The story of the Magdalene laundries has been told again and again but remains mired in the same old myths and misunderstandings.
In her new book, academic Louise Brangan explores what really happened in these institutions – and the forgotten women who lived out their lives behind their walls
Nothing Brigid was 12 when she was removed from her west of Ireland home in the 1940s. She was told she was being taken away because she had been skipping school.
In truth, her casual approach to class attendance was never the real reason she was cast out of society.
Brigid had been born outside of marriage – she was illegitimate. Illegitimacy is an ugly word, but it was a legal category assigned at birth until 1988 in Ireland.
For much of the 20th century, the Government counted the number of illegitimate babies and tracked their year-on-year growth or decline.
They scrutinised these figures in comparison with other countries, particularly Britain, which was engaged in the same dismal demography.
The size of Ireland’s illegitimate population was lamented by the Government like an ill-gotten underclass.
By the time Brigid was born, illegitimacy was a permanent social anxiety.
Tens of thousands of children in similar positions found themselves detained and debased in one of Ireland’s 50 industrial schools.
Brigid was spared this fate as her grandmother had taken her in.
Then, their local priest heard of the truancy. He took it as evidence that Brigid was, like many illegitimate girls, “morally defective”.
She was marked with the damming label: “pre-delinquent”.
The priest persuaded her grandmother that he should immediately bring Brigid to St Mary’s, the local Magdalene convent in Limerick.
That evening, Brigid was received by the nuns.
They took her clothes and cut her hair.
They changed her name.
She was no longer Brigid.
From that moment on, she was known only as Peter.
Then she was put to work: she washed, she scrubbed, she spun, and she pressed. There in the laundry, priests and prisoners had their uniforms and vestments treated alike.
The crisp linens of hotels, restaurants and family dining rooms passed through the hands of these women and girls.
In this way, the laundry did not discriminate. Brigid worked from morning till evening, Monday to Saturday.
She was forced to maintain a strict rule of silence: no talking, no making friends. The only noise that would perforate the quiet was the relentless thrum of prayers.
A nun was always with the women and girls, reading out litanies, rosaries, and stations of the cross like an incessant incantation, to which they would make only the required curt collective responses.
At the Limerick laundry, there were 180 other women and girls. Across Ireland, another 1,000 women were being held in one of nine other Magdalene laundries at this time.
All of them, like Brigid, had lost their hair, their name, their voice.
They had no time to think. But what most tortured those confined in Magdalene laundries was that this was potentially indefinite incarceration.
There was a chance they would die there, anonymous, buried on the grounds, in an unmarked or mass grave.
For Brigid, having played fast and loose with school rules aged 12, this was a life sentence. Adult men found guilty of murder in the same period could expect to serve no more than seven years, and even that was a rarity.
Somehow, by the 1940s, the mildest transgressions of Ireland’s girls and women caused more outrage than the taking of a life.
How could this happen? And why? I am certainly not the first to have been plagued by these questions and to have felt haunted by this history.
The story of the Magdalene laundries has been told again and again.
Yet here I was, traipsing around Ireland trying to write a book about them, because something felt unresolved.
As I continued researching, reading archives, meeting people who remembered and had experienced the laundries, what I came to discover was that, while we now know of the Magdalene laundries, it is often through fable and soundbite.
The laundries were always slightly enigmatic, not least because they didn’t have a single defining term or name. They were called homes, penitentiaries, asylums, refuges.
And what went on there was spoken about in taut euphemisms – charity, redemption, salvation.
That the laundries have now become such a lively source for cultural output – podcasts, movies, books, YouTube sleuths, theatre shows, art installations,
TikTok historians, and novels – suggests that we have cleared the silence that once engulfed the laundries.
Yet, I found myself confronted by an emerging paradox. The more we spoke about the laundries, the more mired they became in the same old myths and misunderstandings.
In reckoning with this, I found that while lives like Brigid’s were callously discarded in the past, they also risked being discounted in the present in the way we speak about the history of the laundries today.
In 2024, Small Things Like These was released in cinemas, adapted from Claire Keegan’s bestselling novella of the same name.
The story follows one man living in New Ross who finds himself troubled by the affairs of the local laundry.
The film, like the book, is set in 1985, though the New Ross Magdalene laundry had in fact closed almost 20 years prior, in 1967, and by the 1980s, the remaining laundries were no longer the busy places they had once been.
