After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Magdalene Laundries: Ireland's Dark Secret

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

The Magdalene Laundries existed throughout Ireland up until the late 20th century. Women and young girls were sent to these institutions that were run by orders of nuns. They were told they could not leave, and were forced to work - all because they were perceived to be ‘fallen’ and in need of salvation, fixing. It is a truly dark and complex history we are only now beginning to really peel back the layers on.To guide us today we have Dr. Louise Brangan of the LSE on the show. Her newest work is titled “The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence.”This episode was edited by Anna Brant. Produced by Tomos Delargy and McKenna Fernandez. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.UK listeners: voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJaSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello After Dark listeners. It is I, Anthony Delaney, one of your co-hosts from, of course, After Dark. Now listen, we have some good news. We have been shortlisted for the top 20 in the Listeners Choice Award category for this year's British Podcast Awards. Now, we made the top, I think it was five last year. So we are greedy historians and we want to make that top five again. This year, things are slightly different though. You can only vote for us in this long list in the Spotify app. And you'll find a link in this week's episode that'll take you to vote for us. As a matter of fact, you can vote for us three times. So if you feel so inclined, please do that. We want to make that top five. We're going to smash it this year. I think we're going to take it, he said, with absolutely no confidence. But lend us your vote and we'll see how well we get on. Heading for the top five, I know we can do it. The Magdalene Laundries were institutions that existed throughout Ireland up until the late 20th century. Fallen women and girls were sent. to these facilities run by orders of nuns, unable to leave and forced into unpaid labor,

all because they were perceived to be in need of salvation. Bridget was just 12 years old when she was condemned to a life within a God-forsaken washhouse. She used to come every night to an open window to listen to dogs bark outside. These dogs had what she wanted. Freedom. Bridget lived her whole life imprisoned inside the laundry Her every minute policed by nuns who forced her to work While scolding her as if she was a sinner Eventually she would die there

How and why was this allowed to happen What on earth was going on inside Ireland's Magdalene Laundries Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Maddie And I'm Anthony And in this episode we're going to be discussing the dark history of the Magdalene Laundries that existed through our island up until the late 20th century. Now, women and young girls were sent to these laundries, and they were forced to work. They were told they couldn't leave, and they were overseen by orders of nuns.

They were perceived to be fallen and in need of being fixed. It's a truly dark and complex history and one that we're only now starting to peel the layers back on. To guide us through this history, we have the one and only doctor, in fact, Louise Brangen. I read this book a few months ago now and I was, I put it out on social media saying, I need to have Louise on the podcast. Please somebody put me in contact and the internet did its thing and here we are. Louise is from the London School of Economics and her newest work is what we're going to be talking about today. The Fallen, the Lost Girls of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and a legacy of silence.

Louise, welcome to after dark. Hi, thanks for having me. It's so exciting because this. This is a difficult history, right, for various and many reasons. And we'll come to some of those difficulties. But the way in which a lot of people outside of Ireland might not even know what a magdalen laundry is, don't worry, we'll get into that. But even in Ireland, I, as a historian, went in thinking that a magdalen laundry was a certain

thing. And when reading your book, I was like, wait, it's nothing got to do with mother and baby homes. I thought it was maybe like some kind of symbiote. And then you do point out to the book that there's a little bit of relationship here and there but anyway, I'm getting too much into too much detail. But to help people who might not know Louise, what is a Magdalene Laundrie not?

It is not or was not a mother and baby home. And a mother and baby home is exactly what you think it was. It was places for women who became pregnant outside of marriage and wanting to keep the illegitimate, as it was always called. And legally, if you had a baby outside of marriage, it was categorized as illegitimate. You would go to these sort of clandestine, houses, convents run by Catholic orders of nuns, but also there were Protestant ones and there

are also other types of institutions as well where you'd have your baby and then that baby will be given away and then you would, this is ostensibly the plan, you would return to your normal life with your sort of private shame but with your personal public standing intact. I also thought a Magdal Laundra was something to do with this sort of clandestine scheme, the subterfuge system of illegitimate pregnancy. But what I came to realise very quickly was the Magdal Laundries were something else entirely. And when I was starting to write the book,

I was dealing with this huge, several thousand pages of Magdal Laundrie survivor testimony. And every time I was reading, I kept writing my notes, was not pregnant. Was not pregnant. Was not pregnant. I mean, girls as young as nine,

and women as old as 89 were recorded as being received into the Magdal Laundries. And so even when I was writing, the book, I remember speaking to my agent saying this is I'm going to say in the introduction. They're not Magdal Laundries

and he said to me oh you don't need to go all about the houses about what they're just say what they are and you can't because this deep misconception about them has embedded itself

in the collective consciousness and so as much as I'm speaking in the book about history about what they were I'm also sort of tackling with collective memory and why we have sort of failed or not yet

sort of understood what these institutions were. So Louise, in broad terms then, and we will get into the nuance of this, and as you say, it's a really kind of woolly and slightly blurred subject, really, in terms of the requirements for entry or the sort of circumstances in which women would be coming into the Magdalene laundries, what were those reasons? Are they myriad and complex? Is there something sort of common that threads them altogether?

Yeah, so myriad and complex is exactly the way I'd put it. It was for any type of girl or woman who fell outside the ideal Catholic image of a woman. So every single woman, yeah, because the ideal Catholic image of a woman was herself, the Virgin Mary, who, you know, and when you think about the Virgin Mary in the Bible, she has no classic lines, she does nothing, she tends to her now. She has no classic lines. Can we just some Mary's involvement in the Bible up by that? By the way, we recently got a comment saying, I need to stop blaspheming on this podcast. I have a feeling this episode might not be for you. The next one will probably be where you take. Commit yourself to that.

But that's amazing. And so it was for girls who were considered too lively. You know, in the survivor testimony, one woman who was sent to a magdala laundry was puzzling why she'd been sent. And that's important. None of them were ever really told why they were being sent. They were being arraigned for something. but this whole air of mystery hung over it. So it would be that their father would bring them

and say hop in the back of the bike there, you're going to go somewhere for a better education. It would be the priest saying, you've been skipping school, let me bring you to somewhere where you'll get about education. The nun's saying, we've arranged a new job for you, hop in the back of this taxi.

