https://www.europesays.com/ie/689509/ Six-storey apartment block proposed on site of former Donnybrook Magdalene laundry – The Irish Times #apartment #Business #donnybrook #dublin #DublinCityCouncil #Dublin4 #Éire #ElectricVehicles #HousingCrisis #IE #Ireland #MagdaleneLaundries #PlanningPermission #SistersOfCharity
#magdalenelaundries — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #magdalenelaundries, aggregated by home.social.
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https://www.europesays.com/ie/599479/ Testimony on RTÉ One: Why didn’t Ireland do more to help victims of Magdalene laundries? – The Irish Times #Éire #Entertainment #IE #Ireland #MagdaleneLaundries #RTÉ
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No building over babies graves!
"Imagine that you lived in a country that respected women and babies...."
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BUDaDR8n4/
#Bessborough #mastodaoine #IrishPol #Cork #BabyAndMotherHome #ireland #infanticide #MagdaleneLaundries
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Heartbreaking 💔 "Decision to allow apartments be built on Bessborough site condemned as 'shameful'. Survivors and families have long called for the site to be excavated."
https://www.thejournal.ie/bessborough-site-apartments-planning-permission-7096390-Jul2026/
#Bessborough #MotherAndBaby #MotherAndBabyHomes #ireland #misogyny #MagdaleneLaundries #MagdaleneLaundry #mastodaoine #infanticide #900Babies #cork #CorkCity
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In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
– Bertolt Brecht, Motto / Svendborg Poems, 1939 -
(CW: abuse and exploitation of women)
July Book Review. The Fallen: The Lost
Girls of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence by Louise Brangan (Simon & Schuster, 2026)
https://jacobin.com/2026/07/magdalene-laundries-ireland-catholicism-branganhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_laundries_in_Ireland#The_Magdalene_Sisters
April Book review
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/apr/15/the-fallen-by-louise-brangan-review-an-enraging-account-of-irelands-magdalene-laundries -
This is shameful!
"Survivors fighting Bessborough apartment plans prepared to chain themselves to diggers
Cork City Council has granted permission for 140 apartments, a decision that is currently being appealed to An Coimisiún Pleanála, with a decision due by July 9"
https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-41870565.html
#Bessborough #mastodaoine #CorkCity #cork #MotherAndBabyHome #survivor #ChildAbuse #Ireland #900babies #IrishHistory #MagdaleneLaundries
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https://www.europesays.com/ie/513021/ ‘I came to Ireland all guns blazing … I didn’t know that was the least cool thing’ – The Irish Times #AbbeyTheatre #AnnieRyan #CaitríonaMcLaughlin #ClareBarrett #CornExchange #DominicWest #Éire #Entertainment #GenevieveHulmeBeaman #IE #Ireland #LennoxRobinson #LennyAbrahamson #LirAcademy #MagdaleneLaundries #MichaelWest
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https://www.europesays.com/ie/500263/ Sitdown Sunday: Inside the hantavirus-hit cruise ship · TheJournal.ie #7DeadlyReads #CruiseShips #Éire #Health #IE #Ireland #Longreads #MagdaleneLaundries #SevenDeadlyReads #SitdownSunday #TrueCrime
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The Fallen – The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland’s Legacy of Silence: A perversion of any basic humanity – The Irish Times https://www.byteseu.com/2003561/ #BookReviews #CatholicChurch #Ireland #MagdaleneLaundries
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https://www.europesays.com/2976150/ The Fallen – The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland’s Legacy of Silence: A perversion of any basic humanity – The Irish Times #BookReviews #CatholicChurch #ireland #MagdaleneLaundries
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https://www.europesays.com/ie/449309/ Census data reveals almost 9,000 people were confined to mental institutions in 1926 – The Journal #1926Census #asylums #BreakingNews #BreakingNews #Éire #FeaturedNews #FeaturedNews #Headlines #IE #IndustrialSchools #Ireland #LatestNews #LatestNews #MagdaleneLaundries #MainNews #MainNews #MentalHospitals #News #Prison #TopStories #TopStories
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https://www.europesays.com/ie/346766/ ‘When my dream of escaping Ireland was over, I felt like I hit rock bottom’ – The Irish Times #Australia #Clondalkin #Éire #Health #IE #Ireland #magazine #MagdaleneLaundries #MeMyselfAndIreland
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https://www.europesays.com/ie/280514/ ‘I have nowhere to go. I am frightened’ – The Irish Times #Disability #donnybrook #DublinCityCouncil #Éire #Health #IE #Ireland #MagdaleneLaundries #MentalHealth #MentalHealth #ResidentialTenanciesBoardPrtb #WorkplaceRelationsCommission
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https://www.europesays.com/ie/207796/ A 34-year secret shrouded in shame paved the way to teach children about the horrors of our past – The Irish Times #BreakingNews #BreakingNews #CatholicChurch #Éire #EuropeanParliament #FeaturedNews #FeaturedNews #Headlines #IE #Ireland #LatestNews #LatestNews #London #MagdaleneLaundries #MainNews #MainNews #MotherBabyHomes #News #TopStories #TopStories #tuam #weekendreview
