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

Product Information

She was told that she would receive an education there, but instead she was immediately stripped of her possessions and thrown into forced labour, washing clothes and scrubbing floors in inhumane and unrelenting conditions. Cork’s Mercier Press has been shortlisted for the 2023 IPA Prix Voltaire alongside publishers and authors from Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey. Inside I really grieve for what I never had. I grieve for the man in the photograph, the smiling, curly-headed young man who I have spent my life longing for. I grieve for the happy home he had with my mother, the love and laughter that was there, and the childhood I lost when he died. I think of what my life would have been, if only John L. Sullivan had never taken his horse out on a cold, wet day. Maureen Sullivan was 12 years old when she was taken from her school in Carlow to the Magdalene laundry in New Ross, in the mid-1960s. She was incarcerated because she told an allegedly sympathetic nun at her school that she had been physically and sexually abused by her stepfather for years. Nothing happened to the stepfather; her mother appeared powerless to prevent her removal. She was effectively punished for the crimes of her guardian and the compliance of her mother. 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.

When I started publicising my case my boss was a lovely man, and said ‘you go ahead and tell your truth, and anything I can do to help you, I will’. A man for justice,” said Maureen. But people have been so good, and I think there is strength in speaking out. I want to help others; I want to end sexual abuse and help people,” said Maureen. I spoke to a person about it recently, and she said ‘well, Maureen, there’s a lot more crime nowadays’, and I said I’d prefer a little more crime than knowing about little children getting abused behind high walls,” she said. Cover of Girl in the Tunnel: My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries, by Maureen Sullivan. Recreation time was making Rosary beads or knitting Aran sweaters,” she said, “but the reward for speaking was imprisonment”.

There was also the un-faminist remark that "women in those days were fit from walking and from work" It is perhaps the only anti-feminist comment Sullivan makes in the book. However as someone who walks most places and never learned to drive (because there was no one there to teach me, my poor disabled body has suffered due to this) it was a little upsetting to read that. The determined words of Carlow’s Maureen Sullivan, one of the youngest survivors of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene laundries. Maureen has just published her memoir Girl in the tunnel – my story of love and loss as a survivor of the Magdalene Laundries, where she bravely recounts her agonising journey from a monstrously violent home in Carlow town to the cold and brutal Magdalene laundry system and her desperate, gruelling fight for freedom and for justice.

The floors in Green Lane were clay and sawdust, like most of the poor homes around us. The sawdust was there to soak up the Irish rain that came so often, and the spilled tea or bathwater that splashed out. Every now and again Marty and Shay would take up the floor coverings, digging out the old sawdust and clay to replace them with new. The smell of sour and must would be gone for a while when they did that. My mother came once as Athy was close and she managed to get a lift. We talked for a while, very politely. Maureen asks the fundamental question that occurs to everyone who knows about Ireland’s carceral institutions: “Why were they so cruel to me? Why were they so hard? I was a little kid, yet they never let me have a minute to look at a book or sing a song... I was made into a miniature robot for the church to profit from.” 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. She has continued to do so. “The HAA [Health Amendment Act] card. We never got that. We just got an ordinary medical card that we already had,” she said.Weaving a tapestry of music and words in celebration of a bygone generation of Irish artists, My Father’s Kind is based on a suite of poems by Dermot Bolger. My Father’s Kind depicts many 20th century traditional Irish musicians, including Séamus Ennis, Mary Ann Carolan and Johnny Doherty, exploring not only the iconic music, but the real lives and humanity behind the loved and celebrated figures. The Catholic Church later denied that Maureen had ever been enslaved in the Magdalene Laundry at New Ross, insisting that she had attended the adjoining school. Finally, the Church admitted that this was not the case and a nun confirmed to Maureen that she had been held captive because as a sexually abused child, the Church feared that she would corrupt the other children. The nun continued: “They believed you could corrupt the innocence... of the other children,” she said, “if you mixed with them.” Sullivan interjected: “Sister, are you telling me they put me into the laundry and... all of it... because they thought I would tell the other children about what my stepfather done to me?” The nun continued: “It was wrong,” she said, nodding, “but yes, that’s what they did.” My older brother, Michael, is the only one with memories of him, but they are fleeting, nothing more than a shadow leaning over his cot.

There are people out there who don’t want me to tell my story, people who tell me to ‘get over it’ or push me to stay silent, but I want good to come of it,” Maureen told The Nationalist. To get to Granny’s you went through two standing stones that opened the hedgerows and exposed a small two-storey cottage, with rooms in the attic and a huge hearth right in the middle. 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. It was a place where everything was warm, where everything was good and I was not hurt or afraid.

The descriptions of the nuns are perhaps telling. Obviously I do not sympathise for a second with the choice to effect such terrible and ongoing punishment on an abused child, but Sullivan also makes a point about the nuns having in many ways dreadful lives of their own—more comfortable than the life they afforded Sullivan in the Laundries, certainly, but not happy ones. Not happy creatures. Sullivan does not sympathise, exactly (how could she, when neither did they?), but it's a fascinating perspective. 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. Nobody ever spoke about my father except Granny, who told me he was a kind and gentle person. Is it possible to miss something you never had? It feels like it. Even now, the child that’s left in me calls out for her father in the dark and cries when he doesn’t come. If my father hadn’t gone out that day, and hadn’t caught a chill that led to such a serious illness that he didn’t survive, I would have had a childhood where my parents’ love for one another surrounded me and my brothers too. I think often about fate and how the event of his death changed the path of my whole life, even before I was born. When I was on the way, safe in my mother’s womb, I was a child of a loving marriage, with two parents planning a future for me, one of happiness and warmth. Even at 12 I thought that my mother went down to the hospital and a nurse gave her a baby — Maureen Sullivan