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

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Maureen spent two years in New Ross and a further year in the House of Mercy laundry in Athy, and then two years at St Mary’s School for the Blind in Dublin. After leaving St Mary’s, she soon moved to England, but this was not the end of her hardship. 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. Sullivan grew up poor in Ireland when growing up poor in Ireland meant owning only one or two outfits, sleeping piled up with your siblings in one bed because the house was too cold to do otherwise, and going without food because there wasn't enough to go around. Her father died young, and her mother remarried—and the only person whom the marriage benefitted was the new husband.

I spoke to a person about it recently, and she said ‘well, Maureen, there’s a lot more crime nowadays’, and I said I’d prefer a little more crime than knowing about little children getting abused behind high walls,” she said. Nobody ever spoke about my father except Granny, who told me he was a kind and gentle person. Is it possible to miss something you never had? It feels like it. Even now, the child that’s left in me calls out for her father in the dark and cries when he doesn’t come. If my father hadn’t gone out that day, and hadn’t caught a chill that led to such a serious illness that he didn’t survive, I would have had a childhood where my parents’ love for one another surrounded me and my brothers too. I think often about fate and how the event of his death changed the path of my whole life, even before I was born. When I was on the way, safe in my mother’s womb, I was a child of a loving marriage, with two parents planning a future for me, one of happiness and warmth. 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. I changed most of the names in the book – my abuser, relatives, locals and the nuns, because I’m not out to hurt or for revenge. I wrote this book because I was silenced as a child when I was a victim of abuse, and I was silenced by society when I left the laundry. I want people to know what happened. This is my history, but it is also the history of this country,” said Maureen. 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.Instead, I was born into a life where my family was displaced, where my father was dead and unable to protect me, where I was placed in the care of monsters and stolen away to be neglected, abused and abandoned to evil. 1 MARTY 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.”

It was difficult for me to avoid the steam as I held the corners of the clothes to get the right fold without making dents in the fabric. Marks were not tolerated. Inside I really grieve for what I never had. I grieve for the man in the photograph, the smiling, curly-headed young man who I have spent my life longing for. I grieve for the happy home he had with my mother, the love and laughter that was there, and the childhood I lost when he died. I think of what my life would have been, if only John L. Sullivan had never taken his horse out on a cold, wet day.

There was also the un-faminist remark that "women in those days were fit from walking and from work" It is perhaps the only anti-feminist comment Sullivan makes in the book. However as someone who walks most places and never learned to drive (because there was no one there to teach me, my poor disabled body has suffered due to this) it was a little upsetting to read that. 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 Like most people in those days, we had an outhouse with our cottage, just your basic privy with no flush. Scraps of paper hung on a nail, which was also the norm in Irish houses at the time, that we had cut up from newspapers we found around the town. We could never have bought one. We barely had enough money to live.

Most of the good moments in the book are when Sullivan is with her grandmother. I felt that too, how her grandmother was so kind and loving and caring. Though there was a situation where she planted Sullivan in a very perspicacious position. Where in, if Sullivan had been caught she would surly have paid with more than money. And that I felt made the granny more like the rest of Sullivan's family than I care to admit. Before I was two my mother married that lame pig jobber from Green Lane in Carlow town called Marty Murphy. He is, I suppose, the only father I ever knew. He hurt me the day I was carried into his house, with a hard slap to my legs, and he hurts me still today, though he has been dead for years. The mental, physical and sexual torture I suffered in my childhood, that can never be erased or settled. I live with it. When Maureen was just 12 years old, she confided in a teacher that she was being physically and sexually abused by her stepfather, but never, in her darkest imaginings, could she have dreamt that she would be the one who would face harrowing punishment.

Mark Coen, co-editor of a book on the Donnybrook Magdalene laundry, holding copies of a ledger from the laundry from the 1980s. Photograph: Alan Betson