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Sinn Féin: Urgent action needed to protect mother and baby home records – Kathleen Funchion MEP. “Sinn Fein MEP for Ireland South, Kathleen Funchion, has called on the government to fund a modern digital archive system to preserve Mother and Baby Home records. This comes following Tusla’s acknowledgement that the current database is built on unsupported legacy software, which is not fit […]
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https://www.europesays.com/uk/572058/ Irish Film Festival London 2025: Testimony #AoifeKelleher #Britain #Documentary #England #film #GreatBritain #IrishFilmFestivalLondon2025 #london #MagdaleneLaundries #RachelLysaght #Review #testimony #UK #UnitedKingdom
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In 2012, an Irish amateur historian, Catherine Corless, discovered that there were no burial records for the 796 children who died at the St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home in the west-of-Ireland town of Tuam, which was run by the Bon Secours order of nuns. Tests confirmed that they were buried in a mass grave at the site of St. Mary's, which was demolished in the 1970s. This led to an investigation into the Mother and Baby Home network, which estimated around 9,000 children and babies died across 18 institutions over a 75-year period. The mortality rate for children in these homes was around 15 percent. Now, excavation has begun at the site of St. Mary's. The Dial's Jade Wilson took a look at what happened there, and spoke to people who lived at the institution, and family members of those who may have died there.
#History @histodons #Ireland #IrelandNews #IrishHistory #Tuam #MagdaleneLaundries
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Small Things Like These, by Clare Keegan
Now on a bit of a roll, I’ve finished reading the third of the six novels I bought earlier this year. The first of these I read was Foster, by Clare Keegan who also wrote the latest, Small Things Like These. There’s much in common between these two works, not only in the beautifully spare writing style with which the stories are told, but also in the message hope of they find in grim circumstances.
The current book is revolves around a character called Tom Furlong, a hard-working and moderately successful timber and coal merchant who makes deliveries around his neighbourhood. It is set in the 1980s, in a time of economic recession, shortly before Christmas. Tom is happily married with five daughters. Tom doesn’t know who his father was; he was raised by a kindly Protestant lady. One day making his delivery round takes him to the local convent, where he sees the harsh treatment of young unmarried mothers in the Magdalene laundry run by the nuns; later visiting the same place to deliver coal he finds a young girl locked in the coalhouse, in the freezing cold. These and other episodes unsettle Tom, by making him think about how lucky he has been, largely thanks to the kindness of others, and how small things can make a huge difference to how one’s life turns out. What he does at the end of the story is not a small thing at all, and we aren’t told how it works out, but it is an act of kindness and he does it for all the right reasons, so we feel it will somehow all work out for the best.
The last novel I wrote about was a work of historical fiction, and so is this. Although it is set in the 1980s, that was a time in which social attitudes in Ireland were much more dominated by the Roman Catholic Church than they are now, the cruelty of the mother-and-baby homes being just one example. Keegan is at pains to point out that the convent is right next door to the local school, two aspects of the same system of social control.
Small Things Like These was published in 2021 and has already been made into a film featuring Cillian Murphy. I haven’t seen the film, unlike Foster in which case I saw the film based on it, An Cailín Ciúin, before reading the book. I must see the film.
P.S. At the end I found myself thinking of these lines from Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. -
Watched Small Things Like These. Great film, but horrifying to know that #MagdaleneLaundries were operating in #Ireland until 1998—a topic my colleague @ka-od.bsky.social has researched and written on extensively.
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Yesterday's Panel 2 at #BritCult2024 - Merle Tönnies & Dennis Henneböhl gave a great talk on the emotional rhetoric of the 2024 GB election, Andrew Wells on Liberty & Carolin Steinke on shame & the female body in Irish Nation-Building (#MagdaleneLaundries)
BritCult #AffectTheory
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“Free Labour”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-13/magdalene-laundries-and-the-free-labour-of-fallen-women/103235648Art by Rachael Romero shows the harsh life faced by women and girls in #MagdaleneLaundries.(#RachaelRomero)
A commemorative plaque honouring Magdalen women on a bench at St Stephen's Green Park in #Dublin.(Image: Wikimedia/Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP (Glasc) under CC licence 4.0)
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“I’ve never been able to get my head around the collective evil of those nuns.”