Across that decade, only 147 women and girls entered the laundries, mostly on remand from the courts.
A small number compared to the staggering 7,039 women admitted to the laundries between the 1920s and 1940s.
Of course, we can justify this as artistic licence, until the film ends (which is where it departs from the book). The screen goes black. Now the audience is given the stark smack of historical reality. But we are given the wrong information.
The film is “Dedicated to the more than 56,000 young women who were sent to the Magdalene laundries... And the children who were taken from them”.
The filmmakers didn’t make this figure up. This was the headline figure from an official state investigation into another dimension of 20-century Irish ignominy – but not the Magdalene laundries.
That was the figure for mother and baby homes, which had held 56,000 women and girls across the 20th century.
Upon seeing that misplaced fact projected on a big screen in a packed cinema, hearing the soft cacophony of tuts and gasps as people read it, I felt my mind listing, as if I had vertigo. It was not the first time I had felt this.
In the process of researching and writing my book on the Magdalene laundries, when I told people of my undertaking, I was surprised to find that many I spoke to repeated the same vehement mantra: it was awful what the Church and State did to those women and their babies.
My interlocutors wanted to state their allegiance to the common sense of the present and establish their revulsion at the perpetrators of this terrible history.
The conflation of mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries is so widespread that it is now cited as historical fact.
But no babies were born in Magdalene laundries.
Pregnant women were not permitted in the Laundries either.
I, too, began with this vague assumption, that this was a ghoulish prison for women and girls who had become pregnant outside of marriage.
It quickly became clear that Mother and Baby Homes and Laundries were distinct institutions with very different functions.
Girls as young as nine, and women as old as 89, were admitted into the laundries. Some were children in need, as they were abused and abandoned daughters.
Or their families were pulled apart for not fitting the mould of what a family should be.
Many were considered unruly girls, whose incarceration was warranted, according to one priest in 1933, because they were “giddy” and “undisciplined”.
Having spent years reading thousands of pages of testimony from women who survived the Laundries, what left me the most unsettled was to see that the majority were just like Brigid.
They very rarely did anything recognisably deviant, and they certainly did not need to do anything so egregious as become pregnant to be detained at a Magdalene Laundry.
The Laundries were more like a mausoleum. Places to bury all that might shame, or simply burden families, communities, and the country alike.
So, social workers, the courts, priests, missionaries, mothers and father sent women and girls to the Laundries, and then they sent their washing in after them.
This line about pregnant women was certainly the gossip of the day, the scurrilous innuendo that swirled through Irish towns and communities about who was in the laundry and why.
In reality, if they were indeed the fallen, it was only because, for much of the 20th century, the meaning of “fallen woman” had become capacious.
Yet this original derogatory rumour is still fully functioning today: that the laundries were for the most vilified cases of illegitimate pregnancies.
Survivors of the laundries have said how upsetting it is to be persistently misrepresented.
We seem to be as confused now as we were back then.
But why?
Especially when we are meant to be in a period of post-recovery, post-redress, when everything is out in the open.
This revealed the strange terrain that I was on.
I was writing a history that was supposedly hidden, but apparently now known, though most predominantly through powerful misconception: Women and babies, pregnant girls, illegitimate births, untrammelled collusion between Church and State.
I was not writing to reveal a past, but writing in the wake of it being exposed, with everyone feeling quite settled that they knew what had happened, why it was wrong and, importantly, who was to blame.
I had arrived too late, some people told me. Several described the way the Irish now felt about the topic using the same dismaying term: They had “laundry fatigue”; people got it. Perhaps they had already had enough.
Even those with an explicit mandate to clear the murk from this history have only deepened the confusion.
The Government published the McAleese Report in 2013. Across its 1,000-plus pages are statistics plotted on graphs and bar charts, intended to “establish the facts” of the Magdalene laundries: there were 14,607 admissions to 10 laundries; 879 women died there; the average length of stay was 27 weeks.
The findings of the report have been widely disputed because the figures seem to have been so
‘The conflation of mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries is so widespread that it is now cited as historical fact. But no babies were born in the laundries’
cautiously calculated that they severely minimised the scale of what happened. As one newspaper marvelled of the McAleese Report, the laundries were “more benign… than may be popularly believed”.
It is possible to fight the bad mathematics of the report with more sophisticated arithmetic. Yet, to some degree, that repeats the problem, to think that the horrors of this history can be effectively enumerated, set out in neat categories and grids.
