IRELAND
Washington Post
By Jamie Smyth | Financial Times
Tuesday, February 5
DUBLIN — The inscription above the door claims it was a place of refuge. But for Margaret Bullen and thousands like her, the Magdalene laundry on Sean McDermott Street in Dublin’s city center was a prison and a workhouse.
In 1967, a 16-year-old Bullen was sent to the laundry, which was run by nuns, from an industrial school for neglected children. She did not leave until it closed in 1996. She remained institutionalized until she died in 2003 and was buried in a communal grave.
“It was white slavery,” said Samantha Long, one of the twin daughters who were taken from Bullen by the nuns and put up for adoption. “Margaret never got paid and wasn’t allowed to leave. There was never enough food, just enough to keep them working.”
For more than a decade, the Irish government has denied responsibility for the 10 Magdalene laundries across the country, which were operated by religious orders from the 19th century until the mid-1990s.
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