But no one is ever told, and then they arrive, and I'm sure we'll get into what happens inside, but they arrive with this real sense of bewilderment. And so they spent days and weeks trying to figure out what they've done, sometimes lifetimes, and this one woman,

And when she was recalling being sent to the magden laundry, she said the only thing I can think that I was guilty of was I just loved life. I loved enjoying myself. And all that meant she was doing was she had a boyfriend. They liked going out. Sometimes she stayed out a bit late. Who knows what could have been happening.

You know, so that's it. There's kind of very things that we think are very average now. One woman in the book, well, woman now or was a woman girl, when she was 12, she'd been born outside of marriage. And that's important. And we keep thinking of the Magdal Laundries as mother and baby homes. But in fact, it's often a place where the illegitimate daughters were sent. So she had been born inside of marriage.

Her mother went off to work as a domestic servant summer in one of these grand, big houses. Her grandmother was raising her. She gets the age of 12. She's kind of skipping school, kind of inconsequential. She's going to be leaving school at the age of 13 anyway because it's the 1940s. So there's no secondary school education, you know, instilled as an expectation. but the priest hears that she is skipping school and he arrives at the grandmother's house

because he sees this as a sign of the malaise that is to come of like the deep sort of immoral delinquency that rests inside her because she had been born outside of marriage and convinces her grandmother you've just got to let me take her away somewhere let me, this is the only way to deal with it and he brings her down the road

to the Magdal Laundry that was in Limerick City another girl in the book she'd been raised in an industrial school and really rather than the relationship between being between Magdal Laundries and Mother and Baby Homs. It's really between industrial schools and Magdalal Laundries.

This girl is 16. She's time for her to leave the industrial school. Off she goes, the nuns send her off to be a domestic servant somewhere. She didn't like it. The house where she was a domestic servant

didn't have a toilet. She was like at least in the industrial school we had a toilet. She returns to the nuns and says like, no, you got to get me a better job, but somewhere like with better conditions. Fine, they send her to another place.

Too far away, didn't like it, comes back and says, oh, I don't like. Could you send me somewhere else to better conditions? And it was almost like three strikes you're out. So the nun said, you know what? Stay here for a week and we'll figure it out. And she's back in the industrial school, but living in a separate room, helping out a bit,

going down to the town in the summer. She said she went to the fun fair. I was having a fine time. And then one day her bag was packed for her. It was already in the parlor. And they said, we have somewhere for you to go now. She hops in the back of the car and they drive her to the Magdain Laundrie. But again, she was never told her she's going.

And when she arrived, one of the things about the Magdal Laundries, is we always think of these sort of soft pleading faces of young mothers. They were mostly filled with elderly women because, you know, women, there was no end date. It was a sentence, but to be served over a lifetime often. When she arrived, she could see all of these elderly women and like everyone else who had arrived before her

began to think, why the hell am I here? I don't know why I'm here. I hadn't done anything wrong. And she thought, like basically thought it was as an old folks home. And she initially thought she'd been there to help these women. There are two things that are striking me, Louise. We're going to get into more of the details in a minute, but just from the sort of top of this episode,

that what is remarkable is that these women of all different ages and contexts are just being removed from their life. They're missing, essentially, and nobody seems to bat an eyelid. But also, you know, you spoke about the mother and baby homes being a distinct thing at the beginning, and that there's this idea of shame. You know why you're in there. The reason is undeniable.

And that you then go back to your life, as you say, with this private shame, even if your public standing is maintained, that you have to live with and you're, you know, that's how it is understood whether people actually felt that or not, you know, so it's another question. But in this context, in the laundries, people don't often know why they're in there. And so it strikes me that actually their function is not so much to punish these women who are transcending and the rules of society, but actually that it's just for the convenience of a sort of patriarchal society outside that. And these women themselves just don't really understand what the issue is. It's remarkable, really. I've said before I think a way to think about them is to think about them as Ireland's disappeared.

They've been disavowed. And, you know, one of the ways I came into this topic, there are several longer routes in. But one of them was because when I was very small, my nana was minding me. And she was like a west of Ireland woman. And she said, you know, when I was growing up, he used to know when a girl got into trouble. but that was not the way she said it was nothing to do with pregnancy it was like she had done something rowdy

or lively she would disappear one day and no one ever spoke about her again Wow and I just remember thinking And that was accepted in normal Yeah and then she just I can see her

She turned her back and walked off back into the kitchen I was like she'd already said what she needed to say but that really frightened me because it was first of all where did they go but also just the idea

that no one spoke about them again and so some of the Magdal Laundrie survivors have likened the laundries to the gulags or to, you know, Auschwitz. And, you know, you don't want to overdraw those comparisons because these things, every atrocity is distinct in its own way.

But I think there's something about the element of just disappearance and eradication there. So even in a magdalene laundry, you know, what's one of the 10 commandant is, they shall not kill. So they're not going to eradicate them physically. But they can make it to be, and create a silence. That was as if these women never existed at all, while they're actually behind closed walls and their family aren't speaking about them

and they have no way to communicate to anyone. One of the things as an Irish person reading your book and so I don't thank you for this, but I do as well because I think we need to face up to this and we need to be more mature in our understanding of our own history is we're very good at giving out about the 800 years as we always go on about of British colonial rule

and of course there was some atrocious things that happened throughout that span of time. Your book made me realize we should be so flippin' angry at ourselves for what occurred afterwards that we are in many ways the product of complicity around this. But just so people outside of Ireland might have a little bit of context about this time in Ireland. Give us the time span that we're talking about where the laundries are most prevalent. And how religious is this society? Okay, so the laundries span from the 18th century up until 1996.

That's interesting about the 800 years because we do love, we do love to talk about that. And I think in some ways the way we talk about Magdon Laundries has a similar kind of definitive air of blame about it. So then the Brits left. That was great. Then 1921, Ireland's independent. And then bang. Church and state. That like handing glove, oppressive atmosphere.

But actually what I found was I kept thinking, well, what does that actually mean? So how do they actually take over? So in the archives, what I found was the 1920s was a much more fraught time in Ireland. It was the jazz age. There was cinema. There was new music. There was new fashions. And also independence.

And also the majority of the country were under 30. Like some part of me just thinks, God, that might have been a bit of crack. Yeah. You know a society that's sort of putting itself together. But across Western Europe, people, all countries, conservatives, governing classes, were concerned about the sort of influx of this new modernist culture.

