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

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I didn’t rebel there at all, I asked nothing, I kept my head down and got on with it. I had given up. I did my work, ate and went to bed. I abandoned all ideas I had of who I was or what I thought. I said nothing. Recreation time was making Rosary beads or knitting Aran sweaters,” she said, “but the reward for speaking was imprisonment”. Speaking of her time in New Ross, Maureen said: “The way they looked at it was that I was a soiled child. It’s horrible, but that’s the way they looked at me. It was the coldest, most harrowing place I ever came across. It was a cruel, cold attitude. No speaking … full of silence. You could hear someone walking on a corridor a mile away.”

Maureen’s story and incredible fight for justice has propelled her to local and national prominence, her bravery and heroism to speak out truly remarkable. She’s now a tireless and vocal advocate for justice for those affected – and at 70 years’ old, she now feels ready to publish her story.

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. But people have been so good, and I think there is strength in speaking out. I want to help others; I want to end sexual abuse and help people,” said Maureen. 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. 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”.

Even at the weekends, the youngster was forced to clean the floors of the local church when she should have been out playing, enjoying life and meeting other children. Survivor testimony has always been at the heart of Justice for Magdalenes Research, the ground-breaking advocacy and research project for former inmates of Magdalene laundries. They have gathered numerous survivor accounts as part of their oral history project (Maureen Sullivan’s among them), made many important submissions to the McAleese committee’s Inquiry into State Involvement with Magdalene laundries, most of which were shamefully ignored, given help with survivors’ legal needs, and produced valuable research outputs, of which the latest is a study of Donnybrook Magdalene laundry, run by the Religious Sisters of Charity.

The Laundry in Athy, it was up behind the Catholic Church, where I used to scrub the floors,” she said. By day she worked in the laundry, was fed bread and dripping, and then made Aran sweaters or rosary beads before going to bed at night in St Aidan’s Industrial School. About an hour’s walk from Green Lane is the small village of Bennekerry, where my father’s people were all from, and where my brother still lives in my granny’s cottage, on a bend in the road near the river.

Maureen Sullivan (70) is a strong woman. She has had to be. Probably the youngest person to have been held in a Magdalene laundry in Ireland, she was just 12 when she arrived at the Good Shepherd-run establishment at New Ross, Co Wexford, in 1964. Over the following four years she was transferred to another such laundry in Athy, Co Kildare, and then to a home for the blind on Merrion Road in Dublin. 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”. My mother came once as Athy was close and she managed to get a lift. We talked for a while, very politely. Far from being a threat to the innocence of other children, Sullivan was so ignorant of the basic facts of life that she thought babies came from the hospital. “Even at 12 I thought that my mother went down to the hospital and a nurse gave her a baby.” And her mother went to that hospital many times – 13 to be accurate. Three of those times were before Sullivan’s father died. Her mother was then 19 and pregnant with her. Her mother then married a second time. As with even the best books, of course there were a few things that I didn't like about the writing. Most noticeably the "in those days" comment was extreamly over used. And a lot of the things that preceded that comment are still quiet common. For example, washing powder can still come in cardboard boxes, though electricity is widely available there are those who do not have it, particularly children of abuse, the same with phones. And during my time at school 90's - 00's we also wrapped our school books in wallpaper. I also had times where I had to eat goody (without the sugar) and other times when my sisters and I starved but had to hide it as it was also not considered normal in the 90's and 00's.Maureen said: “When they came out, they had no education, nowhere to turn to and the majority of us went to England. All we wanted to do was run away from the way we had been treated in Ireland.”

Not allowed to speak, barely fed and often going without water, the child was viciously beaten by the nuns for years and hidden away in an underground tunnel when government inspectors came.

The marriage did not work out. “Then I had to bring my daughter up on my own, try and get bits of jobs. It was very, very hard. You always had this past in your mind. You couldn’t say where you were, where your education finished.” 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”. As a young woman, Maureen tried to take her own life. In her 30s, she talked to a counsellor, who helped Maureen immensely and made her realise that she was an innocent child who had been abused and wronged. “I got a sentence for what my stepfather did with me. I did the time. He got away scot-free.” There are people out there who don’t want me to tell my story, people who tell me to ‘get over it’ or push me to stay silent, but I want good to come of it,” Maureen told The Nationalist.