an advocate of protectionism, see John Horgan (1997) Seán Lemass: The enigmatic patriot, Gill & Macmillan.

A nation based around subsistence: A government report on the matter stated this bluntly: “nowadays, fewer people are satisfied with a subsistence standard of living,” Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, 1948–1954.

He declared that: Connery (1969) The Irish, p.19.

The government began enthusiastically: Government of Ireland (1958) Economic Development, Stationery Office.

From the 1960s: Tony Fahey and Eithne McLaughlin (1999) Family and the State in Anothony Heath, Anthony Breen and Christopher Whelan (eds) Ireland North and South: Perspective from social science, Oxford University Press; Mel Cousins (2003) The Birth of Welfare in Ireland.

There was a concerted effort: Helen Buckley, Caroline Skehill and Eoin O’Sullivan (1997) Child Protection Practices in Ireland, Oak Tree Press.

The Department of Justice began to modernize: Mary Rogan (2011) Prison Policy in Ireland: Politics, penal-welfarism and political imprisonment, Routledge.

The Department of Justice was even: Louise Brangan (2021) The Politics of Punishment: A comparative study of imprisonment and political culture, Routledge.

The overall common sense: Brangan (2021) “Pastoral Penality.”

It was decided that a small group: Girls of other denominations were sent to the prison, though the Minister said he was happy to explore similar arrangements for them with the Church of Ireland. Seanad Éireann debate—Wednesday, 13 July 1960 Vol. 52 No. 19.

The new policy was announced: Ibid.; Letter from Archbishop McQuaid 3 April 1952 [AB8/B/XLIV/86/5/1 Dublin diocese archives].

Then one member of parliament: Seanad Éireann debate—Wednesday, 13 July 1960 Vol. 52 No. 19.

The bill was passed: In light of this, the government began to pay capitation grants to the nuns for their services in this area.

The Commission of Inquiry into: Anthony Keating (2014) “A Contested Legacy: The Kennedy Committee revisited,” Irish Studies Review, 22(3), 304–320.

Rather than saying prayers: The Kennedy Report marked a major shift in child welfare. See Denis O’Sullivan (1979) “Social Definition in Child Care in the Irish Republic: Models of child and child care intervention,” Economic and Social Review, 10(3) April, pp.209–230; Buckley, Skehill, and O’Sullivan (1997) Child Protection Practices in Ireland. A later Task Force on Child Care Services, established in 1974, was even more scathing of the way these institutions were being used: “The most striking feature of the child care scene in Ireland was the alarming complacency and indifference of both the general public and various government departments and statutory bodies responsible for the welfare of children. This state of affairs illustrated clearly the use by a society of residential establishments to divest itself of responsibility for deprived children and delinquent children.” Task Force on Child Care Services (1980), p.182.

In 1965, the outcome: Franz Hilderbrandt (1963) “Methodist Observer at the Second Vatican Council, in Doctrine and Life,” p.99, cited in Louise O’Reilly (2013) The Impact of Vatican II on Women Religious: Case study of the Union of Irish Presentation Sisters, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

For the nuns, the changes: Ibid. Melissa J. Wilde (2004) “How Culture Mattered at Vatican II: Collegiality trumps authority in the Council’s social movement organizations,” American Sociological Review, 69(4):576–602.

They had a new freedom: Deirdre Raftery and Catriona Delaney (2022) “Teaching Vocation or Religious Vocation: Examining the changing identity of Irish teaching sisters c.1940–1970, an oral history approach,” Irish Educational Studies, 43(2), 329–340.

The hierarchal separation: Pope Paul VI (1965) Perfectae Caritatis: Adaptation and renewal of religious life, Rome.

the number of novices: The number of nuns in Ireland dropped by 35% between 1970 and 1995, compared to a 7% decrease in the number of priests in the same period, see Research and Development Commission, Irish Priests and Religious, 1970–1975; Research and Development Commission, Vocations Returns 1996 ; Raftery and Delaney (2022) “Teaching Vocation or Religious Vocation”; MacCurtain(1995) “Late in the Field.”

In 1972, the electorate: Niamh Ní Leathlobhair and Donal Coffey (2021) “Article 44.1 and the ‘Special Position’ of the Catholic Church in the Irish Constitution, 1937–1972,” in: Kevin Costello and Niamh Howlin (eds) Law and Religion in Ireland, 1700–1970, Palgrave Macmillan.

The Pope had decreed: Papal Encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno (1931).

According to one biography: John Cooney (2012) John Charles McQuaid: Ruler of Catholic Ireland, O’Brien Press.

Accepting nothing but total: Noël Brown (1986) Against the Tide, Gill & Macmillan.

He began to badger: AB8/B/XLIV/86/5/1 Dublin diocesan archives.

Quite incredibly: On other occasions, when the nuns took the initiative over the running of their Laundries, such as trying to turn away girls who came from the criminal justice system, or seeking to purchase a house across the road from their convent for some women and girls in the Laundry to live in, McQuaid was uncompromising in the sharpness of his rejection of these efforts [DDA/AB8/B/XLIV/86/5/1 Dublin diocesan archives].

The nuns, in turn, wondered: Prunty (2017) The Monasteries, Magdalen Asylums and Reformatory Schools, p.480.

At Limerick, Seán McDermott Street: Ibid.

The plan was that younger girls: Ibid. p.531.

The nuns felt that they needed: Irish Federation of the Order of Our Lady of Charity, Findings of the First Session of the Aggiornamento Federal Chapter Held at High Park, August 10th–17th 1969 [DDA/AB8/b/XLIV/86/5/1 Dublin diocesan archives].

By 1971, they had decided: Experimental Statutes of the Irish Federation, special regulations regarding the apostolate, para 2. 18 March 1970, [DDA/AB8/b/XLIV/86/5/1 Dublin diocesan archives].

Walls were built: Sister Stanislaus Kennedy (1985) But Where Can I go? Homeless women in Dublin, Arlen House, p.82.

As the nuns could leave: MBHML/NL, p.36; Irish Times, “Last Days of a Laundry,” 25 September 1996.

With the Laundries formally: Internal Departmental memorandum, 18 May 1973, quoted in McAleese Report, Chapter 13, pp.622–626.

With the expansion of State welfare: Disabled Persons (Rehabilitation) Regulations, 1973.

“This institution is providing worthwhile”: Internal Departmental Memorandum, 15 June 1973, quoted in McAleese Report, Chapter 13, pp.623-624.

They conveyed this to the: Letter from Department of Health to Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, 5 July 1973 quoted in McAleese Report, Chapter 13, p.624. For a fuller overview of payments from government to the Magdalene Laundries see McAleese Report Chapters 13 and 14.

It took several more years: Ireland’s bid for membership was greatly facilitated by seeking to join the EEC at the same time as Britain. Aoife Keogh (2018) “Ireland’s Adaptation to Membership of the EEC: Early dealings with the European Regional and Development Fund,” Irish Studies in International Affairs, 29(1):261–77.

Interest rates rose: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (1975), Economic Surveys, Ireland, Paris: OECD.

The government coffers: Cormac Ó Gráda and Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke (2022) “The Irish Economy During the Century After Partition,” Economic History Review, 75(2), pp.336–370.

There would be no women’s prison: There was an attempt in late 1975 to delay the implementation of equal pay legislation. Deirdre Foley (2024) “ ‘Provided the Family is Not Neglected’: Women’s work, maternity leave and childcare in Ireland, c.1969–1981,” in Jennifer Redmond and Mary McAuliffe (eds) The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland: A reader, Four Courts Press.

By the 1970s, the nuns defined: Irish Federation of the Order of Our Lady of Charity, Findings of the First Session of the Aggiornamento Federal Chapter Held at High Park, August 10th–17th 1969 [DDA/AB8/b/XLIV/86/5/1].

This was Ri Villa: Prunty (2017) The Monasteries, Magdalen Asylums and Reformatory Schools, pp.424–426.

Sarah’s mother was also: There is evidence that this casual use of industrial schools by parents was not uncommon, see Sarah Anne Buckley (2008) “Child Neglect, Poverty and Class: The NSPCC in Ireland, 1889–1939—a case study,” Saothar, 33, 57–70. p.66.

