Girl in the Tunnel: My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries

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I’d feel the warmth of spreading urine under me and be upset and shocked that it had happened and terrified that one of the others would notice and I’d be battered too. There is a poignant description of a rare visit from her mother and her brother (who had ended up in an industrial school). Now as 36 year old woman who was never abducted into a religious institution, I was surprised that I felt Sullivan and I had so much in common. When she was just twelve years old she was placed in the Magdalene Laundry at New Ross, County Wexford, where she was forced to work long hours scrubbing floors and washing clothes, and denied an education.

Brid Murphy and Martin Quinn look at surviving accounts records found on the site, covering the period from 1962 to 1987, to show that the laundry generated a healthy yearly surplus which would have been wiped out if the women doing the work had been paid. The archivist Barry Houlihan of NUIG Library, who accessioned the records found at the site after its closure, points out that former president Mary Robinson, elected in 1990, was patron of the National Maternity Hospital, which had a laundry contract with Donnybrook at the time. I was trafficked through four institutions (she was moved to Dublin after Athy), and I got out at 16,” she said. Not having any milk when Marty wanted coffee was a sentence for punishment, so myself and my brothers pre-empted this and other things we would get in trouble for by taking preventative action.It was tiny and tumbledown and leaked rain in places, but to me it was a sanctuary from everything that was going on at home.

My skin reacted to the mix by breaking out in dermatitis, small splits in my over-dried skin that left my hands raw every day. Highlights include conversations between The Edge and Brian Cox; Ruby Wax and Ian Robertson; Masha Gessen and Dylan Moran, who will also perform the Irish premiere of his show We Got This; and a football head-to-head with Roddy Collins and Paul Howard. Every person should know what happened to Maureen she was brave enough to tell her story and we must read it. He always bathed first and took his time, then my mother would get in and out quickly, and one by one the children would be washed. I think often about fate and how the event of his death changed the path of my whole life, even before I was born.

The only good things in Maureen's life where her full blood brothers and her paternal grandmother, and the church even took them away from her. Her descriptions of these assaults are unbearable – a small defenceless child being brutalised by an ugly predatory man, with no recourse to any help. He has made excellent use of other sources: materials about the RSC published by themselves, media reports, records in the Dublin Diocesan Archives (a shining light in terms of public access to its important collections) and some late records rescued from the site of the laundry after its vacation by the RSC. They would roll around on the mud floor, or in the dust of the yard, boxing each other and pinning, or being pinned, until they ran out of steam and stopped, bloodied and exhausted. The supervising nun, the old harridan, was whipping me with the end of a wet pillowcase that she had picked up off the pile next to me.

It was confirmation that Sullivan was incarcerated in a Magdalene laundry, at such a young age, just for being sexually abused by her stepfather. It is the story of the author’s life in three different Magdalene Laundries - New Ross, Athy, and Dublin. I watched out for a different look eventually – a curl of his lip and a way of fixing his eyes on me that I would learn to be terrified of.

I was looking for the story of a woman in a Wexford Magdalene Laundry who escaped via a laundry van. Last summer, she and Independent Dublin City Councillor Mannix Flynn were central to unveiling the Journey Stone at the Little Museum of Dublin on St Stephen’s Green to honour “the great courage, integrity and dignity of the women” who had been in the laundries.

I didn’t tell anyone; not my granny who I was so close to because I was afraid what would happen to her if he found out.The door would whack open, hitting the wall like the wind whipped it, and Marty Murphy would cross the floor to where me and my brothers lay and stop any fighting – even if we weren’t involved – with a box to our bodies or faces. In Claire Keegan’s perfect novel, Small Things Like These, Bill Furlong, the protagonist, discovers a young woman locked in the coal shed of the Magdalene laundry in New Ross, Co Wexford. Somewhere along the lines I confused the two women's stories and went into this book thinking Sullivan escaped the Magdalene Laundry in New Ross, this was most certainly not the case. In the cottage there was a tin bath, like you see in old movies, where one end slopes up for you to rest your back.