LITTLE Maureen Sullivan expected some help when she confided in a nun that she had been sexually assaulted for three years by her stepfather.
Instead, the 12-year-old was thrown into a Magdalene laundry where she had to do back-breaking jobs from 6am to 9pm, with “no education, no playtime and no speaking at all”.
Ireland’s cruel religious institutions — named after the Biblical figure Mary Magdalene — are now the subject of BBC One drama Woman In The Wall, starring Ruth Wilson and Daryl McCormack.
It follows the story of Lorna Brady (Wilson), a woman suffering trauma caused by her time in a laundry.
There, she gave birth, only to have her baby taken away from her and taken to an unknown location.
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Maureen, now 71, from Carlow, says: “It was very cruel and evil how I was treated. That should not have happened to me.”
Tens of thousands of women across Ireland suffered abuse at the Magdalene laundries, which date back to the early 19th century.
The asylums housed orphans, unmarried mothers and their children, abuse victims and “fallen women” entering via the criminal justice system, reformatory schools and social services.
Mass grave
Once admitted to the workhouses, which were run as commercial laundries, the women would have to carry out unpaid labour.
Some victims were confined there from birth until death.
The asylums became the subject of a media scandal in the Nineties, when a mass grave holding 155 bodies was discovered on the land of a former institution in Drumcondra, North Dublin.
The last laundry closed in 1996.
Maureen was one of the youngest people to have been held in a laundry when she arrived at the Good Shepherd-run establishment at New Ross, Co Wexford, in 1964.
She recalls: “I’d been abused by my stepfather since I was about eight or nine and I had suffered for a few years.
“Then, I was 12, and a nun at school noticed that I was very pale, and I wasn’t communicating with the other girls and refusing to play.
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“I wasn’t acting like a normal child should do.”
Having come from a poor family, in which she would share a bed with three of her siblings, Maureen tells how a local nun “bribed” her with chocolate to open up about the abuse.
“Chocolates were not something you would see in my house. It was like black magic.
“She offered me some and I explained to her the terrible things that were happening to me at home.”
According to the law at that time, the nun had to inform the local priest of what Maureen had said.
He instructed her mum to allow Maureen to be taken away and a van arrived soon after to pick her up.
Shockingly, Maureen reveals: “There was not one word said to my stepfather. He was never even questioned about the abuse.”
Maureen was taken to New Ross, where she would wash clothes during the day and, “for recreation”, forced to make rosary beads and knit sweaters.
When there were big orders in, the women would work until 9pm, having been up since 6am.
Often, they were whipped or stabbed in the back with crucifixes to work harder.
Maureen says: “No playtime. No education. No care about how you feel, or why you are so sad. They didn’t care.
“I was a young child, I should have been in school, and I should have been out playing with other children.
“I should have been communicating with other children, but I was just a worker. They just worked me from morning to night.
“Nobody showed me one bit of love. Nobody spoke to me.
“They were cruel, horrible and evil people to treat a child like that, especially one that had been abused in the home.”
Over the following four years, Maureen was transferred to another laundry in Athy, Co Kildare, where she was made to remain silent, apart from the odd supervised visit from her mother, who had no idea what was going on.
She explains: “I couldn’t talk, or tell my mother the truth about what was happening.”
Later, Maureen was moved to a home for the blind on Merrion Road in Dublin, where the work was less gruelling but still unpaid.
She says: “I was looking after the blind people and changing their beds, cleaning their dormitory, and things like that.
‘Left on the streets’
“They were lovely people, kind people, and the nuns just didn’t see us.
“And we could talk to the other girls and I had a room of my own, like a little dormitory room.”
It was an unsupervised visit from her mother that prompted Maureen’s escape from the laundries.
When her mum realised that her daughter had not been getting paid for any of her work and could not afford to buy shoes that fit, she persuaded Maureen to speak to the nuns.
The teen told them: “My mum said I should be earning money. My shoes are killing me.”
She says: “My bag was packed that evening and I was left at Dublin’s Heuston Station the next morning to go back to Carlow.
“Where was I to go in Carlow? They never even asked. They couldn’t have cared less.
“I was left on the streets. I was homeless from that day. I couldn’t go back to my home again.”
Maureen was so terrified of seeing her stepfather that she sent a neighbour to her mother’s house to tell her she was at the end of the road.
“My mother said, ‘He won’t let you into the house. You may go and stay at your Granny’s.’
“My poor granny didn’t have a bed, so I had to sleep on the floor.”
Maureen then took a job in the White Star laundry in Carlow before eventually “getting a little bit of money together” to head for London with her brother, Paddy.
She had various jobs, including on a building site, where she “chucked on a cap” and pretended to be a man, until the Irish Centre in Camden helped her.
“I got a room and a couple of rotten jobs and survived,” she says.
“It was tough as I’d no skills. I didn’t know how to cook. I didn’t know how to look after myself, to take care of myself.”
She met her first husband and had a daughter, now 50, then remarried and had a 35-year-old son.
But Maureen blames her childhood trauma for the breakdown of both marriages.
She says: “My children had two fantastic fathers; they were great men. It was just me.
“I just couldn’t handle a relationship. I tried, but it has affected me so much.
‘I felt ashamed’
“I could never have that beautiful thing that people have out there between a man and a woman and have a happy relationship.
That was destroyed and taken from me.”
In 1988, things came to a head and Maureen tried to kill herself.
She says: “I couldn’t get a decent job because I didn’t have the education and it all hit me one day.
“I [took an overdose and] was taken into hospital. I got there in time and was pumped out, and the rules there were if you try anything like that you have to go for counselling.
“II didn’t know what counselling was.”
Maureen was 37 when she first opened up about her confinement in the Magdalene laundries.
She says: “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 to feel.”
The late Sinead O’Connor revealed in 1993 that she too had been sent to a Dublin laundry, at 14, because she was labelled a “problem child”.
The singer described it as “a prison” that “deprived” her of a normal childhood.
Maureen, now retired and living back in Carlow, has felt empowered by talking about her own ordeal.
She published a book, Girl In The Tunnel, and has been involved in marking the graves of women who had been in the laundries.
She is delighted that Woman In The Wall is on the BBC and will educate more people about the travesties.
The six-part series follows 2002 movie The Magdalene Sisters, and 2013’s Philomena, which saw Dame Judi Dench nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of survivor Philomena Lee and her 50-year search for her son.
Maureen says: “I met Philomena. The cruelty that poor woman suffered. I go to her son’s grave sometimes, and it’s just so cruel.”
Many of the Magdalene laundry survivors are still affected to this day.
She adds: “It’s difficult to be around lots of people. I prefer to be alone.”
- The Woman In The Wall continues on BBC One on Monday.