The issue with the McAleese Report was not simply the final calculations (though those are certainly a matter of considerable concern).
It was that no one seemed to question if human suffering on a mass scale is reducible to something as flat, static, and final as metrics, especially, as I came to realise, when that history is still ongoing.
Because here is another problematic fact: 1996 is when Ireland closed the last of its Magdalene laundries. I have used that line many times when speaking about the laundries.
It sucks all the oxygen out of the room when you say it, because what else is there to add?
1996 was also when the Spice Girls were on MTV parading girl power, a woman was president of Ireland, the Berlin Wall had been toppled, a New World Order was in ascendance.
It’s tempting to redeploy that line here too. To reiterate that everything about the laundries, the washing, the erasure, the containment, had ended, finally, in 1996.
But I have come to see it as a killer statistic, the big number that grabs attention and wins the argument.
But at what cost? The convent laundry businesses had shuttered, that is correct.
The problem with this fact is that it implies something that isn’t true: the Magdalene laundries completely ended.
In counting the average duration of stay at Magdalene laundries, that meagre 27 weeks, the committee followed the convention and employed 1996 as their end date.
So, they did not include the women who were still there after 1996 – women like Brigid.
What had happened to Brigid was a mystery to me for a long time.
But finally I found someone who knew her, who would be able to tell me at last, what was her route out.
Like hundreds of other women, when the laundries closed, Brigid’s institutionalisation did not come to an end. She stayed living in the convent with the nuns
So, in 2012, when Martin McAleese and his team wanted to speak to women who were still, as the report described, “under the care of the Religious Orders”, Brigid was among them.
From what has been relayed to me about that meeting, the women felt cowed by the alien officiousness of the occasion.
Having lived lives of silent isolation, they were assembled into a focus group and asked questions such as: had they “ever suffered physical or corporal punishment?”
Maybe they were so strictly bound to their survey questions that McAleese and his officials didn’t manage to hear the story of Brigid’s life: that she had been brought to the laundry as a 12-year-old girl.
But they could see that she was still there and that she would likely die there.
Women are still dying there. As late as November 2024, I found death notices for women whose addresses were given as former Magdalene laundries.
This was how I found Brigid’s death notice. Her address too was given as the former convent Laundry in Limerick.
At least one in 10 of the women that were sent to the Laundries ended their days there, behind those convent walls. Brigid died in 2016, over 70 years after being sent to the Laundry.
The history of the laundry seems quantifiable.
Laundries processed over 1,000 garments a week, between the hankies and the tablecloths. Sentences were served in days, weeks, months, years, lifetimes.
Thousands of women and girls. But how do you calculate a life not lived? How do we begin to remember a history like that, when it has not yet come to a conclusive end?
I had been wondering about this at a work dinner. I was sitting beside an Irish legal academic who, upon hearing of my research, said that he was very impressed with the volume of public discussion about the laundries over recent years.
He told our fellow diners just how well-covered and exposed the history now was.
What was it worth, I said, if the facts of the laundries remained obscured?
And if it is largely the false rumour that we have recovered – that the laundries were for cases of pregnancy outside marriage?
I worried that the successor of collective silence might be collective forgetting.
His reply was instant. “Who cares about the details as long as we know it was wrong?”
Dismissive as his response was intended to be, I was envious of the astute concision of this line.
It struck me as a perfect distillation of the problem of Magdalene laundry history in general.
Facts, and sometimes truth itself, can be discarded when we are mired in the need to settle scores and to judge the wrongdoers.
My book, The Fallen, is not concerned with anything nearly as tidy and definitive as blame. I sense we have gotten as far as we can with that line of historical interrogation.
Anyway, the generations that have followed are not to blame for the laundries.
But we are entirely responsible for how they are remembered.
How to make amends for the laundries is contested, fraught and, necessarily, ongoing.
But remembering is also a source of reparation.
Writing history is, I hope, one way to remember. It makes us capable of seeing that which might otherwise have gone overlooked.
Nothing can undo the past or bring the dead back to life, but we can acknowledge that they lived.
So, my book is the story of the Magdalene laundries, of what actually happened and why, told through the voices of the women who were there, the nuns who presided over these institutions, and the communities who lived alongside them.
It is an act of recovery, to save the truth from being lost.
‘The Fallen: Magdalene Laundries and Ireland’s Legacy of Silence’ by Dr Louise Brangan is published by Penguin Random House