And Ireland was no different, but what was happening in Ireland as well was also extreme poverty, like really extreme poverty. And you have people in the middle of the 1920s saying, we are on the cusp of a famine. We're about to go into 1847 again, which you know is like Black 47,

the worst year of the famine. So that was the fear people were living with. Their children were emigrating en masse. There were no jobs. There was no social welfare. And the people in power were centrist, right, conservative, uninspiring. And so people are looking for answers in that time. And the church had always existed and always exerted power.

It's not to say that they grew in power in that time. But when Ireland was so weak, in the middle of the 1920s, the bishops started issuing statements like purity is strength. So it's not economics. It's not the global order. it's not that maybe Britain should have paid some sort of reparation to Ireland or whatever. And so in that time, the religious ideas take on a kind of almost, I would say, like a fanatical, you know, they're at the edge of society. And a friend of mine who's a historian said, well, you're being too judgmental calling them fanatical.

But no, I took that word from the archives. There are government letters saying, God, these are fanatical right wingers. These are, you know, they're so overzealous. They'll have us all marked with the scarlet letter and such like. So they thought they were mad. And then suddenly, by the 1930s, that kind of view, those kinds of views, that kind of feeling really takes over in popular culture. And then a new political party is voted in. And you have then a sort of raft of legislation in 1935 won a piece of legislation that says any sort of act that causes moral injury to the community is prosecutable.

That's like dangerously vague. And you have the rewriting of the constitution at the end. end of that period that women's places in the home. So slowly you get these Catholic ideas getting inputted into the legislation. But what happened in Ireland became so effective and went on for so long because that system had been bought into by and was supported by a general public who had been seeking some sort of answer, some sort of stability, some sort of sense of national renewal. And purity became that idea, Catholic purity. But the problem with purity is you You know, you can't say, oh, we're very pure and we're very good.

If you have pregnant girls outside of marriage sort of going around and you've girls in flapper skirts. You know, and they wrote one bishop said, Ireland's become overrun. I have to get this because it's such a great line. Jazz dancing, lip sticking, fag smoking flappers. Fantastic. Oh, my gosh. Louise, within that context then, tell me a little bit about the cult of Mary because there's no coincidence that these are called the Magdalene Laundries, right? And that idea of purity in the Virgin Mary.

How important is that idea of womanhood and idealism within this context? I came across stuff during the time where apparently in Rome they were concerned that Ireland liked and was more adoring of the Virgin Mary that Jesus had been reduced to this like second tier God, second tier Messiah in his own religion. We seem to, like she's kind of the quintessential Irish mammy. Like they just love her. And that's what in 19. The book opens in 1954 with the disappearance. of one young girl called Eileen who had been,

she had also been born outside of marriage, she had ran away to Dublin, you know, and the odds are against this girl in every conceivable way. She's 14, she has no family,

she runs away to Dublin, and then finds her feet in the big city, she gets a job in a B&B. And while she said these two women approach her... I hate this one so much. This one infuriates me.

Well, I'll tell it and then we'll discuss it because... Go on, yeah. So she is working at B&B and two women approach her come in off the street and they weren't customers but she does the usual can I help you

and they say to her we can take you somewhere nicer we can take you somewhere better to work and she says I have been raised in the strict Catholic way we don't say no to people particularly if they have an air of authority these were just two bland

middle class women they say come with us now she says yes and she walks out into the car with them and they drive her across Dublin and they bring her to Magdal Laundrie and she still is just standing there in obedience silence and then they turn to leave when she's in the convent with the nun

still saying nothing and then they look at her just before they leave the door and say, we're putting you in here for your own safety. I have all sorts of theories about how they came to identify her

but they were part of a group it turns out called the Legion of Mary and that is known because the nuns wrote a letter saying the Legion of Mary sent you here and I've seen that

so that's, we know that and they had started in 1921, the Legion of Mary by a guy called Frank Duff, and this was a group who were committed to the veneration of Mary and everything that she did. And what that meant was, they would say things like from their meetings, we can get beyond the priest. The priest is on the pulpit, but we're in the community.

We can be in the sports club, the pub, convincing people to behave with more religious decorum. But also that would meant they would just sort of sidel up alongside people on the street and say, you know, they were looking for people who also would be predilinquent. And so that's, so, but in the 1920s, they were. considered fringe fanatics. By 1954, they were literally legion in name and in number. There are tens of thousands of members of the Legion of Mary. And then in 1954, when this girl, Eileen, was taken by them, that was also had been declared a Marianneur by the Pope. And I mean, my feeling is that no other country probably threw themselves into the veneration. Mary was almost

like opened the sort of gates for them. They'd already been doing it. I've seen photos in the archives of people who painted the whole front of their house in a shade known as Marion Blue, which I realise maybe people outside Ireland don't realize. I know what it is straight away. Yeah, it's the shade of her robes. They built dozens, must be more. More, more statues around Ireland.

You will go down the most abandoned, rocky, rural, windswept, middle of nowhere and find a raised, looming statue. of the Virgin Mary. And these are people go on missions across Ireland to other parts of Ireland

and build these and erect these statues. So Virgin Mary is incredibly important and in Ireland and marrying culture is incredibly important and a really common

thing for the Irish family to do right up until I think in the 80s that had probably been abandoned and began to wane a little in the 60s but was to say the rosary unbended knee

led by your father every day at 6 o'clock and still when I went to secondary school right up until the early 2000s we were made say the rosary. every day at 12 and it'd be a great honor to be invited up to read it out over the tannoyne and I've like yes this year yeah yeah you know but that that's so that part is so you know Catholicism really part was part of the ordinary culture of Ireland and so that's why as much we must be annoyed at ourselves if you have nothing like nothing really nothing and you have Catholicism which gives you order it gives you a certain kind of pageantry you know you've got Christmas Easter or you know you know you've got Christmas Easter or you know you know

know, you've got penance, you've got fasting on Fridays. It gives a whole, a whole daily, weekly, monthly, annual rhythm to your life, a life that previously had probably been spiraling. We're going to take a step inside the laundries when we come back after this break. Louise, you've given us an indication of what it was like when those girls in some cases came through those doors with their suitcase and are suddenly surrounded by these faces of older women, nuns, but also, you know, inmates, what do you call them, residents. But give us an idea of what daily life was like in there for these people.