#MagdaleneLaundries #Ireland #Sexism #CatholicChurch #Torture
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/sep/24/unreleased-sinead-oconnor-song-to-play-at-finale-of-church-cruelty-drama -
Something good on the BBC. And, nice, and appropriate, to hear Sinead O' Connor in episode 2.
#TheWomanInTheWall #MagdaleneLaundries #MastoDaoine #Ireland #religion #SineadOConnor
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‘Deplorable places’: why one #BBC drama is shedding light on #Ireland’s #ChurchRun #abuse factories
When Bafta nominee #JoeMurtagh learned about the #MagdaleneLaundries, he realised he had to tell their tale. Here, he explains how he wrote new thriller #TheWomanInTheWall, starring #RuthWilson
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/aug/09/deplorable-places-why-one-bbc-drama-is-shedding-light-on-irelands-church-run-abuse-factories #Religion -
#Sinéad was right. That was 1992. The last of Canada's 139 residential schools for Indigenous children closed in 1998.
Via The Decolonial Atlas https://www.facebook.com/100080290562951/posts/pfbid02Kusz1JsTGfK5DNTj9131XnNPCRxYgYMqmxeMioM6vzstxFsMaNGztieTQdpCrzTil/?sfnsn=mo
The Magdalene Laundries of Ireland and the Canadian residential schools are cousins. #ResidentialSchools #Canada #MagdaleneLaundries #Ireland
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An open letter from Sinead O'Connor on the Magdalene Laundries report | The Irish Post
https://www.irishpost.com/news/an-open-letter-from-sinead-oconnor-on-the-magdalene-laundries-report-3212
#MagdaleneLaundries
#SineadO_Connor -
CW: One paragraph on genocidal "residential schools", in this case 400 years of the Catholic Church "teaching" mass murder on behalf of various governments.
I don't know how to explain Ireland's Magdalene laundries (originally supposedly set up as training schools), or the Catholic Church's other "residential school" mass murders, beyond basic facts. There were many "Magdalene laundries". In Tuam they murdered at least 796 infants, about one baby every two weeks during the 36 years it existed, plus the women murdered through intentional neglect and malnutrition. Babies' bodies were disappeared into sewers. Another mass grave of 222 infants was found at another site in Dublin. This was outsourced mass murder by a government targeting particular demographics of people in exactly the same way as all other "residential school" genocides. I have no expertise in this subject but even I know that the Catholic Church was using "residential schools" to mass murder indigenous people in the Americas from the 1600s onwards, e.g. in what is now Paraguay (tellingly the Catholic Church "educated" thousands of indigenous Guarani people in concentration camps without producing one indigenous Catholic priest). The Jesuits are still trying to spin these mass murders as a positive contribution to society - there are Jesuits, amongst others, employed today by the Catholic Church to twist history and theology into forms in which murdering Catholic priests and nuns didn't commit crimes or sins and aren't, according to their own religion, being tortured in hell for all eternity (they were "following orders", which sounds familiar...). I condemn all these intentional evils: all the orders, and all the murders, and all the cover-ups.
#reading #books #Ireland #CatholicChurch #MagdaleneLaundry #MagdaleneLaundries #MagdalenLaundry #MagdalenLaundries #ResidentialSchool #ResidentialSchools #Paraguay #Guarani
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I finished the 110 page novella Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan and it's brilliant, with not a word out of place. It's set in 1985 in the mind of one small town Irishman who, almost accidentally, lifts an accusatory finger against the abusive Magdalene laundries run by the Catholic Church (in reality they continued until 1996 - short rant under a cut in the next post). Keegan's only use of the word "legitimately", in the last sentence, is perfect.
Obligatory folk song note: The Croppy Boy sung within the story is the version (recorded by the Clancy Brothers) in which the young man is betrayed by his cousin and denied by his father: "My own first cousin did me betray / And for one bare guinea swore my life away" and "My aged father did me deny / And the name he gave me was the Croppy Boy." (A very different version of the song was used by James Joyce in Ulysses where Leopold Bloom attempts to avoid it.)
#reading #books #Ireland #CatholicChurch #MagdaleneLaundry #MagdaleneLaundries #MagdalenLaundry #MagdalenLaundries #FolkSong #FolkMusic #IrishMusic #IrishLiterature
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Visited #Abbotsford in #Melbourne today: founded by Irish nuns from the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in 1863, by 1901 it was largest charitable institution operating in the Southern Hemisphere. Its large #convent, chapel, Magdalen Laundry & industrial school are still extant. Saved via community efforts, it’s a popular arts centre now, but still grappling with its past, and how to interpret the diverse (traumatic and redemptive) stories of the women and girls who lived here.
#magdalenelaundries -
#MagdaleneLaundries in Ireland is one of the many amoral reasons the #CatholicChurch is so filthy rich, and also why it is losing members. 😡
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_Laundries_in_Ireland