Her grandmother, Angelina Collins, later renamed Angela, endured 27 years of forced labour under the Sisters of Charity.
Despite being recommended for a hysterectomy years before she died, it was never performed, and she continued working while unwell until she eventually died of ovarian cancer.
She was buried in a mass grave owned by the religious order, who, Laura says, still refuse to take responsibility for her death.
Laura's mother, Mary Teresa Collins, is a survivor of the industrial school run by the Sisters of Mercy, where her hair was roughly cut short, she was renamed Number 5, and suffered terrible abuse as a child.
Laura's aunt was placed in the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home before being fostered and later adopted.
Both have lived with the trauma of these institutions, Laura said, while her other aunt, who was placed in the Sunday’s Well Magdalene Laundry at just 14 years old, later took her own life after "carrying the weight of the abuse she endured."
Now, Laura and her mother are fighting to get permission to remove her grandmother’s remains from the mass grave – an act of justice which she says is "long overdue."
She said the council presented terms, and they met all but one: permission from the religious order who owns it. To this day, their pleas for permission remain unanswered.
"My nan, she was put into a Magdalene Laundry for 27 years of her life where, over 10 years before she died, she was recommended a hysterectomy and she was not given this treatment," she said.
"She was left to continue to work until she died of ovarian cancer and was put into a mass grave. So my mum, after being gagged during the Ryan Report (Child Abuse Inquiry), wanted to fight for her mum.
"She wanted to fight for the stuff that she had seen from the age of seven."
‘Brutal abuse’
Laura explained that her mother would visit her grandmother in the Magdalene Laundry.
"Basically, while my nan was in the Magdalene Laundry for five years, she was refusing to sign adoption papers for her youngest daughter, called Bridget.
"It was only when they basically said, ‘Look, we’ve got Mary in the industrial school—if you sign these papers’—because Bridget at the time was being held in a foster placement and they wanted to adopt her—‘you'll get to start having arranged visits from Mary from the industrial school.’
"That's when, from the age of seven, my mum started going into the Magdalene Laundry, where she saw her mum really withdrawn.
"Obviously she has her own experiences from within the industrial school. They were abusing her based on who her mother was, her identity, and where she came from.
"So after experiencing that and going to see your mum like that, she would associate it with pain.
"They would brutally abuse my mum—they’d call her all sorts of names and beat her. Terrible stuff that they inflicted upon children.
"So anyway, my mum went through this process and she was gagged, but she wanted to speak on the Magdalene Laundries, the Mother and Baby Homes, the County Homes."
For too long, Laura said, the religious orders that ran Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes, County Homes, Magdalene Laundries and industrial schools have been allowed to escape accountability.
Last week, a report found only two of eight religious bodies linked to mother and baby homes offered to contribute to a survivor redress scheme.
Five bodies — the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd; the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary; the Sisters of Mercy; the Legion of Mary; and the Church of Ireland — made no offer at all.
The negotiation was part of a bid to secure contributions from religious bodies toward the cost of the Government-established Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme.
Minister for Children Norma Foley expressed disappointment at the approach adopted by the majority of religious bodies to the redress scheme.
Laura detailed how disappointed she and her family were at how the Government responded to the findings of a Commission of Investigation set up in 2015.
The Commission examined homes run by the State and religious organisations where tens of thousands of unmarried women were sent to have their babies.
The Commission found that almost 170,000 women and children passed through the institutions from 1922 until the last one closed in 1998.
The investigation exposed the often harsh conditions and unforgiving regimes many women and children experienced.
Laura said: “When the Magdalene apology came, my mum was sat in the Dáil, and she was heartbroken.
"Absolutely heartbroken, because not only could they exclude acknowledging these women in the mass grave, they also excluded acknowledging circumstances like her being a visitor—the two hands of the mother-and-child abuse that always accompanied each other, especially in her case and many other cases that were present within Magdalene circumstances."
The women buried in these graves—including Laura's grandmother—were excluded from the State’s 2013 apology for the Magdalene Laundries.
In 2013, then Taoiseach Enda Kenny apologised to the women who spent time in the Magdalene Laundries.
At the time, he said: "I, as Taoiseach, on behalf of this State, the Government and our citizens, deeply regret and apologise unreservedly to all those women for the hurt that was done to them, for any stigma they suffered as a result of the time they spent in the Magdalene Laundry."
However, Laura pointed out that no apology was offered for the dead women present in mass graves.
“They excluded the dead women from the apology. My mum, she was heartbroken. She didn't know what to do," she said.
"There was no justice—no justice for her mum. There was no acknowledgement.
"What she ended up doing is she applied to Cork City Council to have her mother's remains exhumed from the mass grave.
"My mum, my family, met every condition—except the permission of the religious order."
To this day, Laura's family have still not received permission from the religious order to exhume her grandmother’s remains from the mass grave.
"There's no justice, and when there's no justice, there really is no peace. Because my mum hasn't got peace."