The daily regime was absolutely unrelenting. And I think in, you know, the Magdal Laundries is a largely politicised topic now about who is to blame and how wrong was it really, you know, the church were only doing what people thought was normal. And one of the government reports reports, the Macalese report, and which is often used to say, look, this really wasn't a punishing place. We'll say, well, they weren't beaten. These weren't like industrial schools. It wasn't regimented sexual and physical violence. So there weren't, that's not a very low ball. Yeah. Well, yes. But actually, speaking to women reading the archives, yes, I wasn't regimented beatings and other kinds of abuse. But what was absolutely psychologically puncturing was that once they entered, their name was. was taken, not to be spoken again. They would be replaced with either a pseudonym, often drawn from Bible, often male names, larkin, perpetua, scholastica, and then their clothes would be taken. They would never get those back again. And that's interesting when if and when some of the women did get to leave, they were given other people's clothes. They were never given their own items back. So their clothes

be taken and then they'd be given this uniform that would be cut from rough calico. And then their hair would be cut and then you know one of the and usually this is the point at which women would begin to speak and say like what are you doing and so you just have to have your hair short here you have to have your hair short here so the hair would be cut up and then they would be brought to a dorm room and that would be where they would sleep and often the way that so that some of the dorm rooms are organized such that they sat like head to foot so even if you turn around to whisper to someone you actually weren't as close to the person you were looking at their feet so it was very hard to communicate and then they were just put to work, immediately put to work. And we called the Magdalene Laundries. They weren't called

Magdalene Laundries at the time. They were called asylums or penitentiaries or homes or refuges. And certainly homes and refuges are the terms that the Catholic Church have really liked to hold on to. But they were called laundries. We call them that name because that's precisely what they were big industrial scale laundries. And they were washing everyone's laundry. Local people, local businesses, you know, the president or so Nukhtraim would send their sheets and tableclots there, wedding dresses, everyone. Everyone's having their laundry washed there. And when we sort of see these institutions visualised in cinema, they almost look like little cottage industries, they're all sort of round of that. These were huge purpose-built, industrial factories built at the back of convents.

And I've been to see a couple of them, they all follow the same pattern. So it's not they just like started up accidentally in the back. You know they were purpose built. You have an ironing room, this steamy, sweaty room. You have a, you have. the wet room where you know these huge I mean massive industrial laundry machines five six foot and height huge gaping you know vats and then you've got the packing room but the point is it works basically like a conveyor belt but the reason that it's not like a factory is that the minute they they would start their day straight up wiggle into their back into their calico dress and then down on the knees for the first round of Hail Marys and rosary of the day

Then down to the chapel for a mass. And women will say at this stage, I still don't know where they were, but no one is speaking. And there's a nun leading them all the way. Then they would go have a breakfast in the large refinery at these long, large tables. They're not looking at each other.

They're looking straight up at a nun who's sitting up on a raised rostrum. Still no one is talking. And then one woman was saying in her first day, so she's still just following kind of lockstep in this kind of cavalcade of women, walks out of this room where they've just had breakfast and down this tiled, cold corridor and on one of the arched signs, it says,

do penance or perish, painted in a cursive script. And then she entered the laundry. And they're doing all that laundry work. They're set about in these different rooms, but they're not allowed speak. That's the thing that's absolutely grueling there. It's not just the labour.

It's not just the slavery. Of course it was slavery. Of course it was imprisonment. But basically, they are working in silence unless they were being led in prayer. So they're praying all day, all the time, led by none. So like these incessant incantations constantly.

Praying, working, praying, working. Never allowed to speak. So you could never speak to another person. You could never use your own name. And you're just going on like that. And you still don't know where you are. Two things that strike me again, Louise, is first of all that it must have been so remarkable to have been removed from your own life. And you're sort of vicariously living the lives of the people whose laundry are doing.

mentioned like wedding dresses coming in and that sort of thing and and you know you've been stripped of all of your personhood your womanhood I think you know crucially and in terms of this idea of the cult of Mary and you know you're having your hair cut and the sort of removal of anything that would mark you out in terms of that identity but also that the spaces you're describing and those regimen those routines that there's there's a sort of a very purposeful choreography to that and I'm wondering you mentioned that these factories grow up at the back of convents. Is there a scheme to design these?

You mentioned they're quite similar. You've been to a couple. You know, is there like one architect that's just doing this as a commission? And if so, how these, what's the sort of thought process behind those spaces? Is it simply, oh, we're going to build somewhere where we can do laundry?

Or is it, you know, talking about the, you know, those sort of cursive script above the door and things. there's such a sense of the design of these spaces and the oppressiveness as being sort of intrinsic to that. Is that actively what's going on in people's minds when they're setting these spaces up? Or do they just evolve organically and suddenly they're at this pinnacle of sort of horror?

There is a really good PhD done by a guy who's an architect called Chris Hamill at Queens and he's looked at them as architecture and looked at all the blueprints. And I've also gone to architect office and looked at the blueprints. They are, I don't know if it's one architect that's built as a commission, but when the numbers of women being sent to the Magdalondon's in the 1920s and 30s began to rise as this kind of more intensely Catholic spirit really began to take off, there are letters in the archives from the nuns saying we're going to build even bigger, bigger spaces, bigger laundries, we're going to have bigger dorms. So they're really aspirational. Also a bit of context to put this in is that Ireland did not have an industrial revolution. And in fact, poverty was idealized as kind of virtuous.

you know, so it wasn't accidental. They'd bypass that. They'd sort of bypassed, you know, capitalism. We're not going to do that. We're not going to do socialism. We've got Catholicism as a kind of full political economic ideology.

And so there isn't the same kind of factory. Like everyone was meant to be making good in small subsistence firms and, you know, lend and make do. And it's all like really idealized rural 20th century living. But here at the back of convents for women are these big industrial spaces. So I just think the contrast there is incredibly telling. The reason I think they did laundry

work, you know, it's very, you could really ring out, which is a pun not intended. They're like the rich metaphorical thing about these women were considered fallen filth. They're also told they were filthy and dirty all the time. They were insulted all the time. That here they were literally bleaching and staining and cleaning. But the nuns have sort of said and maybe it's true that it's just that it was cheap and it was easy to do and one did not need a sort of a very high sense. skill set to do it. So why was it laundry, why these factory spaces was that so intentional? I think it began from time when it was easier and cheaper to do it.

