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

Product Information

Girl in the tunnel was co-written by Liosa McNamara. For both women, recounting Maureen’s childhood was a difficult and incredibly painfully process. Even at 12 I thought that my mother went down to the hospital and a nurse gave her a baby — Maureen Sullivan

In the heart-breaking Girl in the Tunnel, Maureen bravely recounts her agonising journey from a monstrously violent home to the cold and brutal Magdalene laundry, and her desperate, gruelling fight for freedom and for justice. Survivor testimony has always been at the heart of Justice for Magdalenes Research, the ground-breaking advocacy and research project for former inmates of Magdalene laundries. They have gathered numerous survivor accounts as part of their oral history project (Maureen Sullivan’s among them), made many important submissions to the McAleese committee’s Inquiry into State Involvement with Magdalene laundries, most of which were shamefully ignored, given help with survivors’ legal needs, and produced valuable research outputs, of which the latest is a study of Donnybrook Magdalene laundry, run by the Religious Sisters of Charity. 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. At New Ross there was “no schooling, just the laundry every day, from 6am to about 9pm, with cleaning duties in the evening and at weekends”. The women there were adults, many elderly.When she is 12, she discloses her abuse, while being bribed with sweets, to her supposed ally, a nun in her school. The nun had two choices: go to the police and report the abuse; or go to the parish priest and set in train four more years of misery for Maureen, this time in two Magdalene laundries, where she experienced physical brutality, slave labour, denial of her education and cold unkindness from the nuns who must have known the reason why this child had arrived. There is a poignant description of a rare visit from her mother and her brother (who had ended up in an industrial school). A nun sits stiffly in the room throughout the visit. There is little communication. She describes her family and herself as “three worn-out animals in the same vicinity”.

Sullivan grew up poor in Ireland when growing up poor in Ireland meant owning only one or two outfits, sleeping piled up with your siblings in one bed because the house was too cold to do otherwise, and going without food because there wasn't enough to go around. Her father died young, and her mother remarried—and the only person whom the marriage benefitted was the new husband. It was confirmation that Sullivan was incarcerated in a Magdalene laundry, at such a young age, just for being sexually abused by her stepfather. She had, in fact, been doubly abused. 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.Sullivan also didn’t know at the age of 12, that other women around her were victims of rape and sexual assault – like her. There were also women deemed too flirtatious or promiscuous, some women with disabilities or special needs, many women deemed at odds with societal expectations. As a young woman, Maureen tried to take her own life. In her 30s, she talked to a counsellor, who helped Maureen immensely and made her realise that she was an innocent child who had been abused and wronged. “I got a sentence for what my stepfather did with me. I did the time. He got away scot-free.” The descriptions of the nuns are perhaps telling. Obviously I do not sympathise for a second with the choice to effect such terrible and ongoing punishment on an abused child, but Sullivan also makes a point about the nuns having in many ways dreadful lives of their own—more comfortable than the life they afforded Sullivan in the Laundries, certainly, but not happy ones. Not happy creatures. Sullivan does not sympathise, exactly (how could she, when neither did they?), but it's a fascinating perspective. Maureen Sullivan (70) is a strong woman. She has had to be. Probably the youngest person to have been held in a Magdalene laundry in Ireland, she was just 12 when she arrived at the Good Shepherd-run establishment at New Ross, Co Wexford, in 1964. Over the following four years she was transferred to another such laundry in Athy, Co Kildare, and then to a home for the blind on Merrion Road in Dublin.