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

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I still lie in bed trying to figure it out, what I did and why was I sent away to a prison to work as a slave? What was my crime? 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 harrowing punishment. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) 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. Cork’s Mercier Press has been shortlisted for the 2023 IPA Prix Voltaire alongside publishers and authors from Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey.

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. Marty, however, never went without. He was fed first and always had a supply of his two great loves, Erinmore tobacco and Irel coffee, which came in a bottle and was stirred into hot water. He took it with milk. Not having any milk when Marty wanted coffee was a sentence for punishment, so myself and my brothers pre-empted this and other things we would get in trouble for by taking preventative action. It’s something I still struggle with today, as I find myself fretting if I run out of milk, even though I’m the only one here.Before I was two my mother married that lame pig jobber from Green Lane in Carlow town called Marty Murphy. He is, I suppose, the only father I ever knew. He hurt me the day I was carried into his house, with a hard slap to my legs, and he hurts me still today, though he has been dead for years. The mental, physical and sexual torture I suffered in my childhood, that can never be erased or settled. I live with it. 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.

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. I spoke to a person about it recently, and she said ‘well, Maureen, there’s a lot more crime nowadays’, and I said I’d prefer a little more crime than knowing about little children getting abused behind high walls,” she said.It was a life of misery and of drudgery—not allowed to continue her education, not allowed to be friendly with the other inmates, not allowed to speak to the children who were at the convent boarding school. Sullivan was perhaps the youngest inmate of the Magdalene Laundries (at least within the time frame when she was held there), and it was years and years before she understood why the powers that be had deemed it appropriate to put her there in the first place. My mother was nineteen and pregnant with me when my father died suddenly. Michael was two and my other brother, Paddy, was only eight months. They all lived with my granny in her tiny two-storey cottage in the middle of the Irish countryside. That was where I was born a few months later, in the little parlour off the main room – the same room that my newly-wed parents had first slept in together. 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.