But in the 1950s, they expanded them even more, like lots of them more and they bought new machines. So it was another phase of like really redevelopment of the laundries. But the regime in those spaces, if you think they're in these huge convent complexes where the nuns live, there might be an industrial school at one end, there's gardens, there's all sorts of spaces. There's places where the public will come, the parlor, the chapel. But actually, in that vast architecture of the convent, the women who are, and you asked what they were called inmates, they were called penitents.

And the nuns would refer them or are there children. Our children. So in the nuns, you know, the nuns have a, I read a literal handbook, how to deal with our penitent children. And they can't super out them as our children. So again, that's the patrician idea of always infantilizing these women. and they would walk one recurrent route through this from the dorm, down the stairs, into the refactory, from the refinery

to the laundry, back to the refactory, back to the dorm. That's it. That's the recurrent route. So as much as these are large spaces, they are contained very tightly in one. It's claustrophobic. Those are the sights of these women's lives for years. We have a photo here of one of the bags that presumably the laundry was sent back out in

and it just looks so innocuous. It looks so mundane. It's just a white, maybe is it paper bag? It looks paper. It just says magdalen laundry and dry cleaning service. There's a telephone number. And it's... A four-digit telephone number.

Ah, simple times. One, two, three, four. You know, it just, I suppose it just gives nothing of what was going on inside these places. But I'm just wondering about the bags. Were they ever used to transmit messages? Do women ever write on them, you know, help? I'm stuck in here. Not that I'm aware of

No But at the last point Would not When you are giving The wrapped finished laundry You're giving it to a delivery driver Who would often drive a van that says Like Magdalene Home laundry or whatever

Also on the side of it And it's usually a known who's doing that Like a nun is at that last stage So there's no opportunity to You know One woman was saying How basically she lost a sock or something Or anyway

I'm just be up but like crying being like, if I don't find this sock, I'm going to get absolutely hammered. So you can imagine if you're thinking I've lost a pair of socks. I mean, very much happened to the best of us. The idea of trying to sneak a message in would like surely put you over the edge. That's how controlled these spaces were. But I'm so glad you chose this bag because I was, and I got this thanks to the Galway City Museum and an incredible woman there who had a photograph for me when I heard that they had it.

Because when we talk and think about the laundries, we're thinking about what happened inside and the women and the nuns. And it's all easy then because we've got good guys and bad guys and victims and offenders. And we also, we speak about the laundries now

so much in the terms of human rights abuse. It was illegal trafficking. All of that is right. But what I think that sort of allows us to this sidestep is that the idea, we know that they're wrong now, we can damn it now

for a very long time. Not only people think they were right, they thought they were ordinary. And I just thought that bag for me really got at that. Yeah, the mundanity of it is shocking. It has branding. Yeah.

Yeah, and it's just you can now envisage it landing on Mary's door down the road who's just got her blouses done or Tim who's just got whatever. It'll have you to map that complicity, doesn't it, across society that these parcels are going out to whoever's had their laundry done. It really is across the board and ordinary in terms of its place in that world. And it really does make me very suspect of the idea. No, I'm not suspect of the idea of charity. But when people like... I hate charity. There's too much of it, you know.

But when people have this sense of mission and I'm doing good and I'm doing good for these people, whoever they are, and you think, well, have you asked these people? What would they like? And in some ways, like, such was the sense of people when they got those in. If they did think about them, they thought about it as a kind of charity. The nuns are doing good by these women. It's salvation. They've fallen. And we don't really need to know what they've done.

If they went there, then they deserve it. You know, there's no smoke without fire. And they've clearly sinned or have aired on the side of sinning and the nuns are wonderful. You know, and people would have believed that, you know. And so there's something just about how you could think, yeah, that's fine. That's all normal. That's right. These are the good guys, you know.

You talk about these women that we don't need to know anything about in the context of the time. And for me, one of the people that really sticks with me. And this is why, again, your book is so brilliant is because you starts to bring these women back, to the forefront. They start to assemble themselves before you, like a cast of women that we should always have being paying attention to. And for me, Eileen is one of those people that really kind of pulls at the heartstrings, particularly that just the Legion of actually saw an ad for a current day Legion of Mary shortly after I read your book and I was like, take that down. Anyway, the other person though that I want you to tell us a little bit more about is Bridgett because she lives a lot of her

life over the course of the laundry. So can you tell you? Tells a little bit about her, how she gets in there and what her life is like. Well, Bridget was the person I was, the child I was alluding to earlier, who is 12 years old, whose priest come and convince her grandmother to bring into the Magdalene Laundry. And there are incidents where family members would have sent their, you know, wild and giddy daughters. And giddiness is a problem that comes up, you know. A lot of girls are a bit giddy and this will put manners on them, a short, sharp shock. sometimes the parents

or family members come and pick them up after a day a couple of days or a week or whatever but no one comes to pick up Bridget and she's there

for such a long time and she said initially when she arrived she would go into the toilet and at night and the sash window would be open and she could hear a dog barking

and it reminded her of the dog at home so she would go to the toilet at night and not all the dorms had an associated toilet you would just use a pan or something. Yeah, yeah.

And she must have mentioned it to someone because then one night she went in and the window had been nailed shut. Oh my God. Yeah, so that's just like just the touch of cruelty. Like that's how much they were really cut off from the outside world. Bridget ended up staying there

until she's in her late 30s. From the age of 12? Yeah. When it was decided that maybe now is the time that she could probably leave. and she is given a job working for a priest and you know she her mother her own mother then comes to pick her up

and this her own mother anyway comes picks her drops her at the priest Bridget said you know he was a bit too haughty for me but I've spoken to people who knew Bridget and said you know he was just a bit of work like he was not nice or pleasant and then she was there for with him for a couple of years and then a woman in her early 40s she decides like this is not the place for me and she returns to the Magdalene Laundry that she had been in.

And then she leaves again and she gets her own house. But then she said when people found out that she had been in St. Mary's, which was the local Magdalene's asylum, they were crossed the road to avoid her or they would make comments. You know, because she was a fallen woman. And that was the thing in the 1960s, you know, because they were, this is also another way how I came into this was I was writing about the prisons. And they were saying, we don't even have a women's prison.

And when people go on remand, we will say, send them to one of the Magdal Laundries. Aren't we great? You're right. They're basically like, you know, pro-to-abolitionists. It's fantastic.