Girls like Katie: Another Magdalene survivor and later a trailblazing activist, Maureen O’Sullivan, was sent to a Laundry in 1964 when she was only twelve years old. Like Katie, Maureen was brought there after revealing she was being sexually abused at home. Maureen O’Sullivan (2023) Girl in the Tunnel: My story of love and loss as a survivor of the Magdalene Laundries, Merrion Press; James Smith (2007) Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries at p.20. See also Sarah-Anne Buckley (2013) The Cruelty Man: Child welfare, the NSPCC and the state in Ireland, 1889–1956, Manchester university press, pp 162–5; and in Occasions of Sin, Ferriter writes that Ireland’s use of “incarceration” shows that “victims had to pay a heavy price, despite having been criminally wronged,” p.228.

life after the Magdalenes: In a short but influential 1908 essay entitled “The Stranger,” the sociologist and philosopher George Simmel described those people who come to feel like outsiders in their own land. Something marks them out, such that they can be in a group, but never be part of it. They cannot speak, cannot reveal their truth, because their lives confront those around them with that which cannot be tolerated. Such admissions risk them being treated, Simmel said, as the “enemies within.” They must then live in silent forbearance.

CHAPTER 8: SILENCE

1. Heaney was speaking: In recent years, the phrase “Say nothing” has come to be more associated with Patrick Radden Keefe, who used Heaney’s titular phrase to title his gripping non-fiction account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and its subsequent TV adaption.

2. The book wasn’t trading: Country Girls was banned within three months of publication. It was also banned in Australia and New Zealand. Her second novel was banned almost immediately. Irish Times, “Censorship and Edna O’Brien: A special case: constitutional possibilities,” 21 November 1966.

3. This was where her mother: Guardian, “Causing a Commotion: Edna O’Brien recalls the furore surrounding publication of The Country Girls,” 19 April 2008; Paris Review, “Edna O’Brien: The Art of Fiction No. 82”. Conversations with Edna O’Brien, summer 1984.

4. It was not just a warped: All of these institutions, Mother and Baby Homes, industrial schools, asylums, and of course, Magdalene Laundries, were intended as a means to hide that which might embarrass and scandalize. In the Irish Ecclesiastical Record in 1922, one article on unmarried mothers argued that “the continuation of the system of individual treatment provided by a range of Catholic societies’ was favored “due to its avoidance of scandal,” quoted in Diarmuid Ferriter (2010) The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000, Profile Books. See also: Donald Cozzens (2010) “Culture that Corrodes,” in John Littleton and Eamon Maher (eds), The Dublin/Murphy Report: A watershed for Irish Catholicism? Columba Press, p.145.

5. In a bracing report on: Amnesty International Ireland (2011) In Plain Sight: Responding to the Ferns, Ryan, Murphy and Cloyne Reports, p.123.

6. Such a surreally muted: Murphy Report, p.239.

7. This incident certainly reveals: The Ferns Report, published in 2005 by the Irish government after an inquiry, makes sobering reading. It details how allegations of sexual abuse were commonly handled in this way—treating the priests as if they were above the law.

8. In 1974, that abused boy: I came across this Chekhov story first in Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, a work which is interested in the trouble of memory and the limits of official facts. See also Lindsey Earner-Byrne (2011) “Child Sexual Abuse, History and the Pursuit of Blame in Modern Ireland’ in Katie Holmes and Stuart Ward (eds), Exhuming Passions: The pressure of the past in Ireland and Australia, Irish Academic Press, pp.51–70.

9. Magdalene Laundries in the North: In Newry, Derry and Belfast, seeMBHML/NI.

10. In 1932, the Department of Local Government: Department of Local Government and Public Health Report, 1932, p.129.

11. Those kinds of acts: In her article on the emergent censoriousness in the 1920s and 1930s, Senia Pašeta quoted from one 1934 Catholic publication, The Young Husband, that urged young married couples not to “pander to carnal pleasure” and instead to “use their will power and prudence, and live as brother and sister.”

12. In the 1920s and 1930s: Inglis (1998) Moral Monopoly, p.216.

13. A point made in: Sex in a Cold Climate (1998) Channel 4 (UK)

14. It was a reality that: Carol Smart (2011) “Families, Secrets and Memories,” Sociology, 45(4), pp.539–553.

CHAPTER 9: DEMISE

The solidarity of this union: There was periodic debate about how the 1955 Factories Act did, and did not, apply to the Laundries. Seanad Éireann debate—Wednesday, 4 May 1955, Vol. 44 No. 14.

“The Superioress and Sisters”: Irish Rosary, 1955.

As a religious organization: They had charitable status which made them tax exempt. See McAleese Report, Chapter 16; Brid Murphy and Martin Quinn (2023) “Accounting at the Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry,” in Mark Coen, Katherine O’Donnell and Maeve O’Rourke (eds) A Dublin Magdalene Laundry, Bloomsbury Academic.

When it came to the money: Ibid.

Though these are caveated: MBHML/NL, p.36.

Some religious orders: McAleese Report, Chapter 19, p.977.

Those plans were ultimately: Jeremy Williams, A Companion Guide to Architecture in Ireland 1837–1921, p.66; Cork Examiner, “St. Finbar’s New Asylum,” 3 October 1870.

Line after line: BBC World Service, “Magdalene Laundries: Our World,” 27 September 2014.

Accountants were soon asked: Murphy and Quinn (2023) “Accounting at the Donnybrook Magdelene Laundry,” p.177. This was based on three sample years: 1975, 1981 and 1984.

The account for Donnybrook: Ibid.

But in 1975, before: Ibid.

In the first year: When John Kennedy took over, the nuns already had ten staff from the local area who worked alongside the women.

John wasn’t the only person: Other Laundries had commercial managers by this stage too, such as High Park [Letter from Archbishop 10 November 1970 DDA/AB8/b/XLIV/86/5/1].

The article stated that: The Connacht Sentinel, “Magdalen Home to Close Down after 134 Years,” 16 October 1984.

In 1971, at a large outdoor: Irish Press, “Onslaughts on Faith Deplored,” 24 May 1971.

Contraception was the unifying: Kelly (2023) Contraception and Modern Ireland.

The popularity of this option: Fintan O’Toole (2021) We don’t Know Ourselves: A personal history of Ireland since 1958, Bloomsbury Publishing.

Contraception was legalized: Kelly (2023) Contraception and Modern Ireland, Chapter 7.

By the mid-nineties: William Crotty (1998) “Democratisation and Political Development in Ireland” in William Crotty and David Schmitt (eds) Ireland and the Politics of Change, Routledge, p.1.

Women were soon “abandoning”: Inglis (1998) Moral Monopoly, pp.238–239.

In 1961, a mere 5 percent: Niamh Hardiman and Chris Whelan (1998) Changing Values, in William Crotty and David Schmitt (eds) Ireland and the Politics of Change, Routledge, p.69.

In the 1990 European Values: On divorce see Michele Dillon (1998) “Divorces and Cultural Rationality,” in Michael Peillon and Eamonn Slater (eds) Encounters with Modern Ireland—A Sociological Chronicle 1995–1996, Institute of Public Administration; Gladys Ganiel (2016) Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland: Religious practice in late modernity, Oxford University Press; Chris Whelan (1994) “Irish Social Values: Traditional or modern?” in Christopher Whelen (ed.) Values and Social Change in Ireland, Gill & Macmillan, pp.212–15.

A white paper produced: Government of Ireland (1984) The Psychiatric Service—Planning for the Future: Report of a study group on the development of psychiatric service.

A document once considered: In 1974, a minister had asked to see a copy of the Carrigan Report. He was only permitted to read it as long as he swore never to refer to it in public, see in Beatty (2016) Masculinity and Power, p.207.

After being considered: Frances Ruane (2007) “Foreword,” in Tony Fahey, Helen Russell and Christopher Whelan (eds) Best of Times? Social impact of the Celtic Tiger, Institute of Public Policy, p.xi; Colin Coulter (2003) “The End of Irish History? An introduction to the book,” in Colin Coulter and Steve Coleman (eds) The End of Irish History? Critical reflections on the Celtic Tiger, Manchester University Press, p.3.

In 1996, Ireland began: Central Statistics Office, 2003, Population and Vital Statistics.

Some nuns even took: In her series of radio essays for BBC Radio 3, Olivia O’Leary provided one of the few attempts to chart “the massive swing in nuns” from right to left in the late twentieth century, “Behind the Veil: The story of the nuns—the rebels,” first aired on 5 January 2023. See also O’Leary’s reporting at the time, in Magill magazine, “Is It a Sin to be Rich?” 1 October 1984.

In 1995, one priest: Irish Times, “Turbulent Priest,” 31 January 1995.

The way I recall it: Dermot Keogh described it as a sense of renaissance. See Keogh (1994) Twentieth-Century Ireland, p.29.

