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

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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.

When Maureen was just 12 years old, she confided in a teacher that she was being physically and sexually abused by her stepfather, but never, in her darkest imaginings, could she have dreamt that she would be the one who would face harrowing punishment. In time she remarried, this time to a man from Westmeath, and they had a son. In 1988, matters came to a head. “I couldn’t get a decent job because I didn’t have the education and it just all hit me one day.” She took an overdose. “I was taken into hospital. I was got in time and was pumped out, and the rules there was if you try anything like that you have to go for counselling. I didn’t know what counselling was.” I told on him, didn’t I? That was the crime. That’s what happened. I told the Church that my stepfather was molesting and raping me, and beating me and my brothers. 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.

Girl in the Tunnel

The 60-year-old believes she was treated like a slave and had her dignity, identity, and life taken from her for fear she would follow in her mother’s footsteps.

I didn’t rebel there at all, I asked nothing, I kept my head down and got on with it. I had given up. I did my work, ate and went to bed. I abandoned all ideas I had of who I was or what I thought. I said nothing. 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.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. Bishop Nulty here in Carlow, I like him, he’s a fair and honest man, and he told me it was wrong,” she said. Not allowed to speak, barely fed and often going without water, the child was viciously beaten by the nuns for years and hidden away in an underground tunnel when government inspectors came. By day she worked in the laundry, was fed bread and dripping, and then made Aran sweaters or rosary beads before going to bed at night in St Aidan’s Industrial School.

I have no regrets about telling my story,” she says. “I no longer have shame. My father had died, my mother was too weak from having 13 children to speak up. I don’t blame her for it, as she was oppressed by the system, too. Our Government, and the Church possessed far too much power, and it completely took over our country, and caused such cruelty. The immense damage done to all of us girls and women is still rippling through Ireland, today.”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. Maureen spent two years in New Ross and a further year in the House of Mercy laundry in Athy, and then two years at St Mary’s School for the Blind in Dublin. After leaving St Mary’s, she soon moved to England, but this was not the end of her hardship. She was told that she would receive an education there, but instead she was immediately stripped of her possessions and thrown into forced labour, washing clothes and scrubbing floors in inhumane and unrelenting conditions. It was very hard for Liosa and me, because this is very disturbing and very, very painfully to listen to and exhausting emotionally. We’d often have to take a break, maybe for a few months, because I’m still in recovery, I always will be, so I do have to mind myself,” explained Maureen.

The nun told me we couldn’t have you playing with other children in case you told them what happened to you, so I was ostracised for that,” she said. We all slept in beds together. In Green Lane there were two rooms, with two double beds in each one. My mother and Marty were in the front room in a bed with a baby, across from a bed with the youngest ones. In the other room there was me, my brothers and the others. We didn’t have duvets or even blankets most of the time. It was coats on top of us and we would sleep close for the heat of each other to get through the night. From a large family in Carlow town, as a child Maureen had been sexually abused by her stepfather, who is now deceased. It was 1964 and Maureen went to the primary school run by the Presentation Sisters, now known as Scoil Mhuire gan Smál. She told a Sister Veronica at the school, a nun who was kind to her, about the abuse at home after the sister detected something was wrong. My shoes got too small and when I asked to be paid so I could get new ones, they just brought me down to Heuston or whatever it was called then, and put me on a train to Carlow,” said Maureen.

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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. Speaking of her time in New Ross, Maureen said: “The way they looked at it was that I was a soiled child. It’s horrible, but that’s the way they looked at me. It was the coldest, most harrowing place I ever came across. It was a cruel, cold attitude. No speaking … full of silence. You could hear someone walking on a corridor a mile away.” My mother came once as Athy was close and she managed to get a lift. We talked for a while, very politely. 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. 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.