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

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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 marriage did not work out. “Then I had to bring my daughter up on my own, try and get bits of jobs. It was very, very hard. You always had this past in your mind. You couldn’t say where you were, where your education finished.”

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.”Instead, I was born into a life where my family was displaced, where my father was dead and unable to protect me, where I was placed in the care of monsters and stolen away to be neglected, abused and abandoned to evil. 1 MARTY At twelve, Sullivan finally told a teacher how bad things were at home. The teacher sought help for her in the form of a convent boarding school—and instead Sullivan was sent to the Magdalene Laundries. Kept separate from the other children her age, she was put to work doing laundry, day in and day out, as penance for having been abused.

I was still Frances, and couldn’t have my own name, basically it was the same, just a smaller scale than New Ross,” she said.The nun) was only doing her best. She didn’t do me wrong. She put covers on my books for me going to school. She thought I was going down there (New Ross) to go to the industrial school side of it.” Maureen spent two years in New Ross and a further year in the House of Mercy laundry in Athy, and then two years at St Mary’s School for the Blind in Dublin. After leaving St Mary’s, she soon moved to England, but this was not the end of her hardship. I was given no books, pens, or paper. I spent those years without having a conversation. I saw my mother a handful of times over the next five years,” she recalls. Sullivan and the fellow girls and women in the laundries were referred to as “penitents”: a person who seeks forgiveness for their sins. I then took it up that when the nuns hid her in the tunnel it was for her safety ie to keep her away form her stepfather. Another misconception. The laundry wasn’t a refuge, it was a prison, and we were treated as slaves. Everything we did was for the church’s profit, but we got nothing,” she says. “The laundry would pile in every day from hotels, restaurants and the armies, plus churches, and the priests. I cleaned, washed and ironed it all from morning until night.”

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. This book is another important testimony from a brave survivor of two kinds of abuse – familial child sexual abuse and incarceration, physical and emotional abuse in three religious institutions. I would have liked to have read more about her post-Magdalene life, in which she became an activist and advocate for her fellow sufferers. But what Maureen Sullivan gives us is essential reading: we are by no means done with what church and State did to vulnerable women and children in this country, and books like this one are a timely reminder of Ireland’s reprehensible past. As a young woman, Maureen tried to take her own life. In her 30s, she talked to a counsellor, who helped Maureen immensely and made her realise that she was an innocent child who had been abused and wronged. “I got a sentence for what my stepfather did with me. I did the time. He got away scot-free.” 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. Oh!’ She said suddenly and rummaged in her bag, pulling out one of those thin, flat Dairy Milk bars you don’t see anymore.

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.” 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. It was very hard for Liosa and me, because this is very disturbing and very, very painfully to listen to and exhausting emotionally. We’d often have to take a break, maybe for a few months, because I’m still in recovery, I always will be, so I do have to mind myself,” explained Maureen.