The businesses slowed: Francis Finnegan (2004) Do Penance or Perish.

Crucifixes fell from walls: See the work of photographer Ethna Rose O’Regan, After Magdalene.

Others were repurposed: Chris Hamill (2024) Ireland’s “Architecture of Containment,” pp.409–410.

A month before: Irish Times, “Last Days of a Laundry,” 25 September 1996.

The newspaper interview: RTÉ Radio One, Close the Door, 12 March 1990.

The industrial schools, the hypocrisy: Mike Milotte (1997) Banished Babies, New Island Books; Susan McKay (1998) Sophia’s Story, Gill & Macmillan; Report of the Kilkenny Incest Investigation (1993), Dublin Stationery Office; Tom Inglis (2003) Truth, Power and Lies: Irish society and the case of the Kerry babies, University College Dublin Press; Louis Lentin (1996) Dear Daughter, RTÉ.

They could find no names: Irish Times, “Taking Mary Home,” 15 April 2004; Irish Times, “Restoring Dignity to Magdalens,” 21 August 2003.

Was that not why: Witness statement, Sister Ethna McDermott, 11 January 2016.

There was a decent amount: Irish Press, 12 September 1993; Evening Herald, 13 September 1993.

A book of remembrance: Irish Independent, 13 September 1993.

And so, while the council agreed: Evening Press, “City May Erect Plaque to Magdalen Women,” 9 November 1993.

Mary Robinson, who by 1996: Irish Times, “Magdalen Women Plaque Unveiled,” 22 April 1996.

It was described by one politician: Dáil Éireann debate—Wednesday, 13 February 2013 Vol. 792 No. 2.

I have used that line: BBC Radio 3, The Essay, “Legacies of the Laundries,” first aired April 2023.

the “killer stat”: Sarah Armstrong (2014) Scottish Justice Matters, Vol. 2(2).

She also accepted that: Elizabeth Butler Cullingford (2007) “Our Nuns Are Not a Nation: Politicizing the convent in Irish literature and film”; Wanda Balazno, Anne Mulhall and Moynagh Sullivan (eds) Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.55–73.

The difference between these: Stanislaus Kennedy (1985) But Where Can I Go? Homeless women in Dublin, Arlene House.

Others stayed: Ten years after the last Laundry closed, a photography student named Ethna O’Regan gained access to the old Seán McDermott Street Laundry in Dublin city center. She wanted to capture a series of images that explored the legacy of Magdalene Laundries. The spaces were haunting. The nuns warned Ethna, though, to stay away from certain areas. Behind doors and down forbidden corridors there were forty remaining penitents. Ethna could photograph where the regime had ended, but she could not access the space beyond that, where it continued. Some of O’Regan’s haunting images can be seen on her website https://www.ethnaoregan.com under her series After Magdalene.

sisters sold Sunday’s Well: Witness statement, Sister Ethna McDermott, p.10.

At the last official count: Forty-seven women were with the Good Shepherds; twenty-nine women in Sisters of Chairty convents and thirty-nine in the convents of the Religious Sisters of Charity. See The Magdalen Commission Report (2013) Report of Mr. Justice John Quirke on the establishment of an ex gratia scheme and related matters for the benefit of those women who were admitted to and worked in the Magdalen Laundries, May 2013, pp.25–27 [hereafter Quirke Report]. I have not found corresponding figures for Northern Ireland.

The special advocate: Question Number(s): 1245 Question Reference(s): 1441/25, Department: Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Asked by: Ivana Bacik TD.

CHAPTER 10: REDRESS

A Commission to Inquire: State Apologies, Dáil Éireann debate, Wednesday, 10 July 2024.

When the details for the commission: Dáil Éireann debate—Wednesday, 21 November 2001 Vol. 544 No. 4.

Accordingly, it would not be: Dáil Éireann debate—Thursday, 30 April 1998 Vol. 490 No. 4.

As her four years in the Laundry: The nuns never contributed the necessary social insurance payments for the women and girls who worked in the Laundries, and the government did not pursue these either, having already made exemptions for the Laundries under the usual factories and tax law.

It was, as one friend: Irish Times, “Abused in the Past and Abandoned in the Present,” 5 February 2013.

One politician after another: Irish Examiner, “Cowen ‘Trying to Deny Implications of State’s Complicity Over Laundries,’ ” 29 April 2010.

The State did not refer: Irish Times, “O’Keeffe Criticised for Referring to Magdalen Women as ‘Employees,’ ” 19 September 2009. Though the Minister did later say he regretted this term and changed instead for the slightly more neutral “workers,” see Irish Times, “O’Keeffe Sorry for Magdalen Remark,” 29 September 2009.

At this time, it was repeatedly: Irish Times, “Irish Society Colluded in Betrayal of Magdalen Women,” 1 September 2003. The source of this estimation is unknown, and it has been questioned by a leading historian of nineteenth-century Magdalene Laundries, Maria Luddy, in her book Prostitution and Irish Society, pp.11–13.

They reported that: Irish Times, “FF to Discuss Magdalen Issue,” 3 November 2009; RTÉ News, 4 November 2009.

The matter necessitated an investigation: Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) Campaign Summary, 2011.

the government announced: RTÉ News, “As it Happened: Magdalene Laundries Report,” 11 June 2014.

There was frustration: RTÉ Prime Time, 5 February 2013.

For many survivors: RTÉ Prime Time, 19 February 2013.

“He didn’t hold back”: Irish Times, “Women ‘Thrilled and Moved’ by Taoiseach’s Apology,” 20 February 2013.

McAleese decided the report: McAleese Report, “Executive Summary,” p.iv; Ibid. Chapter 3, p.48.

Given how mythologized: Ibid. “Introduction,” pp.1–2.

“The Committee has”: Ibid. “Executive Summary,” p.ii.

With this guiding logic: Ibid. Chapter 1, “Terminology.”

The official numbers: Ibid. Chapter 16, p.791.

Those women who had: Ibid. pp.790–791.

That is at just one Laundry: An archaeological survey conducted at the request of developers who were seeking to build apartments at one former Madgalene Laundry site stated that: “There are no clear records as to what happened to some of the women who operated within the laundries once they died. It remains a possibility that some are buried within the area of the proposed development.” Irish Archaeological Consultancy, August 2016.

Activists who have undertaken: McGettrick et al. (2021) Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries, p.163.

For those who left: McAleese Report, Chapter 8, p.170; the average is given as 167.5 weeks.

Counting them might “bias”: McAleese Report, Chapter 7, p.150.

committee did include the much shorter lengths: The report never states this explicitly; however, it does clearly outline those who were excluded, and these criminal justice and remand cases are not listed among them.

The problem of the McAleese Report’s definitive: Ibid. Chapter 8, p.168; Ibid. Chapter 16, p.791.

Brigid met McAleese: Ibid. Chapter 19, p.929.

Having lived lives of: Ibid. p.936.

Of the 10,012 women and girls: Ibid. Chapter 8, p.168. Though the scale of the known unknowns in the McAleese Report’s statistical analysis might be even greater. Having reviewed the report’s statistical analysis, Justice for Magdalenes argue that that only 42% of women and girls had a known exit date, see Death, Institutionalisation & Duration of Stay: A critique of Chapter 16 of the Report of the Inter Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries and related issues, 19 February 2015, p.15.

I found myself yearning: Some legal academics are critical of the apology for describing the Laundries as the “nation’s shame” as it “redirects responsibility to Irish society.” For example, see James Gallen (2023) Transitional Justice and the Historical Abuses of Church and State, Cambridge University Press, p.245.

“deep hurt they felt”: McAleese Report, Introduction.

given a right of rebuttal: Ibid. Chapter 19, “Comments by the Religious Congregations in response,” p.958.

The nuns tell of women: Ibid. p.958.

The stripping of names: Ibid. p.959.

“Committee found no evidence to contradict”: Ibid. Introduction, p.iv.

“discipline was mainly exercised”: Ibid. Chapter 19, p.962.

the Laundries had been exaggerated: Irish Examiner, “Magdalene Report: ‘There was a legal basis for way state operated,’ ” 5 February 2013.

There were not that many: It is a shame the Quirke Report never garnered the news attention, or impacted on the public imagination, as the McAleese Report did. This is likely because the Quirke Report has tended to be viewed as a bureaucratic exercise. However, upon reading both reports, it is clear the opposite is true: McAleese is technical and flat, taming the past where it can, while Quirke is more emotionally energized and underpinned by the need for justice, based on the words and experiences of the women themselves, which he believes without question.

the narrative of the McAleese Report: Ann Laura Stoler (2009) Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense, Princeton University Press, p.2.

