“As the members of the Catholic organisation wrapped up their speech with an appeal for forgiveness, the auditorium in Madrid exploded in rage. For decades, many in the audience had grappled with the scars left by their time in Catholic-run institutions; now they were on their feet chanting: ‘Truth, justice and reparations’ and – laying bare their rejection of any apology – ‘Neither forget, nor forgive’.
“It was an unprecedented response to an unprecedented moment in Spain, hinting at the deep fissures that linger over one of the longest-running and least-known institutions of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship: the Catholic-run centres that incarcerated thousands of women and girls as young as eight, subjecting them to barbaric punishments, forced labour and religious indoctrination.”
Thus began a report in the Guardian on June 15th, 2025, describing an event organised by Confer, an umbrella organisation for about 400 Spanish Catholic congregations, many of which had run centres for the incarceration of girls and young women, guilty of no crimes, from 1941 to 1985. At their height, under the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, they held 41,000 people. Their patron was Franco’s wife, Carmen Polo.
It was always obvious that Franco’s fascist, profoundly Catholic regime would produce serious abuses of women and children. As elsewhere, it has taken time for the facts to emerge, for brave affected people to recount what happened to them, and for the state to begin to acknowledge the atrocities and crimes visited upon its citizens.
In Ireland, we have carried out investigations into the archipelago of institutions used to contain women and children from the foundation of the State (and in the case of industrial schools and Magdalene asylums, before that). The most obvious correlatives to Spain’s Women’s Protection Board were the Magdalene Laundries, to which girls and women could be sent without any criminal conviction – merely a suspicion that they might be in danger of “falling”.
Louise Brangan, a senior lecturer in social policy at the University of Strathclyde, has written a book dealing with Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries in the 20th century, clearly imbued with admirable empathy for the victims of this pernicious, degrading and illegal system of incarceration, punishment and slave labour. She is highly critical of the devil’s compact between Christ and Caesar, Church and State, collaborating to perpetuate these abuses into the 1990s.
In her introduction, she lays out her objectives: “I wanted to write the history of the Magdalene Laundries from the perspective of the women and girls who had been subjected to it… I was equally curious about the nuns who oversaw the laundries and their journey into the religious life. I wanted to know what it was they thought they were doing with these women, and why this regime seemed not only justified, but necessary.”
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She tells us that she wishes to “comprehend the laundries on their own terms, using archival material, photographs, video footage, blueprints, contemporaneous newspaper coverage, unpublished letters and government reports”. She rightly laments the fact that the records of the religious orders which ran the laundries remain closed, and reveals that “a tiny handful… of former nuns who abandoned their vocations” have made their experiences and views known through “interviews, memoirs and reflective essays”.
She then writes that her main source for this book will be “eyewitness accounts, scores of them. The artist Evelyn Glynn, the Waterford Memories Project and the activist group Justice for Magdalenes conducted their interviews with survivors between 2009 and 2015… Taken together, there is a tranche of roughly 3,000 pages of transcripts…The words and memories and quotes that appear in this book are primarily drawn from those who committed their testimony to these archives. Their names are anonymised.” I will come back to the issue of these sources.
Survivors of Magdalene Laundries and other State institutions touch a monument acknowledging victims that was unveiled in 2022 in Dublin. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times
She chooses six women on whom to focus; Carmel, Nora, Catherine, Brigid, Katie and Eileen. She begins with a short history of post-independence Ireland, where she explores the links between Church and State and the overwhelmingly Catholic miasma that permeated most of society, particularly as regards women and girls. She then moves into some of the individual stories of women and girls who find themselves in one or more of the 10 Magdalene Laundries in Dublin, New Ross, Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Galway.
She describes the now horribly familiar routine treatments – the hair-cutting, provision of ill-fitting uniforms, removal of names, awful and insufficient food, prohibition on friendships, ill-fated attempts to escape, verbal and physical abuse and bone-crushing daily unpaid labour on huge laundry machines. Brangan is very good on the sense of futility and dark resignation that overwhelms so many, as they realise this is how their life will be, likely until they die. An inmate at Sunday’s Well in Cork says: “What really traumatised me [was] to hear that door locking behind you and you were never, never, never to walk out that door again, never.” She captures the unremitting drudgery and profound dullness of daily life, interspersed with many prayers.
