IRELAND
Irish Times
DAN GRIFFIN
Patricia Burke Brogan joined the Sisters of Mercy to help the poor, but after working briefly in Galway’s Magdalene laundry she decided to leave the order and write about what she had witnessed.
In doing so she became one of the first writers to tackle the subject, with a short story and then in the 1980s with a play. At the time most theatres rejected it as too controversial. “One theatre director wrote back and said: ‘Do you know what you’re saying?’,” she said.
She encountered the laundry on Forster Street as a 21-year-old novitiate doing substitute work. She remembers on her first day being “brought down this long, brown corridor and every time we went through doors they were locked behind”.
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