And then one person who, I think Nora Connolly O'Brien, and I think was James Connolly's daughter, stood up, she was a senator and said, I would advise any girl coming before me to go to the prison. Do not go to the Magdal Laundry.

If anyone finds out you've been there, it will be a stain in your reputation from which you will never recover. And it's like the first time sort of in official realms of Ireland in the chambers of parliament, in particular, someone says the thing that everyone knows, but no one will admit. And so that's what Bridget found when she left again. So she returned again. Another thing I should say about Bridget is she was not Bridget when she was there. Her name was Peter. She'd always been known as Peter. She returns again after Vatican

2, which is when the church liberalised in the 1960s, they decided we might get rid of these pseudonyms and that you can have your own name back. You can be Bridget again. But then she left, returned again, left returned again. But she said, this was my family. This was the only place that I knew. Then that laundry was officially closed. And that is when the story of the Magdal Laundry ends. Oh, this is all went its way to a conclusion.

But the laundry was bought by a local businessman. And he paid all his staff, but kept on some of these elderly people like Britain, and paid them a wage. but it's like where else they're going to go? This has been their whole life. And he and Bridget became very good friends and she said he was very good to us. But, you know, that long, it kept going on

and she then moved in with the nuns in they would have built these kind of convalescent homes in around the 90s, early 2000s, like little rows of bungalows, like old folks' homes, like sheltered accommodation or whatever. And so she lived in there. And I have been trying to figure great. You know, well, what her transcript sort of just ends, like she's incredibly eloquent and

also seems to have a very funny sense of humour, you know, and there's one bit where she tells a story just after Vatican too. The nuns were, it's important, the nuns are also closed up in this. They are also fully cloistered in this convent world. And one is the nuns goes out into Limerick City and on an errand or by herself, you know, and she'd promised the children, women, women and girls that she would read them a bedtime story. So I guess you can't do context how we infantilise this space is. But when I get back this evening before bedtime, we will have a story.

She gets in and says I'm shook. I can't. I can't. I've seen something out in town and I can't even believe it. I have to take to my bed. And Bridget said, well, what had you seen? And she said, I saw a woman wearing trousers. So that's just how absolutely closed in and

divorced they were. So Bridget tells all and so in townstow of Bridgett is incredibly tragic, but she also you know, as you say, I'm trying to restore something of someone's full humanity. And so I was trying to figure out what had happened with Bridget and then, you know, I've been speaking to different people and they said, oh, don't you, don't you realize? Bridget, Bridget died there. I don't think they said it like they said. Like, she didn't, she didn't leave and she had met the government, when the government were doing their commission in 2012 and they went to meet women.

the residence of the Magdal Laundries, they met Bridges. They met Bridges. Still there. And they're still there. And they asked her, has you ever been beaten? No.

How's you ever been abused? No. And afterwards, she said, I answered those questions wrong. I should have said, no, those things didn't happen to us. But they made us silent. They suffocated us.

They psychologically tortured us. But that's not what they asked. And these women have lived in silent isolation. for decades at that. And now they're assembled into a focus group beside Martin Maccles, who was also the president's husband.

And then they're asked, tell us the story of your life. And yet, when that commission wrote its report, they said, you know, Magdal Laundries ended in 1996, and yet they had met Bridgett. They'd met Bridgett in 2012

and they could see that she was still there and that she was going to die there, which she did. And I read her obituary notice, but somehow that element of Bridgett's life just made me so incredible. Like I really, you know,

these are all as you two are such pros of looking at. These are dark histories and you're sort of carrying that, but somehow seeing that we had not acknowledged the fact that these laundries did not properly end in 1996, that there were still women there and so women who died there and they were not pregnant outside of marriage. They were literally 12.

They were children and they were giddy and naughty and fun and we just could not tolerate that if they were not from a respectable background. And as you said earlier, just disappeared to them. And now we just, how do you face that? I don't think we know how to face that yet. And that's why Bridget's story for me

was the one that I wanted to hold up so much in the book as well because if we want to confront this history, then we will accept the sad kind of ambivalent, ambiguous end of the laundries that Bridget's story tells us and also the strange, inexplicable route in that these women and girls found into the laundries. Yeah, there's a mundane tragedy to it that's not to take from the gravity of the tragedy,

but it's the mundanity that allows that to just seep into 2012 without people nearly noticing. We're going to take another break, but when we come back, we're going to look at the other set of women that Louise has been referring to in this history, and that is the nuns. So Louise, you talked about the nuns

also being cloistered in this space, that this is a closed community. I think it's tempting and possibly correct to read them as the villains in some way, at least in terms of that institutionalisation and the punishments, maybe not physical, but certainly psychological, they're meeting out on the women that are in their care.

Do you see them as villains? How did you approach their side of things, their experiences and their role in this when you're writing the book? So initially I've been super keen to speak to the nuns. And I felt like I had pretty much got a good record of convincing people to speak to me. I'm short and I'm blonde and I'm smiley

and so I was like I'll not convince them and also because it's in the conclusion of the book my mother had grown up in the gardener's cottage of a closed caramel like convent so I spent my whole life around cloistered nuns and I could see them tiny small I mean shrunken women living

literally behind like we would go visit them behind a grill so I felt like I was I mean the word sympathetic is dangerous here but I was no I But that's my interest. I'm not, I don't believe, I, good and evil. No, no history is good and evil, black and white. There was a nun, to me, there was a nun told story here, and surely that was the nuns.

So I wrote these letters, I told them about my mother. I said I'd grown up also at this Carmelite convent. I really wanted to hear it their way. And I mean, that's genuinely. Yeah. And we had not heard from them. And, you know, if we're interested in women's history in Ireland, well, the nuns are an important part of that. It's not true.

And we never talk about them as women. We all talk about them as nuns. and I either got Stonewalled or had a nice car out nice. I mean, I had a correspondence with one order, but they said absolutely not. We're not going to speak to anyone. So then I thought, well, I'm going to go to the archives. So I went to the Catholic archives, the Catholic Diocesan archives in Dublin.

And I spoke to the archivist there. I said, listen, I'm running about Magdal Laundries. But I'm going to look at the stuff to do with the laundries. But what I want first is just everything from those orders of nuns. I just want to understand what they were thinking about, what they were writing about when they wrote letters to the bishop. what were their concerns? What were they up to?