Emboldened by the finality: Letter from Gerard Corr, Ambassador and Irish Representative at the United Nations, to Felice Graer, Rapporteur at office of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Committee Against Torture, 8 August 2023.

This has remained: In interactions with the UN in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019, the Irish government repeatedly reiterated that there was no evidence of criminal abuse in Magdalene Laundries, as well as their claims that the Laundries did not illegally detain people. See McGettrick et al. (2021) Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries, p.124.

The government’s repeated: One member of Justice for Magdalenes later said that she thought the apology “wasn’t this ‘road to Damascus’ moment, as portrayed in the media… It stemmed from immense public pressure. He knew politically he couldn’t do anything but apologize… Something had to be done to make the Magdalene problem go away.” Aljazeera, “Survivors Remember Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries,” 6 March 2016.

It felt to some activists: McGettrick et al. (2021) Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries, pp.103; Maeve O’Rourke (2022) “Ireland’s ‘Historical’ Abuse Inquiries and the Secrecy of Records and Archives,” in Lynsey Black, Louise Brangan and Deirdre Healy (eds) Histories of Punishment and Social Control in Ireland: Perspectives from a periphery (pp. 107–138), Emerald Publishing.

In November 2013: Irish Examiner, “McAleese Report Queried on ‘A Number of Rather Serious Fronts,’ ” 19 January 2018; Irish Times, “Inquiry Needed to Compel Congregations to Reveal Truth about Treatment of Magdalenes,” 24 July 2013.

The women equally: Quirke Report, p.3.

His conclusion was clear: Ibid. p.9.

The scale of compensation: Ibid. p.19.

Quirke sought to ensure: Free healthcare was “fundamental,” Quirke said, for the women to experience justice and healing. Each survivor was to receive an enhanced medical card, what is known in Ireland as an HAA card. Ireland has a two-tier healthcare system, where a private and public system run parallel. For public healthcare, people pay a nominal fee for treatments and tests at the point of access. For those who are elderly and living below a certain income level, a standard medical card is made available so they do not have to pay those charges. The enhanced medical card that was guaranteed to survivors as part of their redress would have entitled them to private healthcare free of charge. New medical cards were issued to Magdalene survivors, but they provided no more than a standard medical card and did not give them access to the private healthcare as promised. However, it did have two vital differences that gave it the appearance of being distinctive. Unlike the bland, bureaucratic white credit card-sized one that is Ireland’s usual medical card, the women received a card with a large cherry blossom motif. It also the bore in bold the words “Redress for Women Resident in Certain Institutions.” This shocked some survivors, who felt this meant they were forever to be singled out, labeled again, and exposed as those women. Irish Independent, “Magdalene Survivors’ Anger at Medical Card ‘Breach of Privacy,’ ” 15 July 2015; Dáil debates, 17 February 2015.

Minister Shatter told the sisters: Dáil Éireann debate—Tuesday, 16 July 2013, Vol. 811 No. 1; Letter from Private Secretary to the Minister for Justice and Equality, to Province Leader, Good Shepherd Provincialate, February 2013.

The Sisters of Mercy: Dáil Éireann debate—Tuesday, 16 July 2013 Vol. 811 No. 1.

“Unfortunately, we are still not”: Letters from Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, 25 June 2013; Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, 28 June 2013; Good Shepherd Provincialate, to Minister for Justice, 27 June 2013.

What they favored was: “Apology by the Good Shepherd Sisters,” in Inquiry into Historical Institutional Abuse 1922–1995 (Northern Ireland), Chapter 21, p.41.

It provided them with: A letter from Sisters of Our Lady of Charity to the Minister for Justice, 13 August 2013, stated that one reason that they did not wish to pay into the redress scheme was due to the findings of the McAleese Report.

As they insisted in their apology: BBC News, “Magdalene Laundries: Reaction to the McAleese Report,” 5 February 2013; At the time of writing, none of the religious orders who ran the Laundries have paid into the redress scheme.

In this brief and bitter torrent: The interviewer, Claire McCormick, also wrote about her interview in Women’s eNews, “Nuns Claim No Role in Irish Laundry Scandal,” 29 May 2013 and America Magazine, “Ireland Apologizes for Magdalene Laundries,” 27 February 2013.

They still have to believe: McAleese Report, “Introduction,” p.iv.

Thousands of pages of testimony: Ibid. p.ii—a fact also reiterated by the MBH Report, pp.46–47.

I failed in my attempts: Apart from one order, my emails went unanswered. An advertisement I placed in the Irish Catholic magazine had no responses. The majority of the religious archives I contacted also did not respond to me.

“blinders of narrative”: Janet Malcolm (2011) The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Granta Books.

In June 2018: Katherine O’Donnell and Claire McGettrick (2020) Dublin Honours Magdalenes Listening Exercise Report Vol. 1: Report on key findings. Justice for Magdalenes Research.

as one journalist remarked: Derek Scally (2021) Best Catholics in the World, Sandycove, p.126.

CONCLUSION: REMEMBERING

1. closer to one in every forty: It is impossible to be certain of the number; this is an estimate that was once suggested to me by the researcher who has recovered the population numbers across all of Ireland’s institutions of confinement. For a stark table on rural confinement see Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell (2012) Coercive Confinement in Ireland, p.259.

2. John Banville wrote: New York Times, “A Century of Looking the Other Way,” 22 May 2009.

3. Confronting exactly this problem: The Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz was established in 1990 after the Polish government took responsibility for the former concentration camp following the fall of communism. They held a series of symposia, at Oxford, Krakow, and then at Auschwitz. Rose was among these delegations advising on a restructuring of the museum. Rose’s writing criticized both representations of the past at Auschwitz, as well as the piety with which the Holocaust was coming to be depicted in culture, particularly cinema. For Rose, if we could present that history more carefully and face the horror front on, we would experience a deep and unsettling self-reflection. Among her more affecting, and probably most quoted, statements is that: “Instead of emerging with sentimental tears, which leaves us emotionally and politically intact, we emerge with the dry eyes of a deep grief, which belongs to the recognition of our ineluctable grounding in the norms of the emotional and political culture represented, and which leaves us with uncertainty for the remains of the day.” See: Love’s Work ; also “Athens and Jerusalem: A tale of three cities” and “Beginnings of the Day: Fascism and representation” both in Mourning Becomes Law: Philosophy and representation ; and “The Future of Auschwitz” in Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical essays.

4. “foreign to human nature”: This phrase comes from the essay Who Owns Auschwitz? by the novelist and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz. Kertesz was writing about the cultural misappropriation, and the stylization, of the Holocaust in contemporary culture. He went on to say that “I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of “civilization” as such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust,” p.270. This is close to what Zygmunt Bauman came to realize about the Holocaust, and what drew him to write his book Modernity and the Holocaust. The Holocaust was, he initially thought, “an interruption in the normal flow of history… a momentary madness among sanity.” He came to see that it was a rational outworking of what was a modern society. He warned that the “self-healing process” of contemporary memory means we cannot hear the alarm bell which an understanding of the Holocaust rings.

5. That story is more frightening: In 1996, Gillian Rose wrote in When Mourning Becomes Law, p.43, that this tendency to emphasize the inexplicability of historical atrocity is to “mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are—human, all too human” [original emphasis].

6. Decades later, when Edna O’Brien was asked: New Yorker Fiction Podcast, Andrew O’Hagan Reads Edna O’Brien, with Deborah Treisman, 1 December 2015.

Index

A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.

Page references in italics indicate images.