And very few visits, also. The last great unexplored institution in Ireland is the family. Many of these women were abandoned by their families, and never sought by them again. Some had been placed in the laundries by family members. “Respectability” was clearly more important than family bonds to some. Other inmates came from industrial schools or orphanages and had no families to speak up for them or rescue them.
But why was it necessary for the nuns who ran these organisations to behave with such cruelty and contempt towards those in their power? Many of the inmates had been victims of familial sexual abuse. Instead of help in prosecuting the fathers or brothers responsible, they were treated like criminals. What a terrible perversion of any kind of basic humanity.
[ We need more than a plaque to mark Ireland’s history of crueltyOpens in new window ]
Brangan has a brilliant chapter, titled “Silence”, on the strategies employed by inmates who got out to prevent anyone knowing about their past. One survivor had never told her husband or children about her time in the laundry, such was the shame and stigma accompanying such revelations. It is enraging to contemplate the vile irony of innocent people, effectively kidnapped into highly oppressive environments and illegally kept there for years, feeling thereafter that they were somehow to blame. Alas, our craven culture encouraged such cruelty.
It is scholarship 101 that you must identify your sources accurately so that readers can read them for themselves and test the accuracy or otherwise of your assertions
This is a well-written, fluent book about a really important subject, based on eyewitness evidence from those who suffered. Brangan has some blind spots: she barely mentions the feminist revolution in Ireland in the 1970s, except for the change in the law on contraception and the removal of the marriage bar. The Report of the Commission on the Status of Women in 1973 is not mentioned, nor, amazingly, the Unmarried Mothers’ Allowance, also introduced in 1973. Ireland didn’t change by magic; the second wave of feminism was a huge catalyst for transformation.
There is a problem, however, with how Brangan treats her sources. Writing about a subject so fraught with difficulty, the reader has a right to expect a comprehensive note on sources and methodology, and a bibliography. What I have quoted above is all we get on sources. It is automatic for anyone reading a book based on primary sources, when they come to a quotation, to turn to the footnotes to see where it came from. There are no footnotes at all for the plethora of oral testimonies used in this book.
If you go to the Justice for Magdalenes Research (JFMR) website, as I recommend you do, you will find their testimonies carefully listed, with information about whether the person is anonymised or not, key organisations mentioned in the interview, and a request that if the interview is used in a publication or broadcast, a citation be given. Each interview has a reference number.
It is scholarship 101 that you must identify your sources accurately so that readers can read them for themselves and test the accuracy or otherwise of your assertions.
One of the “anonymised” names used for a crucial witness in the book is “Catherine”. A quick look at the JFMR website reveals this to be Catherine Whelan, who emigrated to the US some time after her exit from New Ross Laundry in 1953; she is credited by JFMR as “the spark” for their political campaign for a proper investigation into the laundries. Why did she need to be “anonymised” like this? How many of the other women chosen by Brangan wished to be anonymised?
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It is, of course, obvious from reading the testimonies in the JFMR archive that certain interviewees desire to protect their anonymity and that of close relatives and others. This is perfectly in order and allowed for by the system adopted for the project. But if someone gave testimony under their own name, are they not asserting their right to something that was taken from them in these institutions?
Despite these reservations, which I hesitated to air because I believe the book to be extremely worthwhile, Louise Brangan has made a serious contribution to a subject that has still not been laid to rest. Her vivid, fluent, frightening and deeply compassionate account of Ireland’s shameful treatment of these girls and women deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in our past and our future.
Catriona Crowe is a former head of special projects at the National Archives
Further reading
jfmresearch.com/home/oralhistoryproject/transcripts/
This is the oral history page of Justice for Magdalene Research’s heroic undertaking to save as much as they can of the stories of those who were incarcerated in the laundries.
Girl in the Tunnel: My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries: Maureen Sullivan (2023) Maureen Sullivan’s harrowing story of incarceration in New Ross Magdalene Laundry after disclosing her sexual abuse by her horrific stepfather. Unforgettable and essential.
The Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland: Ed. Mark Coen, Katherine O’Donnell and Maeve O’Rourke (2023) An impeccable series of essays on one laundry and its history, making ingenious use of various primary sources in the absence of the records of the laundry itself, still jealously guarded by their clerical custodians.