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

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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. Most of the good moments in the book are when Sullivan is with her grandmother. I felt that too, how her grandmother was so kind and loving and caring. Though there was a situation where she planted Sullivan in a very perspicacious position. Where in, if Sullivan had been caught she would surly have paid with more than money. And that I felt made the granny more like the rest of Sullivan's family than I care to admit. I was given the never-ending job of pressing the starched clothes. Starch isn’t common these days, but it was normal then to mix starch powder with water to form a loose jelly that you would dip clothes into, then wring the mixture out and hang them up to dry. Just before they were fully dry you would press them, almost to set the starch into the cloth.

Once “she asked the nuns in front of us all where we went on excursions” and was told by a nun that the laundry ran every day. “Mrs Ryan interrupted her. ‘Now please, Mother,’ she said, ‘everyone needs a day out from time to time.’” The result was a day at the seaside for the women. It was the first time Sullivan had seen the sea. Marty, however, never went without. He was fed first and always had a supply of his two great loves, Erinmore tobacco and Irel coffee, which came in a bottle and was stirred into hot water. He took it with milk. 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’s something I still struggle with today, as I find myself fretting if I run out of milk, even though I’m the only one here. The Laundry in Athy, it was up behind the Catholic Church, where I used to scrub the floors,” she said. That starch and me, we were not friends. 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. And there was no break from the work to let it heal, so I lived with that every day. I was in constant pain. On top of that, working the press meant I burned myself regularly. The machines were designed to be used by fully-grown adults, not small-sized children. The book tells of how Sullivan and her brothers suffered years of neglect by both her mother and stepfather, how her stepfather beat her and her two brothers, while also raping Maureen in secret. So bad were the beatings that one cost Sullivan the last of her baby teeth. So bad were the rapes they caused her hip damage.Girl in the Tunnel is Maureen Sullivan's story of love and loss as one of the youngest known survivors of the Magdalene laundries A regular visitor at the Magdalene laundry in New Ross was “Mrs Ryan”, described as a cousin of US president John F Kennedy. She was “a sort of celebrity in the community, more so since he was dead, and there would be great ceremony when she came to the convent each time”. She would leave a tin of sweets for the women, which “rarely made it to us”. You must remember beneath those habits were women who treated little girls appallingly, and I get in trouble when I say that,” she said. My mother was nineteen and pregnant with me when my father died suddenly. Michael was two and my other brother, Paddy, was only eight months. They all lived with my granny in her tiny two-storey cottage in the middle of the Irish countryside. That was where I was born a few months later, in the little parlour off the main room – the same room that my newly-wed parents had first slept in together.

I didn’t rebel there at all, I asked nothing, I kept my head down and got on with it. I had given up. I did my work, ate and went to bed. I abandoned all ideas I had of who I was or what I thought. I said nothing. It was a life of misery and of drudgery—not allowed to continue her education, not allowed to be friendly with the other inmates, not allowed to speak to the children who were at the convent boarding school. Sullivan was perhaps the youngest inmate of the Magdalene Laundries (at least within the time frame when she was held there), and it was years and years before she understood why the powers that be had deemed it appropriate to put her there in the first place. Before I was two my mother married that lame pig jobber from Green Lane in Carlow town called Marty Murphy. He is, I suppose, the only father I ever knew. He hurt me the day I was carried into his house, with a hard slap to my legs, and he hurts me still today, though he has been dead for years. The mental, physical and sexual torture I suffered in my childhood, that can never be erased or settled. I live with it.

It was difficult for me to avoid the steam as I held the corners of the clothes to get the right fold without making dents in the fabric. Marks were not tolerated. 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. London “was getting rough then, so I came home. I rang my husband – he was in Germany at the time – and I said to him I’m going to Ireland. He said he would be working in Germany for another year and I said, ‘That’s up to you. I’m putting the house up for sale and I’m going to Ireland’. I already had bought it off the council before I met him.”