And she said, we've had so many people in here do Magdal Laundry stuff now. It's very in vogue. But no one's ever asked to just read about the orders. So I knew then that I was definitely right that there was a gap there.

And I found letters where they were writing about, you know, the value of what their institutions were doing because the only women who don't re-offend or fall again are the ones who were in the Magdal Laundries, which is because they're literally not out. Like, I'd also be very good if you wrap me up and bubble wrap

and put me in a box as well. you know. And but I also found, I guess, in their letters and in their archives, you know, things where they really believed that they were savings. Like that's a fundamental here. Like we write this off because we can't understand that their whole sense of personhood or subjectivity. Like they believe in a life that goes on forever.

This is the waiting room. This mortal coil. This is the waiting room for the real thing that's going to happen in the kingdom of heaven. But what you do here will secure. that. And if you really believe people have souls that live forever, that permits all sorts of kind of dreadful behaviour. Like lots of people, Irish people, I had members of my family who have been in the nuns and left and I heard, heard, heard, sort of whispers about that. And I sort of, you know, I understood that entering the nuns was, and entering the convent was really difficult.

So, yeah, so I went about trying to find memoirs, um, archival footage, trying to, to find out what happened to the nuns as well. And, you know, in one part of the book, I open with one of these recruitment drives. So, of like a nun who arrived into a classroom. These girls are 14, 15, 16. Some of them might be the kind of girl who think, well, I don't want to be like my mom. I don't want to be a spinster. And what's the other type of Irish woman fallen? They have aspirations. But there's also nowhere in Ireland where a woman like that could really get a job. If you married, you, if you worked in the civil service, but also lots of private industries, you had to leave your job, it's called the marriage bar. So suddenly you have a nun who's arriving in her

incredible bright white robes. She's come from the missions. You know, some far off lands doing kind of impossibly exotic work working in tropical medicine. They're not just teachers, they're setting up schools, they're not just nurses, they're setting up hospitals. And so so many, and the ladies were girls, 13, 14, 15, 16 were convinced, give up your studies, this is your destination. and then they would enter the convent, their hair would be cut, their name would be taken, they weren't allowed read for a long period of time, and they weren't allowed contact their family. So they've sort of been sold this idea that they're going to be the great and the good. And that is also why so many women would have left the convent.

And if they did, they would have been another kind of fallen woman. They would have really been pilloried in their own community as well, like for the shame they would have brought on their family by leaving the convent. And there's some really interesting research going on around that at the moment with women who left the, left the convent. So I wanted to show that their own journey into the nuns. It wasn't if they started out going,

I really hate that kind of woman. I'm going to go there and do all these villainous things that they were sort of sold this idea of brilliance. And then one nun in her own sort of reflective essay who also left the convent, she said, you know, I could see what was happening. That the great ones were being sent off in the mission. They've got to be secondary school teachers.

But the ones who were probably a little more lackluster or not so into, were not so filled with the sort of Catholic decorum of mission. They were the ones who were sent to the industrial schools. They were the ones who were sent to the Magdal Laundries. The one woman, and there was some footage of her being interviewed, who had left the convent, said that she wanted to go to a Magdal Laundrie because these were surely the most sort of fallen souls of all.

And if you really wanted to show what a good committed, none you were. If you were really interested in salvation, you should go to the very bottom. And that meant the Magdalene Laundrie. and she said when she arrived in, she just said, I can try to think of exactly her words, and she's an incredible voice. And she said,

what I began to see was that the nuns there, who had been there a long time, either hid away or did nothing. But after being there, they were changed. And she, not only she said, I have to get out of this convent,

I have to get out of this Magdon Laundry, but she said, I can't even be a nun anymore. Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow. So I guess the point is just that they also went, I think, on this journey.

And I just think, I've seen some reviews of the book, my book saying, Oh, she says who evil the nuns were. I was like, absolutely, if anything, I've shown that the language of evil is kind of a problem if we begin to really institutionalise it. These are also women in a difficult time,

in a strict time for womanhood. And I think it's so interesting to seeing, you know, fallen woman, risen woman, both here essentially cloistered outside of society in these institutions. It's a kind of perfect epitome of like Ireland's kind of moral value. the best kind of woman would be disappeared

and the worst kind of woman would be disappeared as well. Yes. And they're all kind of magnetised around this idea of the Virgin Mary and the ultimate kind of purity and the ultimate ideal of womanhood. Oh, there's an incredible bit from the Rosary magazine

who's doing incredible circulation in Ireland. The Rosary magazine. And they, if anyone would like to fund me to just read all of these magazines nonstop for several years. Sacred Heart also a great one. Our ecclesiastical record if anyone wants to know. But in the rosary, they sort of marvel at one of the Magdalene laundries.

And they say, here you have Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene side by side. The vile weed and the pure rose face to face. You know, it's like a real biblical thing of good and evil. It was also your book, though, that highlighted to me why, I've said this on the podcast before, why Mary is my favorite one of the Holy Avengers, because we have. this like seep through down through the generations. You love silent women, is that it? No, no. I love a sassy bird.

But she, she, like this, this, this iconic, powerful woman, although that's not what was trickling down to society. But certainly we had this idea. I mean, I have. With Mary Matelan or the Virgin Mary. I was obsessed with her as a child. I was like, where the hell do they get that growing? Gay boy growing up in Royal Ireland.

That's where I got it. But it's just interesting to see what our generation inherited. of this. And there is an inheritance, you know, like we feel like we've moved away from this an awful lot now. But actually, there are still lingering things, which brings us to kind of the close of our conversation, Louise. And I want to talk about the end, or I want you to talk about the end of these laundries

because there are ends, many different types of endings. Talk us through some of them and how we get to where we are now. I guess it was, you know, when I was talking about the regime earlier, and one of the things I should have said about ends and how people left on an individual level, The thing that was most torturous about a magdine laundry is that you did not know when you were leaving. And for many women, they thought they were going to die there. And there was a real chance that they would die there and they'd be buried in an unmarked or mass grave. So were you beaten? No.

