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

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Cover of Girl in the Tunnel: My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries, by Maureen Sullivan. 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. Girl in the tunnel was co-written by Liosa McNamara. For both women, recounting Maureen’s childhood was a difficult and incredibly painfully process. Sincere and compelling, Maureen Sullivan's story (co-written with Liosa McNamara) of her incarceration in three of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries is an important addition to the bibliography of books on the subject. 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.

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 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. We all slept in beds together. In Green Lane there were two rooms, with two double beds in each one. My mother and Marty were in the front room in a bed with a baby, across from a bed with the youngest ones. In the other room there was me, my brothers and the others. We didn’t have duvets or even blankets most of the time. It was coats on top of us and we would sleep close for the heat of each other to get through the night. I was given the never-ending job of pressing the starched clothes. Starch isn’t common these days, but it was normal then to mix starch powder with water to form a loose jelly that you would dip clothes into, then wring the mixture out and hang them up to dry. Just before they were fully dry you would press them, almost to set the starch into the cloth. Bishop Nulty here in Carlow, I like him, he’s a fair and honest man, and he told me it was wrong,” she said.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.

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 Laundry in Athy, it was up behind the Catholic Church, where I used to scrub the floors,” she said.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 Bestselling author Cathy Kelly is returning to HarperFiction in a three-book deal, negotiated by Lynne Drew, publisher, general fiction, with Jonathan Lloyd at Curtis Brown, for UK and Commonwealth rights. 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. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)