CARLOW (IRELAND)
i /inews.co.uk [London, England]
August 30, 2023
By Kasia Delgado
Maureen Sullivan spent almost five years of her childhood in the notorious Irish institution. Now, at 71, she is speaking out, despite some defenders of the Catholic Church still wanting her to stay silent
Just after her 12th birthday in 1964, Maureen Sullivan’s teacher, Sister Cecilia, sat her down and told her to be honest about what was going on at home. Hopeful that perhaps she might be allowed to go and live with her beloved granny if she dared tell the truth, Sullivan admitted to Sister Cecilia what her stepfather had been doing to her for years.
Sullivan’s father had died suddenly when her mother was 19 and, faced with the terrible fate of being a destitute widow, her mother married a new man who she hoped would save the family from starvation. Instead, that man went on to make her children’s lives a living hell. Sullivan detailed the beatings and physical abuse, done to her and her 12 siblings, as well as the sexual abuse – not that she knew the term for it – that had started when she turned eight.
But, after Sullivan’s confession, she wasn’t sent to live with her kind granny. A priest was called, mystery conversations took place, and Sullivan was instead told she was going to “a lovely new school” in New Ross, Wexford, 34 miles away from home in Carlow, a school where she’d also be living. Her mother listened to the nuns and the local priest, and nervously took their instruction. Off Sullivan went.
That “lovely new school” turned out to be a Magdalene Laundry, also known as a Magdalene Asylum, an Irish institution run by the Catholic Church from 1922 to 1996, to house “fallen women”, an estimated 30,000 of whom were confined to these notorious homes, a dark past that Ireland is still reckoning with.
A formal state apology was issued in 2013, and a compensation scheme of 100,000 euros (£8,956) for each survivor was set up by the Irish Government.
From that day in 1965 onwards, Sullivan, now 71, one of the youngest known survivors of a laundry, never saw her school books again. She says she was forced to clean clothes and scrub floors night and day, seven days a week for no pay, beaten, and prevented from speaking. Her hair was chopped off and she was given a new name, Frances.
She didn’t know this as a child, but now believes that names were changed so that the survivors would “never know each other on the outside, never find each other, so we’d have to stay silent, and the rot would be covered up.”
Sullivan also didn’t know at the age of 12, that other women around her were victims of rape and sexual assault – like her. There were also women deemed too flirtatious or promiscuous, some women with disabilities or special needs, many women deemed at odds with societal expectations.
These homes were similar institutions to the “mother-and-baby” homes for women who had babies out of wedlock, and another way that the Catholic Church and the Irish state regulated behaviour that was perceived as deviant. By the 50s, one per cent of Ireland’s population was contained in institutions of coercive confinement.
“The nuns watched me work to the bone,” Sullivan tells i, her gentle tone simmering with a quiet fury. “I was doing hard penance as if I was a sinner. I was ostracised in every way, punished for the crime my stepfather committed against me. He was left at home, in the family and in society still, to go on and abuse others. It was thought that abuse like I’d experienced should be covered up, hidden away.
“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.
“It was horrendous and cruel that I went from being abused, to more abuse,” says Sullivan. “What they did to me is pure evil. I can’t find any other word for it.”
The work
“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.”
For years, Sullivan thought the word “recreation” meant “work” because after she was fed each evening, she and her fellow women would walk single file to begin their second jobs, which the nuns referred to as “recreation”. Sullivan spent the night making rosaries, which were sold and exported by the religious orders to places such as Lourdes, a major place of Catholic pilgrimage in France.
She remembers being slapped around the face when she dropped a bucket of water by accident, being dug in the ribs with a crucifix if she so much as looked at anyone else, and often went without being given water, so would have to drink what she could from the sink in the toilets.
“For a while I kept asking the nuns when I’d be going to school, whether I could have the pencil case back that my mother had given me, where the classroom was. I didn’t understand where I was, or why I was there. Nobody ever explained it to me.” After two years, Sullivan was, as she puts it, “trafficked” to another laundry – this time, an institution for blind women, where she was allowed to speak to the women, but was still working seven days a week without pay.
After the laundry
When she was freed from the laundry at the age of 16, she went back home to Carlow, and then fled to London, feeling she needed to get away from Ireland. “But it all followed me,” she says.
For many years Sullivan stayed silent about what happened to her. When asked about her childhood, she told people, including her husband, that she’d lived with her granny as a teenager. “I felt so much shame,” she says, “I had been told to stay silent, all that time, by the nuns. I didn’t know how to open up, how to manage relationships, how to function as an adult. I was scared, all of the time.”
At 35, married and with two children, she tried to end her life, after which she was helped by The Whittington Hospital in north London, where the staff got her counselling. “I had had all these flashbacks about the cruelty of my stepfather and then being imprisoned after that. One particularly kind lady there helped me deal with the pain I was carrying inside of me,” she says. Sullivan continued therapy, and stayed in London until much later, when her elderly mother needed to be cared for back home.
In 1993, Sullivan – who is still afraid of the dark and has lamps on in every corner of her home – saw the breaking news that 155 unmarked graves had been uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries. “It gave me strength,” she says. She joined a laundry survivor group. “We began asking a lot of questions, and started talking openly, which of course the Church denied,” she says.
In her 50s, she went to visit a younger nun in Wexford who had been tasked with dealing with survivors. “She apologised, and said it was wrong. She said the authorities ‘believed you could corrupt the innocence… of the other children if you mixed with them’.”
Sullivan and her fellow survivors’ campaigning paid off. In 2013, a long-awaited report headed by Senator Martin McAleese which said there was “significant state involvement” in how the laundries were run – a reversal of the official state line for years, which insisted the institutions were privately controlled and run by nuns. The Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach) at the time, Enda Kenny, went on to formally apologise on behalf of the state for its role in the Magdalene laundries, saying that a memorial would be erected “to remind us all of this dark part of our history”.
His speech received a standing ovation from members of the Irish parliament, who then directed their applause towards a group of Magdalene survivors – including Sullivan – gathered in the gallery. Sullivan, who has now written a memoir, says that “there are still people in Ireland who’d rather she stayed silent, those who want to defend the Catholic Church.” In recent years, films such as The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and Philomena (2013) have also explored this part of history, as does the new BBC series The Woman in the Wall, starring Ruth Wilson.
“I have no regrets about telling my story,” she says. “I no longer have shame. My father had died, my mother was too weak from having 13 children to speak up. I don’t blame her for it, as she was oppressed by the system, too. Our Government, and the Church possessed far too much power, and it completely took over our country, and caused such cruelty. The immense damage done to all of us girls and women is still rippling through Ireland, today.”
Girl in the Tunnel – My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries is published by Merrion Press