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

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At twelve, Sullivan finally told a teacher how bad things were at home. The teacher sought help for her in the form of a convent boarding school—and instead Sullivan was sent to the Magdalene Laundries. Kept separate from the other children her age, she was put to work doing laundry, day in and day out, as penance for having been abused. Last summer, she and Independent Dublin City Councillor Mannix Flynn were central to unveiling the Journey Stone at the Little Museum of Dublin on St Stephen’s Green to honour “the great courage, integrity and dignity of the women” who had been in the laundries. She has continued to do so. “The HAA [Health Amendment Act] card. We never got that. We just got an ordinary medical card that we already had,” she said. I told on him, didn't I? That was the crime. That's what happened. I told the Church that my stepfather was molesting and raping me, and beating me and my brothers.

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. 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”. A regular visitor at the Magdalene laundry in New Ross was “Mrs Ryan”, described as a cousin of US president John F Kennedy. She was “a sort of celebrity in the community, more so since he was dead, and there would be great ceremony when she came to the convent each time”. She would leave a tin of sweets for the women, which “rarely made it to us”. 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.I didn’t tell anyone; not my granny who I was so close to because I was afraid what would happen to her if he found out. When the nun got it out of me, I trusted her and I do think she thought what she was doing was the right thing, but I was punished for speaking out,” said Maureen. Maureen continues to fight and advocate for survivors and is part of a local group. She is calling on the government to fulfil its promise of enhanced medical cards for laundry survivors. When she is 12, she discloses her abuse, while being bribed with sweets, to her supposed ally, a nun in her school. The nun had two choices: go to the police and report the abuse; or go to the parish priest and set in train four more years of misery for Maureen, this time in two Magdalene laundries, where she experienced physical brutality, slave labour, denial of her education and cold unkindness from the nuns who must have known the reason why this child had arrived. There is a poignant description of a rare visit from her mother and her brother (who had ended up in an industrial school). A nun sits stiffly in the room throughout the visit. There is little communication. She describes her family and herself as “three worn-out animals in the same vicinity”. Maureen asks the fundamental question that occurs to everyone who knows about Ireland’s carceral institutions: “Why were they so cruel to me? Why were they so hard? I was a little kid, yet they never let me have a minute to look at a book or sing a song... I was made into a miniature robot for the church to profit from.” 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.

From a large family in Carlow town, as a child Maureen had been sexually abused by her stepfather, who is now deceased. It was 1964 and Maureen went to the primary school run by the Presentation Sisters, now known as Scoil Mhuire gan Smál. She told a Sister Veronica at the school, a nun who was kind to her, about the abuse at home after the sister detected something was wrong. 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 Maureen was still recorded as attending school in Carlow during this time, a sign which indicates a cover-up and that the authorities knew it was wrong she was in a laundry. Even at 12 I thought that my mother went down to the hospital and a nurse gave her a baby — Maureen Sullivan

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Oh!’ She said suddenly and rummaged in her bag, pulling out one of those thin, flat Dairy Milk bars you don’t see anymore.

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. My older brother, Michael, is the only one with memories of him, but they are fleeting, nothing more than a shadow leaning over his cot. 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 just hope through my book people listen to little children, that’s the hope I have,” said Maureen.Granny told us that my father was out riding one day and got caught in the rain. A few days later he fell gravely ill. He died three days after that. That’s how the story was told to me anyway. I feel really sad, a truly great and deep sorrow, when I think about my young mother at his bedside, with him slipping away so fast, and then at his graveside with a toddler, a baby in her arms and another on the way. It was a life of misery and of drudgery—not allowed to continue her education, not allowed to be friendly with the other inmates, not allowed to speak to the children who were at the convent boarding school. Sullivan was perhaps the youngest inmate of the Magdalene Laundries (at least within the time frame when she was held there), and it was years and years before she understood why the powers that be had deemed it appropriate to put her there in the first place. She was told she was going to get an education here but this never happened. She was put amongst the older woman and made to work just as hard as them in the laundry room. She was physically and mentally abused every day until her spirit was broken into a thousand pieces. The documentary looked at the experiences of women who entered the laundries, the difficulties they faced when they left and the battle they still fight. The 60-year-old believes she was treated like a slave and had her dignity, identity, and life taken from her for fear she would follow in her mother’s footsteps.