- abortion, 226, 233
- Ahern, Bertie, 243
- Amnesty International Ireland, 207

- Angela, Sister (Sunday’s Well Laundry, Cork), 83–86, 145–46

- Anna, Sister (St. Mary’s convent, Limerick), 217, 218

- Are Nuns Human? (documentary), 174

- asylums, 16, 145, 164

- illegitimate pregnancy and admission into, 38

- Magdalene Laundries described as, 7, 12–13, 171–72, 211, 219

- Magdalene Laundries lose vestiges of being, 92

- numbers of people in Irish, 12, 214
- Personal Effects and, 156–57
- psychiatric hospitals as, 11–12, 290n

- The Psychiatric Service Planning for the Future: Report of a study group on the development of psychiatric service (White Paper, Government of Ireland) (1984) and, 227–28

- Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland, 279–80, 335n

- auxiliary/consecrated penitent, 83–86, 85, 102–6, 115, 121, 132, 139, 140, 142, 153–54

- Bachelard, Gaston, v
- Banville, John, 275–76
- Barry, Father, 43, 44, 77–78, 206

- Betty (survivor of three Magdalene Laundries), 99, 160, 199, 201

- Brenda (survivor of Sunday’s Well Laundry), 101

- Brigid (survivor of St. Mary’s Magdalene Laundry), 22, 76, 266

- admission into St. Mary’s, 39–40, 44, 132, 153–54, 277

- auxiliary/consecrated penitent role, 133–34
- birth, 40
- funerals of nuns and, 133–34
- funerals of penitents and, 133–34
- John Kennedy and, 224, 254

- judgement of people with knowledge of past, experiences, 154

- leaves St. Mary’s, 40, 153–54, 254, 277
- McAleese Report and, 254–55
- mother liberates from St. Mary’s, 40
- name changed, 132, 178
- Pennywell Laundry and, 223, 224, 254
- returns to St. Mary’s, 40, 154, 165, 255
- schooldays, 39–40, 277
- Vatican II and, 178, 223

- Brogan, Patricia Burke, 116–19, 126, 130, 131

- Browne, Reverend, 70

- Bruton, Sister Lucy, 232–33, 235–36, 237

Canon Law, 136, 316n

Carey, Patricia, 268

Carmel (survivor of Sunday’s Well), 22, 76, 201, 266

- admission into Sunday’s Well, 32–34, 44, 80, 81–88, 277

- asks to leave Sunday’s Well, 144

- “closure,” response to journalist question on, 282

- confession, weekly pilgrimage to Catholic, New Ross, 28–29, 238

- covering up of past in social situations, 198

- domestic, job and accommodation as, 32
- dormitory at Sunday’s Well, 86
- England, moves to, 165, 166, 277
- food at Sunday’s Well and, 86
- friendships in Sunday’s Well, 139–41
- hospital, job in, 158, 160–63
- humiliated by nuns, 125–26

- industrial school, New Ross, Wexford, 27–33, 81–82, 294n

- leaves Sunday’s Well, 155–58, 160–61, 166
- mother and, 30, 32, 165
- name changed, 29–30, 150–51
- Redress Board money and, 282

- runs away from Sunday’s Well, 146–50, 155–56

- sewing service at Sunday’s Well, joins, 141–43

- verbal abuse by members of public, victim of, 27–30

- violent beatings by nuns, 30, 31, 33

- working day at Sunday’s Well, 86–109

Carmelite nuns, 271, 272, 273

Carol (account of tentative and fragile early days after release from Magdalene Laundry), 194–95, 201

Carrigan Committee/Carrigan Report (1930-31), 65–70, 228, 305n, 326n

Catherine (survivor of New Ross Magdalene Laundry), 22, 44, 76, 266

- admission into New Ross Magdalene Laundry, 40–42, 277–78

- birth and family background, 40–41
- death, 262
- England, emigrates to, 165
- Irish State pension application, 245, 262
- leaves New Ross Magdalene Laundry, 158, 165
- name change, 121
- nun sneaks treats to, 126

- penal code of New Ross Magdalene Laundry/instruction and, 119–25, 130–31, 151

- Redress Board and, 244–45, 262

Catholicism/Catholic Church

- Catholic Hierarchy, 15, 57, 63, 70, 306–7n

- code of conduct enforced through culture of coercion, 52–53

- confession, 27–29, 30, 48, 76, 106, 144, 165, 238

- constitution of Ireland and, 73, 174–75, 226

- contraception and, 60, 71–72, 226, 307n, 309n, 325n, 326n

- cremation not permitted by, 136
- Fianna Fáil and, 58–59
- fundamentalists, 50–51, 61, 63, 113, 226
- Irish independence and, 48–51
- Legion of Mary and, 4–5
- levels of faith rise in Ireland, 75–76

- Magdalene Laundry origins and, 13, 15, 21, 38, 77–79

- nuns (see nuns)
- oppressive climate clears, 230
- purity as ideology of, 50
- redress scheme and, 62–263
- sexual abuse and, 207
- social ideal of, 55
- totalitarian faith, 54
- Vatican Council (1962), 174
- Vatican II (1965), 174–75, 178, 223
- warped deference to, 207

Catholic Society for the Protection of Girls, 50–51

Catholic Truth Society, 50–51, 57
Catriona (Limerick Laundry), 159–60
Chekhov, Anton: “A Doctor’s Visit,” 324n
Chekhov, Anton: “A Doctor”s Visit,” 207–8
Close the Door (radio documentary), 233
“College Green” elite, 60

Commission of Inquiry into Childhood Abuse in Ireland (CICA) (Ryan Commission) (2000–2009), 243

Commission of Inquiry into Ireland’s Industrial and Reformatory Schools (Kennedy Committee) (1967–70), 173

Commission on Emigration (1948–54), 169–70

Committee on Evil Literature (1926–7), 58, 61

Connacht Tribune, advertisement for a runaway penitent in (1928), x, 151, 338

Connolly O’Brien, Elizabeth, 171–72, 198
contraception, 60, 71–72, 225–26, 307n, 309n, 325n, 326n

- “Contraception Train,” 225

Cork, Ireland, 14, 56, 81, 87, 102, 107, 142, 146, 149, 152, 217, 221, 279

- City Gaol, 102

- Peacock Lane Laundry (see Peacock Lane Laundry, Cork)

- Sunday’s Well Good Shepherd Convent (see Sunday’s Well Good Shepherd Convent, Cork)

- Sunday’s Well Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry (see Sunday’s Well Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry, Cork)

Cork Echo, 107

Cosgrave, W. T., 57, 59, 61, 63, 69, 74, 244, 302n, 303n, 308n

Counihan, Alan: Personal Effects, 156–57
County Homes, 12
cremation, 136, 262, 316n
Cumann na nGaedheal, 57–58, 60, 244
dance halls, 49, 52, 53, 71–72, 74, 159, 297n, 299n, 302n

Declan, Sister Mary, 111, 311n
Department of Education, Ireland, 30
Department of Environment, Ireland, 234

Department of Justice, Ireland, 65, 68, 170–71, 306n, 318n

Department of Local Government, Ireland: annual report (1932), 62–63, 211
de Valera, Éamon, 47–48, 58, 69, 71, 73–74, 76, 170, 175, 308n

Devane, Father Richard, 51–56, 63, 66, 71, 75, 76, 240, 278, 296n, 298–302n, 307n, 308n, 310n
disability, 42–43, 178–79, 321n

Disabled Persons Maintenance Allowance, 178–79
divorce, 51, 58, 227, 303n, 326n

Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry, Dublin, 13, 106, 231, 289n, 293n

- accounts, 221–22
- admission into, 7–8, 150, 239
- donations to, 77
- escapes from, 150–53
- ironing room (2021), x, 242, 338
- packing room, 150
- Sheila released from, 200–201
- See also Eileen

Down syndrome, 42–43, 272

Dublin, Ireland

- “A million people kneel in worship,” O’Connell Street (1932), ix, 64, 337

- City Council, 235

- “Contraception Train” arrives in (1971), 225

- “Dublin Honours Magdalenes,” Dublin’s Mansion House (public event, 2018), 267–68

- Eurovision contest (1994), 223, 230

- Faithfull Place, adjacent to Gloucester Street Laundry (1913), ix, 46, 337

- famine in, 56

- Magdalene Laundries in, 13, 43 (see also individual laundry name)

- National Archives, 228

- Stephen’s Green park, Magdalene Memorial Committee and plaque mounted on bench in, 235, 268

Dunbar-Harrison, Letitia, 61

Dun Laoghaire Magdalene Laundry, Dublin, 13, 231

Durcan, Paul, 129

- Eileen (survivor of Donnybrook and Peacock Lane Laundries), 22, 76, 266

- Auntie Sheila and, 2–3, 152, 153

- birth, 1–3

- escape attempt, Donnybrook Laundry, 3, 150–52

- industrial school, 2

- “kidnapped”/admission into Donnybrook Laundry, 1, 3–8, 44, 150, 153, 239, 277

- letter writing, 106
- mother and, 106, 153
- Mother and Baby Home, born in, 1, 2
- name replaced by number 60, 150–51
- name replaced by number 100, 152
- packing room, Donnybrook Laundry, 3, 150

- Peacock Lane Laundry, leaves, 152–53, 165, 239

- Peacock Lane Laundry, moved to, 152

- Elaine, Sister (on mother’s response to news that she was to enter the convent), 113

