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 The determined words of Carlow’s Maureen Sullivan, one of the youngest survivors of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene laundries. Maureen has just published her memoir Girl in the tunnel – my story of love and loss as a survivor of the Magdalene Laundries, where she bravely recounts her agonising journey from a monstrously violent home in Carlow town to the cold and brutal Magdalene laundry system and her desperate, gruelling fight for freedom and for justice. 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.

You must remember beneath those habits were women who treated little girls appallingly, and I get in trouble when I say that,” she said.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. Instead, I was born into a life where my family was displaced, where my father was dead and unable to protect me, where I was placed in the care of monsters and stolen away to be neglected, abused and abandoned to evil. 1 MARTY After my father died that room was left empty, except for a small table in the corner on which his billhook lay. There was also the un-faminist remark that "women in those days were fit from walking and from work" It is perhaps the only anti-feminist comment Sullivan makes in the book. However as someone who walks most places and never learned to drive (because there was no one there to teach me, my poor disabled body has suffered due to this) it was a little upsetting to read that.

She was not allowed to speak, was barely fed, and often went without water, she was viciously beaten by the nuns for years, and hidden away in an underground tunnel when Government inspectors came. Granny was very poor, living in a little house that had no electricity or running water, and although she loved us very much, she could not support us. I imagine the reason my mother rushed to marry Marty Murphy, a gammy-footed pig dealer from Carlow town, was to save us from starvation. Cork’s Mercier Press has been shortlisted for the 2023 IPA Prix Voltaire alongside publishers and authors from Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey. The Laundry in Athy, it was up behind the Catholic Church, where I used to scrub the floors,” she said. This book is another important testimony from a brave survivor of two kinds of abuse – familial child sexual abuse and incarceration, physical and emotional abuse in three religious institutions. I would have liked to have read more about her post-Magdalene life, in which she became an activist and advocate for her fellow sufferers. But what Maureen Sullivan gives us is essential reading: we are by no means done with what church and State did to vulnerable women and children in this country, and books like this one are a timely reminder of Ireland’s reprehensible past.

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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.

Bestselling author Cathy Kelly is returning to HarperFiction in a three-book deal, negotiated by Lynne Drew, publisher, general fiction, with Jonathan Lloyd at Curtis Brown, for UK and Commonwealth rights. The marriage did not work out. “Then I had to bring my daughter up on my own, try and get bits of jobs. It was very, very hard. You always had this past in your mind. You couldn’t say where you were, where your education finished.” 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. 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.

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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. I was still Frances, and couldn’t have my own name, basically it was the same, just a smaller scale than New Ross,” she said. 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 laureate will be announced at the World Expression Forum (WEXFO) in Lillehammer, Norway on Monday, May 22nd.