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

Product Information

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.

Maureen has one person who provides her with unconditional love – her grandmother, who is powerless to help her in her appalling family situation but who alleviates it as much as she can, and gives the child the essential nurturing which stays with her through her later travails. It is some consolation to the reader to find this poor elderly woman shining like a beacon in the middle of this tale of horrors. My shoes got too small and when I asked to be paid so I could get new ones, they just brought me down to Heuston or whatever it was called then, and put me on a train to Carlow,” said Maureen. 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. Sullivan grew up poor in Ireland when growing up poor in Ireland meant owning only one or two outfits, sleeping piled up with your siblings in one bed because the house was too cold to do otherwise, and going without food because there wasn't enough to go around. Her father died young, and her mother remarried—and the only person whom the marriage benefitted was the new husband. When Maureen was just 12 years old, she confided in a teacher that she was being physically and sexually abused by her stepfather, but never, in her darkest imaginings, could she have dreamt that she would be the one who would face harrowing punishment.

The Whole Sole Guide to Walking the Camino de Santiago: How I Walked over 500 Miles without Getting a Single Blister or Losing a Toenail

You must remember beneath those habits were women who treated little girls appallingly, and I get in trouble when I say that,” she said. 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. Maureen’s story and incredible fight for justice has propelled her to local and national prominence, her bravery and heroism to speak out truly remarkable. She’s now a tireless and vocal advocate for justice for those affected – and at 70 years’ old, she now feels ready to publish her story. 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. 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 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.

Really good, very immersive writing, very well told and kudos for Maureen telling us what happened. Very well balanced story. 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.She was taken from the family, not to be cared for or loved or given to a new family. No, she was sent to a Maggie. Why not the school next door to that very Magdalene Laundry? because (in the eyes of the church) she had been in the wrong. She had been the one to tempt a "good man" into sin. Personally I knew this from the moment she is put to work, but for Maureen Sullivan, it took decades and an admission from a Nun to put the pieces together. Sullivan had been so young when it happened, all of 12, that she grew up literally not understanding how the church could do that to a child. The church tried to deny that she was there, even all those years later. Survivor testimony has always been at the heart of Justice for Magdalenes Research, the ground-breaking advocacy and research project for former inmates of Magdalene laundries. They have gathered numerous survivor accounts as part of their oral history project (Maureen Sullivan’s among them), made many important submissions to the McAleese committee’s Inquiry into State Involvement with Magdalene laundries, most of which were shamefully ignored, given help with survivors’ legal needs, and produced valuable research outputs, of which the latest is a study of Donnybrook Magdalene laundry, run by the Religious Sisters of Charity.

The nun told me we couldn’t have you playing with other children in case you told them what happened to you, so I was ostracised for that,” she said. When Maureen was just 12 years’ old, she confided in her teacher in a Carlow town school that she was being physically and sexually abused by her stepfather. Never in her darkest imaginings could she have dreamt that she would be the one who would face a harrowing punishment. I was fortunate to meet Maureen while in hospital recently and I feel very fortunate to have met a woman so strong even after being through so much in life. The Magdalene laundries was one of the disgraces run by the churches in Ireland and it will forever be a part of Irish history, something the Catholic religion in Ireland should always be ashamed of. I truly hope each and every individual affected by the priests and nuns will get their apologies and explanation as to why...Mary Smith, Maureen Sullivan and Geraldine Coll Cronin, former residents of Magdalene laundries, lay a wreath on the mass unmarked graves of residents of Magdalene laundries in Glasnevin Cemetery on the first anniversary of former taoiseach Enda Kenny's apology to survivors of the institutions. Photograph: Alan Betson