Being imprisoned in a cruel Magdalene laundry left me with ‘no soul’

It is hard to imagine how Maureen Sullivan rebuilt her life after enduring devastating trauma as a child. Following the death of her father, she was raped repeatedly by her stepdad, and when she spoke out about what happened after four years of abuse, she was incarcerated.

Maureen, now 73, was one of the youngest girls to enter the Magdalene Laundries – institutions run primarily by Catholic religious orders where so-called ‘fallen women’ were sent. Inmates, often young and vulnerable, were forced to work in harsh conditions, usually doing laundry for local businesses, the church, or the state.

Maureen was sent to the Magdalene Laundry at St Mary’s Convent, New Ross, County Wexford, where she was forced to work long hours scrubbing floors and washing clothes, and denied an education. She was ostensibly put there for her own safety, but the experience proved to be the final nail in the coffin of her childhood, which had already been devastated.

Speaking from her home in Carlow, Ireland, about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather Marty, she tells Metro: ‘I was so full of fear, it felt like my body was burning. It’s a very horrible way to feel. And I couldn’t understand what was happening to me, couldn’t put a name to it. He was pure evil.’

He warned Maureen that if she told anyone what was happening, nobody would believe her. ‘It’s what paedophiles do. They will groom a child and call them a liar. If you say that you are hurting, or something has happened, they will say: “Sure, don’t mind her. She’s a liar.”’

So the little girl kept it inside, all the while enduring pains in her hips and abdomen and cramping so bad she would vomit. It went on for years until one day, at the age of 12, a teacher approached Maureen and took her into her office for a private chat.

‘She said: “Maureen, you really look pale and unwell, and I’m concerned about you. I know something is wrong.” She had a lovely box of Black Magic chocolates and gave me a few. I’d never seen lovely sweets like them before, and I started talking,’ Maureen remembers.

The Priest was called and a letter given to her mother. It was decided that she was to go immediately to live at the convent at New Ross. Relieved to have escaped Marty, she thought she was going to get an education and come home at weekends, but when she arrived, Maureen realised life was to be very different.

As a survivor of sexual abuse, she was kept away from other children. ‘Because I could “corrupt” their little minds’, she remembers. ‘How cruel is that? I wasn’t able to talk to them or play with them. I was stripped of everything a child should have and was left with nothing.’

Instead, there was hard labour and long days. Maureen was woken at 6am and began the day by washing, polishing and shining corridors, windows and doors. She would then attend mass, have breakfast and go on to spend the day working in the Laundry. At 5pm she would have tea and then attend ‘recreation’.

‘Recreation was making rosary beads and sweaters for Lourdes, Rome and holy places across the world,’ she remembers. ‘There was no such thing as recreation. We would do that until bed at 8 o’clock. We’d be exhausted. They didn’t need to worry about us talking or whispering to one another, we didn’t have the energy.

‘You’d then go to sleep and have nightmares about whether you’d got it right. It was horrible; no play time, no sitting and having a chat… It just didn’t happen,’ she adds.

Maureen would work five days a week, and the weekends would be spent cleaning the church or the nuns’ apartments. Her hands were left sore and burnt from the soul-destroying work and she was given a new name; Frances.

‘You were left with no soul. You had nothing. It was very cruel,’ she remembers. ‘It felt as bad as the original abuse I’d suffered. I was thinking – “why did I tell my teacher? Why did I open my mouth?” Isn’t that sad?’

Maureen’s presence in the laundry was kept secret from the outside world; if inspectors or other visitors arrived, she was put in a tunnel to hide. Once, aged 14, she was locked in for hours and forgotten about. She became hysterical and it took her days to get over the traumatic incident.

After two years, the young girl was transferred to another laundry in Athy, County Kildare and then to a school for blind people in Dublin.

‘My education was taken from me, my hair was cut, I was used as a child slave. I was trafficked from laundry to laundry and my name was changed,’ she remembers starkly. ‘It really damaged me for years. I should have been enjoying life in my early years, but I didn’t. It was worse than prison, because we had no rights.

‘After that, I didn’t cope very well. I never thought anything of myself, it destroyed all the enjoyment I should have had. I never celebrated a birthday or anything about my life. I couldn’t warm to or trust anybody. It was horrendous what was done to me.’

Maureen left as soon as she could, aged 16, and took the boat to London with her brother Patrick where the pair decided to build a new life.

They slept in Argyll Square, Kings Cross, with no sleeping bag, pillow or money to their name. When, after two months they found the Irish Centre in Camden Town, they were given a room.

Without an education, Maureen was limited to jobs in laundries and restaurants.

‘I was getting more and more depressed and getting flashbacks. Memories of my stepfather, of what he did. Memories of the laundry and the way I was treated. Of sleeping in a park and how anything could have happened to me,’ she explains.

She married soon after she arrived in London andhad two children, but Maureen admits she was miserable. Just 19 when she had her daughter, she was so full of ‘fear and confusion’ she struggled to parent. Her son came 15 years later.

By the time she was 34, Maureen made an attempt on her life and ended up in hospital, where, for the first time, she started receiving therapy. She has had counselling every week ever since and has slowly managed to rebuild her life.

Her mother, who had ten children by Marty, left him shortly after her daughter was incarcerated, but when Maureen was in her thirties she learned her stepfather was terminally ill and he’d asked for her to come and see him.

‘I went into the hospital room in private, because I didn’t want to hurt his other children. It wasn’t their fault,’ remembers Maureen. ‘I told him I couldn’t forgive him for what he did. He replied: “Oh, you were a silly little girl. I was only getting you ready for the outside world.” Imagine saying that? It’s sick. I told him: “I hope you rot in hell” and left the room.

‘I felt nothing when he died.’

In 1995, Maureen moved back to Carlow to be with her mother and determined to help others like her, she started working as an advocate for laundry survivors.

She also joined Justice for Magdalenes, the group that helped bring about an apology from the Irish State, and has been involved in honouring the names of women of the laundries who were buried in unmarked graves.

Maureen helped unveil the the Journey Stone at the Little Museum of Dublin in 2022, to honour ‘the great courage, integrity and dignity of the women’ who had been in the laundries. The following year she published The Girl in the Tunnel about her experiences, in the hope that it would help other survivors of abuse.

Despite her initial parenting struggles, she and her children have grown very close. However, even now, people are trying to force Maureen into silence, she says.

‘I was invited onto Oprah and somebody emailed to try and stop me going on. People say I make stuff up, that I’m a liar. Really nasty stuff. The latest rumour is that I am a bigamist,’ she adds.’I don’t know why they do it. I think they begrudge me speaking out, but I don’t care. I will never stop talking about what happened to me and other survivors.’

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