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

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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. Nobody ever spoke about my father except Granny, who told me he was a kind and gentle person. Is it possible to miss something you never had? It feels like it. Even now, the child that’s left in me calls out for her father in the dark and cries when he doesn’t come. If my father hadn’t gone out that day, and hadn’t caught a chill that led to such a serious illness that he didn’t survive, I would have had a childhood where my parents’ love for one another surrounded me and my brothers too. I think often about fate and how the event of his death changed the path of my whole life, even before I was born. When I was on the way, safe in my mother’s womb, I was a child of a loving marriage, with two parents planning a future for me, one of happiness and warmth. After my father died that room was left empty, except for a small table in the corner on which his billhook lay.

I read this over a few days. It is the story of the author’s life in three different Magdalene Laundries - New Ross, Athy, and Dublin. It is a distressing story and I believe it needed to be better told than the co-writer (Liosa McNamara) produced. When Maureen Sullivan was just twelve years old, she was sent to the Magdalene Laundry in New Ross, Co. Wexford. The Girl in the Tunnel is the heart-breaking story of her agonising journey from a violent home to the brutal Magdalene laundry, and her desperate fight for freedom and for justice.When I started publicising my case my boss was a lovely man, and said ‘you go ahead and tell your truth, and anything I can do to help you, I will’. A man for justice,” said 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. 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.

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 had to keep all that bottled up inside me. I felt ashamed because it was like it was my sin. That’s the way I was made feel — Maureen Sullivan