This excellent memoir for me, was the anti-dote to the shortcomings I had with Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These.

Keegan’s novel does everything except go inside the establishment to find out who is in there, why and how they are being treated. Instead it focuses on one man who is portrayed as kindly and empathetic. That man will make a righteous action, whereas the author commits the sin of omission, maintaining a societal silence that continues to bind, in neglecting to shift the narrative gaze towards anything related to those unjustly incarcerated inside. Like standing to one side at the scene of a car accident, choosing to gaze at the sheep in the fields opposite.

Girl in the Tunnel is a memoir of childhood. Of a girl from a large blended family, who is removed from abuse and sent to one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries. Maureen Sullivan’s second paragraph of her Author’s Note in the front of the book speaks volumes.

It might surprise you, or it might not, to know that there are people still pushing me to stay silent. There are people who want this book kept from your hands. People who say to me in the street, ‘Would you not get over it?’ People who tell me to shut up about it – they defend men and they defend the Catholic Church.
But this is my story to tell and this is how I remember it.

Maureen was not even a teenager when she was taken from her school, from her family, from her loving Granny, without being told where she was going, only that she was to attend a new school and would have to live there. None of her questions were ever answered. She would be deposited at the Magdalene laundry in New Ross, County Wexford run by the Order of the Good Shepherd nuns. Stripped of her possessions including the new pencil case her mother bought her as she was leaving, she was thrown into forced labour, washing clothes, pressing linens and scrubbing floors, forbidden an education or contact with any of the children who attended the school there.

I changed most of the names in this 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 the 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’s also the history of this country.

Someone recently said to me that a great opening line of a book can foreshadow the entire story. When I go back and read the first line of Maureen’s memoir, I find so many of the reasons for what happened to her, there in that line.

I never knew my father, John L. Sullivan, but there was a photograph of him on the wall in my grandmother’s house.

Maureen’s mother was married, nineteen and pregnant with Maureen when her father died suddenly leaving two young sons and an unborn daughter. They lived with her Granny, her father’s mother, the only person in her life who ever spoke of the father she never knew. But her Granny was poor and her mother quickly married and created a new family with another man, Marty Murphy, who from very early on took out all his frustrations on the dead man’s children.

My brother’s and I were terrified of Marty from day one. He didn’t restrain himself and lost his temper in a second, sometimes for nothing you could place, and he would go for you, even in his boots, and his kicks would hurt for days. He really hated us. Or he hated himself, maybe, for what he couldn’t stop doing to us, but either way living with Marty was like living with the devil himself. We suffered every single day.

Maureen describes their lives in incredible and evocative detail. Being so poor and having so little, when she describes the few tender and joyous moments, they stand out in the narrative, as they clearly did in her mind as that child.

The way it is written is absolutely captivating, not because of the misery or injustices, but because of the emotional intelligence exhibited. It is so honest and evocative of the way a child would experience things, except that Maureen has grown up and is able to express the questions and thoughts she had as a child. But she does so, with an understanding of where her country and society is today and how it was then. Nevertheless, there is no excuse for the cruelty and lack of basic human rights she experienced. There is a lot that remains hidden and denied to this day.

It’s hard to imagine the reasons for people behaving as they did, given how fast Ireland has progressed, and it’s hard to imagine how my mother thought things through. I know now she had no choices – women were the property of their husbands. Their bodies belonged to the men they married, their children did too.

When Maureen responds to the kind voice of her favourite teacher at school and opens up to her questions, she believes that she is going to rescued, perhaps even go to live with her Granny. This idea of being with her Granny was so powerful, she told her everything.

So I told on him. I told on Marty. I sat there in that room with a chocolate in my mouth and an open heart and talked about it.

When her mother arrives after being called in by the school and sees Maureen sitting in the hallway, she asks her why she is not in class. And worse.

As she went by me, she turned and said, ‘Oh Maureen, what have you done?’ She knocked on the office door and disappeared through it.
What had I done?

That same day she would be removed and taken to the laundry. She would also be told that she had a new name. They all did.

For years I couldn’t figure out why our names were changed in the Magdalene laundries. What reason had they? A number would have made more sense to me if they wanted us to be nothing and nobody. But a number is a way to trace us, and it would have been unique. It would have been remembered and displayed somewhere. By changing our names they made sure, not that we struggled on the inside, but that on the outside we had no way to identify or find each other. And how could we stand as a witness to what went on there if there was nothing to say we had been there at all? We didn’t exist.

Maureen describes all the work they do in the laundry by day and then the work they must do at night, in the tin boxes. It is revelatory and will not leave any reader unaffected.

Merely describing the day to day activities and routine of their lives, and who they were not – (at the time she was in New Ross none of the women there were pregnant), is captivating. A 1911 census referred to them as “inmates”, at New Ross they were referred to as penitents.

It means a person who seeks forgiveness for their sins. There were no sinners in New Ross. Just victims, victims of the patriarchy, victims of misogyny.

The tunnel was the long corridor that separated the sleeping area and the children’s school from the laundry. Every so often she would be locked in there. When the men in suits arrived.

Those men in suits were likely state inspectors. They were sent around to all of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland to check on conditions.

People like Maureen were not supposed to be in the laundry being used as child labour, so they were hidden.

Maureen’s story is an important record of the historical treatment of girls and young women in Ireland, and a testament to the proliferation of abuses in households and the historic risk of speaking out.

Sharing their stories can change things. Last year, one of the best books I read was another memoir Poor: Grit, courage, and the life-changing value of self-belief by Katriona O’Sullivan. That book has had and continues to have a significant impact in changing societal attitudes.

Perhaps more tellingly, as Justice for Magdalenes Research’s book notes, there were never any Magdalene laundries for men. There were no corresponding church-run rehabs for the men who abandoned their families, nor for those who put girls and women in those situations that landed them in institutions. RENÉ OSTBERG, National Catholic Reporter

Highly Recommended.

Further Reading

Book: Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice – the long battle for justice

Essays: A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland

Article: National Catholic Reporter: Book details long battle to get justice for Ireland’s Magdalene survivors by René Ostberg, April 30, 2022

Resources: Justice for Magdalene Research : A Resource for People Affected by and Interested in Ireland’s Magdalene Institutions

Resource: One In Four, Ending the Trauma of Childhood Sexual Abuse – Programs for Adult survivors