The Fallen

In twentieth-century Ireland, an ideology prevailed amongst those in power: moral decay threatened to undermine the nation’s identity and needed to be purged from the streets. By 1951, over 1% of the Irish population were incarcerated. Irish women were not held in prisons, however, but detained in a network of institutions, from Mother and Baby Homes to industrial schools.

The Magdalene Laundries were the deep end in this regime of social control. The Laundries held over 10,000 women and girls – the homeless, sex workers, the disabled, girls from care homes, foster homes or orphanages, those who had been abused. Each of them was perceived to have fallen in some way. Their names were taken. They were forced to maintain a strict rule of silence. And then they were put to work: they washed, they scrubbed, they spun and they pressed, labouring in often indefinite captivity in an attempt to repair and prepare their souls.

In The Fallen, Louise Brangan explores why the Laundries existed, why they persisted and why they eventually closed. Drawing on first-hand accounts and survivors’ testimony, she recovers the lives of women and girls on their harrowing journeys into, through and beyond their walls. She also tells the stories of the nuns who ran them, the communities who lived alongside them, and the local businesses who paid them to wash their linen.

When the gates of the last Laundry were locked for the final time in 1996, it was with a whimper not a bang, shrouding the history in shame. The secrets were sealed off, their violence forgotten. As Ireland is starting to reckon with this horrific past, Brangan compels us to confront a deeper question: what does it truly mean to remember?