Where you held? Where you think you were going to die? Yes. And that is what happened to so many women. So on an individual end, that is what happened. On an institutional end, they began to sell the laundries or close them really from the ends of the 60s, 70s. So it's not quite, and it ends. in 1996. By 1996 there's

Sean McDermott Street left. You know, people in the centre of Dublin. And, you know, we say that

that's when the last Magnet Laundrie closed and the anniversary of that is coming up. And I have given public talks. I've been on radio

before. I have used that line. Like you, you say, and you describe the Magid Laundries, the hair cutting, the silence,

the name changing, the depth. And then you say, when do you think the system ended? 1996 and it's an incredible feeling to possess and hold an audience attention like that because you've won the argument then it all went on too long it all went on too late it was all too much but I sort of say that and I mentioned that in the book as well almost to admit my own complicity of sort of forording this idea that they ended you know they didn't you know you know there was still there was 40 women still in that laundry doing what the nuns called um industrial therapy so they were just full folding pillowcases and folding for... Industrial therapy.

Yeah. So they had an outside workforce, but they would get stuff coming from Mount Joy, the main prison down the road. They would just fold a few little bits. And then, so then the laundry closes. Where did those women go? There's still women all over the country in these institutions.

I went to, because I wanted, there's something, and you'll know this yourselves, about physically being in the space you're writing about. And one of the opening stories is the book starts an industrial school with a girl called Carmel, who would walk from her. industrial school, which also had a magdine laundry beside it, down to the church. So I thought, I'm going to go there. I'm going to do that walk. I felt that was really important. And

when I got back to the car and it really started raining, I was like, there's a mass grave for the magdine laundry across the road in the graveyard. And I knew they'd put a headstone up, a group of activists had put the headstone up with names and dates on it, which they'd really fought for. And that's another thing we'll maybe talk to about, like how much survivors made to fight for acknowledgement. Anyway, I finally found the gravestone. Like, I remember wearing jeans. The jeans were stuck to me.

Oh, my God. It was absolutely lashed and I was just looking at the names and the dates. And I had just really wanted to pay my respects. And then one of the survivors, one of the women whose name was on the headstone, had died something like 30 years after that laundry had closed. So she'd been inside there making little religious trinkets and doing knitting or whatever. So it didn't end for these women. It ended for us and our historical memory and how we like to tell.

tell this story. And so it's interesting. Then they closed in 1996. There was an interview in the Irish Times with Sister Lucy, who was the head of the last magdine laundry and Shaw McDermestreet meant she was the head of the last magdine laundry in the world as far as I'm aware. Nothing, nothing, nothing. 1998, Channel 4 airs a documentary called Sex and a Cold Climate.

That was a huge response to that. And also there's a bit of suspicion and, you know, twitchiness about the British saying something about the Irish, you know. Then that is made into a film by Peter Mullen called the Magdalene's sisters. That was huge as well. That was huge around for months and once and months in the cinema. As a non-Irish person, that was my route into this history. I think, you know, it's interesting.

I don't think there's any confusion there about the mother and baby home in his film. You know, like he, because he had spoken to women. And he got accused a lot that that was a bit, it was a bit much, a bit of an exaggeration. Wasn't that bad. then they disappear again off the radar. So they've sort of, they've come into the consciousness once, think twice, then they disappear again. Then in around the mid-2000s, when Ireland began to deal with its industrial schools, women went and said, well, I was in industrial school. And then when I was 14, I sent to this other kind of industrial place where I washed and I scrubbed and I spun.

You know, I wasn't paid and I wasn't let it leave and I was my prey all day long and whatever. And the government commission said, no, what? That's a thing to do with us. It's a private enterprise. Magdal Laundrie. So there apparently been some great separation of church and state the rest of us hadn't been aware of. So they sort of wiped their hands of them and said, that's the church problem, is nothing to do with the government. Not government paid contracts. The government paid money to the laundries to keep certain kinds of women. Government was completely complicit in it.

But they said, no, no, no, nothing for us. So then different groups of survivors began to come forward, form groups and began to campaign. And so that's when the Magna Laundries really began, again, to enter the collective consciousness. So from about 2009, and then in 2013 you have this Macalese report that says a bit they weren't you know they were hard maybe they were insulted a bit they're put down is how they put it they were put down harsh language

maybe the women weren't sure that they could leave but you know it's mostly fine and that report did the most I cannot overstate how enormous the damages that that report did because it downplayed everything that had happened in the institutions.

And once you get through 900 something pages of drudery of legislation and contracts and whatever, you finally get to a section of that report that includes the women's voices. Like they have this walk on part

in the report that includes, that is about the abuse that they suffered. And then that sort of goes quiet again. It's all like, you know, and now it's sort of dealt with and it's funny because when I started in the project

and every time I went home to Ireland and was chatting to people, people kept saying to me almost like, I God love you, but like, you're a bit late, aren't you? Like, it's done. It's done. Like, and the word, the term I kept hearing again and again from people was,

like, we have our laundry fatigue. Laundry fatigue. Like, they got it. And I think essentially had moved on. And I just thought this was kind of amazing because we don't even have like a history book of this like that puts, lays out the full nature of the institutions for beginning to dubious end. And so it's interesting that as much, like there's a sense that it's all over historically and it's behind us.

And so in some ways, part of the book was also thinking like, what, what does justice look like for these women? Well, they were raised at the time. They were erased from themselves. They were erased from the social landscape. And they've sort of been erased now in the way we keep saying that their mother and baby homes. And I've had real conflict in myself about like not being, you know, I'm not out on the picket lines of this. I'm not like, but I think writing, history writing is also a form of justice. It's a bait saying look at, look at what we have ignored.

Look at what we have sidelined and trying to just say remembering is also a form of justice. And that for the women who are there who are still alive, it will never end. It will always be with them. And one of the women says that at the very end, she wanted it to go, I'll get emotional now. She wanted to go into history books. That was her idea of justice. Yes, she got reparation money. Yes, there's going to be a museum,

but that what happened to her would be understood and not forgotten. That it means, and in some ways it should never end, we should never forget. Do you know what? It feels like there's not much more to say on that. I think that's a good place to end. And just to say, I think you have achieved that with your book. If you haven't read The Fallen, then you need to go out and get a copy. It honestly moved me so much.

You will be angry as you're probably picking up from me on certain points of this. But Louise approaches this with such nuance and intelligence and sympathy and empathy and all of the things that make incredible history that you can't help but meet these women face to face. And it does feel like a tragedy that Irish society was denied them for as long as it was. Thank you for listening to watching After Dark wherever you're meeting us today on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. As I say, go and get Louise's book and thank you so much for listening.