- Elizabeth (survivor of Sunday’s Well), 97–101, 145–46, 196

- fallen women

- “enemies within,” seen as, 62, 323n
- McAleese Report and, 266
- origins of Magdalene Laundries and, 13
- term, xi

- FBI, 175

- Fianna Fáil, 58–59, 69–70, 74, 170, 204, 244, 303n, 318n

- Fine Gael, 244, 248

- Fionnuala (survivor of Sunday’s Well), 100–101

- FitzGerald-Kenney, James, 68

- force-feeding, 31

- Galway, Ireland, 111, 199, 286, 295n, 338

- Sisters of Mercy Magdalene Laundry (see Sisters of Mercy Magdalene Laundry, Galway)

- Gannon, Reverend, 77

- gardaí (Irish police), 43, 69, 149–50, 153, 181, 184, 207, 296n

- Geoghegan, James, 70–71, 306–7n

- Gertrude, Mother (Sunday’s Well), 105

- Gloucester Street Laundry (renamed Seán McDermott Street, 1933), ix, 13, 337

- Glynn, Evelyn, 22, 212, 293n, 315n

- Good Shepherd Sisters, 13, 53, 90, 119–20, 123, 294n

- New Ross, Wexford, convent at (see Wexford)

- Northern Ireland, operate Magdalene Laundries in, 14, 209–10

- Practical Rules for the use of the Religious of the Good Shepherd for the Direction of the Classes, 104, 119, 311n, 314n

- redress scheme and, 263–64

- St. Mary’s Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry, Limerick (see St. Mary’s Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry, Limerick)

- Sunday’s Well, Good Shepherd Convent, Cork (see Sunday’s Well Good Shepherd Convent, Cork)

- Waterford, Good Shepherd Laundry in (see Waterford)

- gossip, 23, 29, 37–38, 51, 100, 166, 203–4

- Haughey, Charles, 204

- Heaney, Seamus

- An Open Letter, v

- “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” 202–3, 323n

- Hegarty, Father Kevin, 229

- High Park Magdalene Laundry, Dublin, 13, 148, 231, 313n, 316n

- An Grianán Training Centre, 183
- closes, 237
- deaths at, 15, 135–36, 234–35, 253
- Kennedy Report and, 177
- sale at, 234

- Hoover, J. Edgar, 175

- Horwitz, Gordon: In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen, v

- hospitals

- campaign for public hospitals to ban Protestant doctors, 61

- Magdalene Laundry girls work in, 158–63, 191, 198, 245

- nuns and, 111
- psychiatric, 11–12, 290n
- unmarried mothers and, 36, 161–62

Ignatius, Mother (New Ross), 119–20, 121, 158

“illegitimate” pregnancy/children

- asylums and, 38

- concept abolished in Ireland (1987), 227

- as forecasting the moral decay of a nation, 53, 62, 66–67, 98–99, 124, 127

- legal category assigned at birth in Ireland, 1–2

- Nora and, 34–38, 209, 210–11
- rates of, 66
- “repeat offenders,” 210–11
- term, xi

- The Valley of the Squinting Windows and, 37–38

Imelda, Sister (Sunday’s Well), 33
industrial schools, 2, 13, 173, 183, 193, 195, 233

- Carrigan Committee and, 67

- fabulist ideal of Ireland and, 164

- girls sent to Laundries from, 39, 83, 85, 87, 91, 97, 100, 148, 194, 198, 199, 200, 239, 244, 260

- mandatory exit at sixteen, 32

- McAleese Report and, 257

- New Ross, County Wexford, 27, 30–34, 81, 83, 85, 140, 158

- numbers of Irish people in, 12, 214, 290n

- origins of, 30–31

- “recruitment places for people that wanted cheap labor,” viewed as, 160

- redress scheme and, 265
- sexual abuse of children in, 207
- Sisters of Mercy and, 115
- States of Fear (documentary series), 243
- violence and neglect in, 31, 33, 257

infanticide, 43, 62, 233

Ireland
age of consent, 65

Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), 47, 48, 57

British newspapers in, 51–52, 59, 62
campaign to cleanse of distorting influences of “imported” culture, 56–63

Catholicism and (see Catholicism/Catholic Church)

Celtic Tiger, 228, 234
censorship in, 54, 58, 60, 72, 74, 76, 78, 106, 204

Civil War (1922–3), 59
constitution, 62, 73, 174–75, 226, 309n
criminal justice/carceral system, 43–44, 78–129, 172, 215, 274, 320n, 331n

Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935), 71–72
divorce legalized (1995), 227
divorce prohibited (1925), 58
economy, 23, 25, 55–56, 57, 59, 68–70, 135, 148, 169–70, 175, 176, 179, 185–86, 224, 226–27, 228, 248, 267, 306n
emigration from, 48, 56, 75, 79, 100, 102, 169, 229, 308n

European Economic Community membership, 179
general election (1927), 59
general election (1932), 69, 170, 244
general election (2011), 248
gossip and, 23, 29, 37–38, 51, 100, 166, 203–4
government departments (see individual department name)

homosexuality decriminalized (1993), 227

“illegitimate” pregnancy/children in (see “illegitimate” pregnancy/children)

independence of/Irish Free State (1922), 19, 25, 45, 47–48, 50, 53, 54, 55, 65, 73, 175
institutional violence in twentieth century within, 129–30

Kenny delivers apology for Magdalene Laundries, 248–52, 256, 258, 262
national income, 169, 170
O’Higgins assassination, 59
oil crisis (1973) and, 179, 218
population numbers, 56, 169
Public Dance Halls Act (1935), 71–72
recessions, 179, 224, 248

Redress Board pays compensation to survivors of Magdalene Laundries (see Redress Board)

scandal, aversion to, 203–4, 206–7
secrecy, culture of, 206–7
silence, paralysis of, 197, 203–9, 213, 214–15, 229–30, 275–76, 280

Special Advocate for Survivors of Institutional Abuse, 239, 268
as “the valley of the squinting windows,” 37–38

See also individual commission, report and place name

Irish Law Reform Commission, 259
Irish Times, 229, 232, 289n, 329n
Irish Vigilance Association, 50–51

Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM), 225–27

Irish Women’s Survivors Support Network, 246

Irish Women Workers’ Union, 219

- Josephine, Mother (Sunday’s Well), 143

- Joyce, James: Ulysses, 49

- Justice for Magdalenes, 22, 246, 258–59, 293n, 331n, 332n

- Katie (survivor of Seán McDermott Street Laundry), 22, 266, 322n

- admission into Seán McDermott Street Laundry, 181–85, 278

- daily schedule, Ri Villa Training Centre, 185–87

- escape attempt, 190–91

- learning to live with past, 191, 201

- sexually and physically abused by father, 180–81

- silence, learns importance of, 188, 189

- strange and unsettling women, encounters, 188

- suicide and, 190, 201

- violence of nuns and, 189–90

- Keane, Sir John B., 60

- Keegan, Claire: Small Things Like These, 17, 292n

- Kennedy, Eileen, 173

- Kennedy, Jacqueline, ix, 141, 142, 337

- Kennedy, John (acquires St. Mary’s Magdalene Laundry), 217, 222–24, 231, 233, 239–41, 254, 325n

- Kennedy, John F., ix, 141–42, 337

- Kennedy Committee, See Commission of Inquiry into Ireland’s Industrial and Reformatory Schools

- Kennedy Report (1970), 173, 177, 319n

- Kenny, Enda, 243–44, 248–52, 256, 258, 262

- Kingship of Christ (An Ríoghacht), 50–51, 302n

- Laura (Limerick Laundry penitent), 195, 199–201

- Lee, Margaret, 115, 129–30, 131

- Legion of Mary, 4–8, 44, 50–51, 150, 152, 201, 248

- Lemass, Seán, 170, 179, 318n

- Limerick, Ireland, 40, 51, 52, 84, 178, 292n

- Mount Saint Lawrence cemetery, 134

- Pennywell Laundry (see Pennywell Laundry, Limerick)

- St. Mary’s convent (see St. Mary’s Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry, Limerick)

- St. Mary’s Magdalene Laundry (see St. Mary’s Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry, Limerick)

- School of Art and Design, 240

- White House Bar, 221

MacNamara, Brinsley: The Valley of the Squinting Windows, 37–38

Magdalene Laundries
admission into, 1, 3–8, 32–40, 44–45, 80, 81–88, 132, 150, 153–54, 181–85, 239, 277–78
auxiliary/consecrated penitent role and, 83–86, 85, 102–6, 115, 121, 132, 139, 140, 142, 153–54
average duration of stay, 254–55
babies born in, 19
campaign groups, 246

