“Nobody told us she had died” – the story of Margaret Bullen, who spent her entire life in a Magdalene Laundry

IRELAND
The Journal

THE FASCINATING AND tragic story of a mother who spent her life in a series of Magdalene Laundries will be told this evening.

RTÉ’s Liveline Callback will tell the story of Margaret Bullen, a mother-of-three who spent her entire life in state institutions such as the infamous Laundries.

Samantha Long was 29 years old and seven months pregnant in October 2003 when she listened to an edition of Liveline on RTÉ Radio in which a woman was decrying the fact that one of her good friends had died and been buried in a communal grave by the nuns at her laundry.

And then she heard the woman’s name. Margaret Bullen. Her mother, who she had first met just eight years previously. Who met her and her twin sister in the Gresham Hotel on O’Connell Street carrying an empty handbag because she owned nothing to put in it.

“When we were just two weeks old, Margaret was sent back to work,” Samantha says today, five years after first sharing her story with TheJournal.ie.

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