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

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This was such a hard read and my heart broke at every sentence for this poor little girl who was so badly treated by most of the people in her life. It infuriated me at the number of people who lied, cheated and turned a blind eye to the horrific abuse that was going on around them. No one wanted to upset the catholic church to save this girl from the appalling and gruesome abuse she received from her stepfather and the nuns. There are people out there who don’t want me to tell my story, people who tell me to ‘get over it’ or push me to stay silent, but I want good to come of it,” Maureen told The Nationalist. At twelve, Sullivan finally told a teacher how bad things were at home. The teacher sought help for her in the form of a convent boarding school—and instead Sullivan was sent to the Magdalene Laundries. Kept separate from the other children her age, she was put to work doing laundry, day in and day out, as penance for having been abused.

To get to Granny’s you went through two standing stones that opened the hedgerows and exposed a small two-storey cottage, with rooms in the attic and a huge hearth right in the middle. It was tiny and tumbledown and leaked rain in places, but to me it was a sanctuary from everything that was going on at home. It was a place where everything was warm, where everything was good and I was not hurt or afraid. That’s why it took us six years to write the book, working together and making sure everything was right,” she added. Last summer, she and Independent Dublin City Councillor Mannix Flynn were central to unveiling the Journey Stone at the Little Museum of Dublin on St Stephen’s Green to honour “the great courage, integrity and dignity of the women” who had been in the laundries.When Maureen Sullivan was just twelve years old, she confided in her teacher that she was being physically and sexually abused by her stepfather. Never, in her darkest imaginings, could she have dreamt that she would be the one who would face a harrowing punishment. 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. Bishop Nulty here in Carlow, I like him, he’s a fair and honest man, and he told me it was wrong,” she said. Maureen was moved to The Magdeline Laundry in New Ross when she was twelve after she confessed to a nun that her stepfather had been abusing her physically and sexually. I then took it up that when the nuns hid her in the tunnel it was for her safety ie to keep her away form her stepfather. Another misconception.

The nun continued: “They believed you could corrupt the innocence... of the other children,” she said, “if you mixed with them.” Sullivan interjected: “Sister, are you telling me they put me into the laundry and... all of it... because they thought I would tell the other children about what my stepfather done to me?” The nun continued: “It was wrong,” she said, nodding, “but yes, that’s what they did.” 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.

When Maureen was just 12 years’ old, she confided in her teacher in a Carlow town school that she was being physically and sexually abused by her stepfather. Never in her darkest imaginings could she have dreamt that she would be the one who would face a 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 Maureen Sullivan was 12 years old when she was taken from her school in Carlow to the Magdalene laundry in New Ross, in the mid-1960s. She was incarcerated because she told an allegedly sympathetic nun at her school that she had been physically and sexually abused by her stepfather for years. Nothing happened to the stepfather; her mother appeared powerless to prevent her removal. She was effectively punished for the crimes of her guardian and the compliance of her mother. 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.

Granny told us that my father was out riding one day and got caught in the rain. A few days later he fell gravely ill. He died three days after that. That’s how the story was told to me anyway. I feel really sad, a truly great and deep sorrow, when I think about my young mother at his bedside, with him slipping away so fast, and then at his graveside with a toddler, a baby in her arms and another on the way. 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. Far from being a threat to the innocence of other children, Sullivan was so ignorant of the basic facts of life that she thought babies came from the hospital. “Even at 12 I thought that my mother went down to the hospital and a nurse gave her a baby.” And her mother went to that hospital many times – 13 to be accurate. Three of those times were before Sullivan’s father died. Her mother was then 19 and pregnant with her. Her mother then married a second time.

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But people have been so good, and I think there is strength in speaking out. I want to help others; I want to end sexual abuse and help people,” said Maureen. The descriptions of the nuns are perhaps telling. Obviously I do not sympathise for a second with the choice to effect such terrible and ongoing punishment on an abused child, but Sullivan also makes a point about the nuns having in many ways dreadful lives of their own—more comfortable than the life they afforded Sullivan in the Laundries, certainly, but not happy ones. Not happy creatures. Sullivan does not sympathise, exactly (how could she, when neither did they?), but it's a fascinating perspective.