Catholicism and (see Catholicism/Catholic Church)

closure of, 15, 231–41
commissions and reports into (see individual commission and report name)

criminal justice system and (see Ireland, criminal justice/carceral system)

deaths in, 3, 132–37, 234–35, 253, 279
disability and (see disability)

dormitories, ix, 33, 78, 86, 103, 107, 109, 147, 155, 156, 183, 185, 187, 261

“Dublin Honours Magdalenes,” Dublin’s Mansion House (public event, 2018), 267–68
education deficit and, 261
erasure of women in, 137
escape attempts, 146–56, 190–91
excessive inhumanity in, 12
expansion and technical revolution in, 13, 78–79, 166
finances, 219–22
folded into expanding State apparatus, 178–79
food, 86, 99–100, 104, 120, 145–46, 182–83, 187, 210, 222
friendships explicitly prohibited in, 139–41
growth in number of, 13, 78–79
hair cutting in, 8, 85–86, 122–25, 150, 183, 274
hazardousness of work in, 95–96, 188–89
health of girls in, 260–61
hierarchy of purity and power within, 83–86, 85
humiliations, nuns subject girls to daily, 121–29, 131, 141, 143, 195, 211, 251, 257
hunger strikes, 145–46
immorality, as permanent mark of, 171–72, 198
ironing room, 90, 92, 150, 188

Kenny delivers apology for, 248–52, 256, 258, 262

Laundry fatigue, 268
learning to live with experience of, 191, 193–215
locations of, 13–14
lost files of, 221–22
Magdalen Home Rules and Horarium, 98
names of girls replaced in, 8, 30, 82, 121, 132, 150–51, 152, 178
numbers of women in, 18, 214
nuns and (see nuns)

older women in, disquiet upon being confronted with community of, 86–87
origins of, 12–13, 51–79
potential of girls in, squandered, 159–61
public consciousness of reality of, 171–72
recreation in, 81, 102, 105–7, 117, 119, 143, 178, 186–87

Redress Board pays compensation to survivors, 92, 243, 244, 245, 259–65, 282, 334n
returning to, 32, 40, 154, 165, 255
sermons in aid of, 77
sewing service, 141, 141–43
silence and (see silence)
as social death, 45
sorting room, 91, 107, 189, 240
surveillant, 118–19
survivor testimony, archive of, 22–23, 76–78, 87, 159, 198, 201–2, 209, 214, 234, 260, 282 (see also individual survivor name)

toilet breaks, 101
training centres, 176–77, 181–91

United Nations Committee Against Torture and (see United Nations)

wages, 107, 218–19
wash day, 103
washing book (1972), x, 216, 338
wet room, 92, 95–96, 97, 103, 118, 126, 240
working day, 86–109
See also individual laundry name
Magdalene Memorial Committee, 235
Magdalene Refuges, 13
Magdalene Survivors Together, 246
Malcolm, Janet, 267

Marge (life spent confined within institutions), 195, 200, 201, 202

Marian blue, 5

Marian grottos, 5

Marina (survivor of Good Shepherd Laundry, Waterford), 123–24
marriage bar, 58, 226

Martina (survivor of Seán McDermott Street Laundry), 122, 188–89

Mary (survivor of Sunday’s Well), 105, 159, 214

Mary, the Mother of God, 4, 5, 49, 144, 174

May (survivor of Seán McDermott Street), 148–49

Mayo, Ireland, 61, 279
McAleese, Dr Martin, 247, 248
McAleese, Mary, 247

McAleese Committee (2011-13)/McAleese Report (2013), 247–67, 292–93n, 321n, 331n

McEntee, Ena, 154–55

McMahon, Phyliss, 115–16, 131–32

McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin, Primate of Ireland, John Charles, 172–73, 175–76
menopause, 275

“mental defectives,” 42–43

Michelle (survivor of Laundry in Dublin), 200, 201, 239

Mick (visitor to local Laundry in Limerick), 211–13, 215

Mother and Baby Homes, 1, 2, 12, 13, 161–64, 196, 205, 233, 291n, 295n, 323n

- cruelty of, 24
- fabulist ideal of Ireland and, 164
- illegitimate pregnancy and, 36, 209–11
- Magdalene Laundries and, 12, 38, 292–93n

- Northern Ireland Executive report into history of (2016), 209–10

- North of Ireland and, 36, 209–10

- numbers of women in, 18, 214

Mulcahy, Richard, 72–73

Mullins, Miss (bed and breakfast owner, Dublin), 3–4, 7

Murphy, Cillian, 163–64

New Ross, Wexford, Ireland, See Wexford, Ireland

News of the World, 51

Nora (survivor of Mother and Baby Home and Magdalene Laundry), 22, 44, 76, 266, 277

- average duration of stay reported by McAleese Report, response to, 254

- befriends a nun, 126

- covering up of past in social situations, 197

- cover story, 205

- effects of time in Laundry, on, 105, 124–25, 196–97

- England, emigrates to, 35–36, 165–66
- family background, 34–38
- gossip and, 38
- illegitimate pregnancy, 35, 208–11

- interview to group of academics (2013), 209–11

- leaves Laundry, 158, 165

- mother and, 34–38, 166, 197, 208–11, 213, 214

- Mother and Baby Home, sent to, 36–37, 197, 210–11

Northern Ireland, 14, 36, 47, 105, 196, 203, 209–10, 220, 225

- Good Shepherd sisters operate three Magdalene Laundries in (see Good Shepherd sisters)

Northern Ireland Executive commissions report into history of Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries in jurisdiction (2016), 209–11
nuns, 20–21, 84–86
abandon convents and turn back on vocation, 21, 116–19, 126, 130–32, 278
apologize for role in Magdalene Laundries, refusal to, 264–67

Are Nuns Human? (documentary), 174
“brainwashing,” 114–15
Catholic Hierarchy and, 15
class system, two-tier, 115
deaths at Laundries and, 135–37, 234, 253
dowry, 115
education of penitents and, 195–96
employment for penitents, finds, 33, 39, 87, 160
escape from Laundries and, 148–53
finances of Laundries and, 21, 218–22
free labor of, 72
funerals, 132–34
grant payments under Disabled Persons Maintenance Allowance, request, 178–79
hazardousness of Laundries and, 95–96, 188–89
humiliation of penitents, 121–29, 131, 141, 143, 195, 211, 251, 257
industrial schools and, 30–31, 39
instruction of penitents, 119–32, 256–58
lay sisters, 115, 174, 177
logbooks/accounts, 21, 221–22
McAleese Report and, 256–58, 263–67
missionary, 44, 111–12, 311n
Mother and Baby Homes and, 1
numbers of in Ireland, 76, 113
orders of, 13 (see also individual order name)

photograph of, Good Shepherd convent, Wexford, 85
protest against growing inequality (1980s), 229
recruitment, 111–15, 278
release of girls from Laundries and, 144, 237
roles in Magdalene Laundries, 115–19
The Rule, 113–15, 174
special appeal of Magdalene Laundries, 115–16
theological dictates, claim to be following, 129

Vatican II and, 174, 175–78
violence of, 30, 119–32, 189–90, 256–58

- O’Brien, Edna, 76, 283, 309–10n

- Country Girls, 204

- “The Widow,” 203–4

- Office of the Seven Dolours, 84
- O’Higgins, Kevin, 58–59, 303n
- O’Keefe, Batt, 245, 249

- Peacock Lane Laundry, Cork, 14, 152

- Pennywell Laundry, Limerick, 222–24, 240

- Perpetua (Sunday’s Well penitent), 87–88, 92–95

- Philomena, Sister (Sunday’s Well), 155–56

- piecework, 142

- populism, 24–25, 54, 58–59, 61, 69, 240, 280

- Post Office, 235

- 5p stamp with the Madonna and Child, marking the Marian Year (1954), ix, xii, 5, 337

- priests

- chaplains to Magdalene Laundries, 43, 77–78
- confession and, 28–29
- constitution of Ireland and, 73
- dance halls, policing of, 74
- free labor of, 72
- sexual abuse of children, 207
- status of within Ireland, 206, 277

- Primate of Ireland, 15, 172–73, 175

- prisons, 232

- closure of, 102–3
- Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935) and, 72
- Department of Justice modernizes, 170–71

- girls remanded in outsourced to Magdalene Laundries, 171–72

- Magdalene Laundries as alternative for, 43–44, 103, 135, 171–72, 188

- numbers of prisoners, 11–12, 170, 290n, 292n, 318n

- women in, 18, 19, 290n, 292n, 318n, 322n

- women’s prison, Ireland’s first, 171, 179, 228

- Psychiatric Service Planning for the Future: Report of a study group on the development of psychiatric service, The (White Paper, Government of Ireland) (1984), 227–28

- Quirke Report (2013), 259–62, 331n, 333n

- Redress Board, 92, 243, 244, 245, 259–65, 282, 334n

- reformatory schools, 12, 172, 173

- Religious Sisters of Charity, 13, 161, 221, 222, 263, 328n

- Riverdance, 230

- Robinson, Mary, 227, 247

- Rose, Gillian: “The Future of Auschwitz,” 279–80

- Ryan Commission, See Commission of Inquiry into Childhood Abuse in Ireland (CICA)

- Ryan’s Daughter (film), 274

St. Aiden’s industrial school, New Ross, 27–34, 81–82, 140

St. Mary’s Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry, Limerick, 14, 39–40, 87, 99, 159–60, 199–200, 217–19, 222, 231, 254, 279

- author visits, 240
- Christmas sale, 142–43
- deaths at, 132–35, 253
- John Kennedy and (see Kennedy, John)
- leaving, 154
- Mick visits, 211–13

- Pennywell Laundry, transformation into, 222–24, 233, 240

- sale of, 217–21, 231
- sewing service, 141, 141–43
- training center, 176
- Vatican II and, 178

Sarah (Seán McDermott Street Laundry penitent), 183–84
scandal, aversion to, 203–4, 206–7

Seán McDermott Street Laundry, Dublin, 122, 181–82, 328n

- admission into, 148, 181–85, 278
- closes, 232, 237
- daily schedule in, 185–89
- escape from, 190–91

- Gloucester Street (renamed Seán McDermott Street, 1933), 13

- motivational poster on wall of, ix, 114, 337

- national museum and research centre based inside, 268

- Ri Villa Training Centre, 176–77, 183, 188
- strange and unsettling older women in, 188
- violence of nuns and, 189–90

secrecy, culture of, 206–7
sexual abuse, 31, 183–84, 207, 322n
Shatter, Alan, 62–263, 333n
Shaw, George Bernard, 61–62

Sheila (survivor of Donnybrook Laundry), 200–201

Sheila, Auntie (aunt of Eileen), 2–3, 152, 153
silence, paralysis of, 197, 203–9, 213, 214–15, 229–30, 275–76, 280

Sisters of Mercy, 13, 31, 98, 115, 129–30, 224, 247, 263, 338

Sisters of Mercy Magdalene Laundry, Galway, 14, 87, 195

- Carol admitted to, 194–95

Sisters of Mercy Magdalene Laundry, Galway

- closes, 224–25

- crowds outside, during car rally (1973), x, 192, 338

- Ena McEntee helps women escape from, 154–55

- folded shirt in protective plastic wrapping from, ix, 92, 286, 337

- paper bag from, ix, 10, 286, 337

- Patricia Burke Brogan at, 116–19, 126, 130 (see also Special Advocate for Survivors of Institutional Abuse)

Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, 13, 135–36, 161

Small Things Like These (film), 17

Special Advocate for Survivors of Institutional Abuse, 239, 268

States of Fear (documentary series), 243
suicide/suicidal ideation, 190, 201

Sunday’s Well Good Shepherd convent, Cork, ix, 80, 81–82

Sunday’s Well Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry, Cork

- admission into, 32–34, 44, 81–88, 277
- complex, 80, 81
- decline, 166
- dormitories, ix, 86, 103, 109, 155–56
- escape from, 146–50, 156
- food at, 86, 99–100, 145
- friendships in, 105–6, 139–41
- humiliation by nuns, 126–29
- hunger strikes, 145–46
- leaving, 144, 155–60, 166, 196
- office (1994), x, 168, 338
- older women, community of, 86–87, 109
- origins, 14

- photographs of, ix, x, 80, 138, 168, 270, 337, 338

- sewing service/christening robe given to Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy, made by women in, ix, 141, 141–43, 337

- sold, 221, 237

- stairs leading down from dormitories to corridor leading to Laundry (1994), ix, 110, 337

- stairs leading to front door (1994), ix, 138, 337

- working day at, 86–109

surveillant, 118–19

- Tá brón orainn (there is a sadness upon us), 230–31

- Trinity College, Dublin, 60

- United Nations (UN): Committee Against Torture, 246–47, 258, 259, 332n

- Vatican, Rome

- Council (1962), 174

- Vatican II (1965), 174–75, 178, 223

- Vigilance Association, 51

- Vigilance Committee, 52

- Vincent, Mother (Sunday’s Well), 82–83, 99, 107, 140–41, 144

- Waterford, Ireland

- Good Shepherd Laundry in, 14, 123–24, 279

- Waterford Memories Project, 22

- Wexford, Ireland, ix, 14, 27, 33, 83, 85, 107, 198, 279, 337

- Good Shepherd convent, New Ross, ix, 13, 27, 33, 42, 81–82, 85, 231

- Magdalene Laundry, New Ross, 17, 42, 81–82, 119–29, 158, 231, 238–39

- St. Aiden’s industrial school, New Ross, 27–34, 81–82, 140

- Whyte, Dianne: “Echo of a Silent Cry,” ix, 26, 337

- Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 19

- Women’s Liberation movement, Irish, 225–27

- Yeats, William Butler, 60

Image Credits

1. Prologue: An Post 5p stamp with the Madonna and Child, marking the Marian Year 1954, courtesy of the author

2. Introduction: Galway Magdalene Laundry paper bag, courtesy of the Galway City Museum

3. Chapter 1: Waiting suitcase from “Echo of a Silent Cry,” courtesy of Dianne Whyte

4. Chapter 2: Faithfull Place, Dublin, adjacent to Gloucester Street Laundry, 1913, courtesy of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland

5. Chapter 3: “A million people kneel in worship,” O’Connell Street, 1932, courtesy of British Pathé

6. Chapter 4: Sunday’s Well, Good Shepherd convent, Cork, c.1969, Evening Echo, courtesy of Irish Examiner Archive

7. p. 85: Nuns and two auxiliaries at Good Shepherd convent, Wexford, c.1901–1954, the Poole Photographic Collection, courtesy of the National Library of Ireland

8. p. 92: Folded shirt in protective plastic wrapping from Galway Magdalene Laundry, courtesy of the Galway City Museum

9. Chapter 5: Sunday’s Well, stairs leading down from dormitories to corridor leading to Laundry, c.1994, courtesy of O’Donnell + Tuomey

10. p. 114: Motivational poster on the wall of Seán McDermott Street Laundry, “To See God” from the series After Magdalene (2006–2009) by Ethna Rose O’Regan

11. Chapter 6: Sunday’s Well, stairs leading to front door, c.1994, courtesy of O’Donnell + Tuomey

12. p. 141: Christening robe given to Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy, made by the women in the Limerick Magdalene Laundry, courtesy of the Limerick Leader

13. p. 151: Connacht Tribune advertisement for a runaway penitent, 1928

14. Chapter 7: Sunday’s Well, office, c.1994, courtesy of O’Donnell + Tuomey

15. Chapter 8: Crowds outside Sisters of Mercy Magdalene Laundry, Forster Street, Galway, during the car rally, 1973, courtesy of the Connacht Tribune

16. Chapter 9: Magdalen Laundry, Washing Book, Terms and Conditions, 1972, courtesy of the Galway City Museum

17. Chapter 10: Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry, ironing room, c. 2021, courtesy of Mark Coen

18. Conclusion: Sunday’s Well, Magdalene Laundry, c. 2024, courtesy of Butler Cammoranesi architects and Bellmount Developments

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Excerpts from “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” from THE POEMS OF SEAMUS HEANEY by Seamus Heaney, edited with an introduction and commentary by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis. Copyright © 2025 by The Estate of Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.

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ISBN 978-1-6680-7974-4

ISBN 978-1-6680-7976-8 (ebook)

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Epigraph
- List of Illustrations
- Author’s Note
- Prologue
- Introduction: Forgetting
- Chapter 1: Disappeared
- Chapter 2: Discontent
- Chapter 3: Purge
- Chapter 4: Penance
- Chapter 5: Erasure
- Chapter 6: Escape
- Chapter 7: Welfare
- Chapter 8: Silence
- Chapter 9: Demise
- Chapter 10: Redress
- Conclusion: Remembering
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Notes
- Index
- Image Credits
- Copyright