IN Whispering Hope, five women speak for the first time about the horrors of being trapped in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, asylums that housed ‘fallen women’ in Ireland during the 20th century. Nancy Costello, Kathleen Legg, Diane Croghan, Marie Slattery and Marina Gambold were confined in the Magdalene laundries during the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. The first such laundry was set up in 1765, and the last one closed its doors in 1996.

The book is a first-person narrative of each woman’s experience and of Steven O’Riordan, a young documentary maker who devoted years to found the Magdalene Survivors Together charity, documented their stories and forced the Irish state to acknowledge the atrocities these women were subjected to through an apology and compensation.

We find the source of the title in Taoiseach (Chief) Enda Kenny’s state apology to the Magdalene women in 2013: “At the conclusion of my discussions with a group of the Magdalene Women, one of those present sang ‘Whispering Hope’. A line from that song stays in my mind — ‘When the dark midnight is over watch for the breaking of day’. Let me hope that this day and this debate herald a new dawn for all those who feared that the dark midnight might never end”.

While the apology may have provided closure to the survivors of the laundries, the stories the five women share in this book are heart-wrenching. The Magdalene laundries were named after the redeemed prostitute, Mary Magdalene, and originated as workhouses run by the Catholic Church to reform ‘fallen women’. They soon expanded, however, to take in girls considered promiscuous, unmarried mothers, petty criminals, the mentally unwell and even girls who were seen as burdens on their families. When the Irish state became independent, it chose to pass on many welfare obligations to the Catholic Church and the Magdalene laundries became slave-labour camps run by nuns who received money from the state for each woman incarcerated there.

Often locked into the laundries as teenagers, the women were made to work endless hours with dangerous machines, forbidden from speaking to each other, underfed and given no compensation. They had no contact with the outside world beyond the occasional visitor whom they met with one of the nuns in attendance, and when they went out of the laundry, they were again accompanied by one of the nuns. The women grew up believing they were in the laundry because they deserved to be.

O’Riordan discovered that many of the laundry buildings had mass graves; some of the women had no death certificate while others had broken bones. He narrates, “When the laundries finally closed, some of the Magdalene women were so institutionalised they were unable to live independently. Today, they still live in institutions operated by the state, run by nuns.”

The five women, who are now between the ages of 56 and 79, recount the horrific physical, emotional and psychological abuse they suffered. Kathleen kept her secret for 60 years because of what she describes as “such overwhelming shame”. She writes: “I had never told anyone that I was once in a Magdalene laundry. Not a soul. I never even told my husband. We were married for 38 years and I never breathed a word of it”. Abused, albeit not physically, Kathleen said, “They were never violent; they didn’t have to be when they had such absolute power over us. It was the mental cruelty — and their total disregard for our welfare — that made us hate them so much.”

Marina was delivered to the laundry by a resentful aunt after her mother and grandmother had passed away. Separated from her brothers, one of whom was sent to an equally inhuman institution for boys, she lived at the laundry until an uncle rescued her.

Nancy had no rescuer; sent to the laundry from a state orphanage because she told a doctor that a nun had split open her chin, she suffered through what she calls “all that terrible hard work”. When ill with an earache or neuralgia, she was taken to a brutal dentist who pulled out multiple teeth on each visit until most were gone. Nancy writes: “I cry every time I think about losing my teeth. It breaks my heart. All those teeth gone, and there was nothing wrong with them. It’s as if it wasn’t enough to take away my childhood and my freedom. They had to take my teeth too.”

Once brave enough to walk out of the laundry, Nancy discovered that life without money, food and shelter was even harder and was forced to return. The nuns who hated her handed her over to a farmer who told her, “I was dying to get an unwanted bastard like you; someone I could kick around”. Almost killed by the farmer, Nancy ran away.

Diane, too, ran away. She writes, “I wasn’t let out of the laundry. Sometimes I really wonder if I ever would have been if I hadn’t taken my chance to escape — but escape I did! I was 15 years old”. Fifteen and alone on the streets, Diane still does not know how she reached Dublin from Wexford. A psychologist told her that she had “blanked it out”.

Marie’s story is as traumatic and yet unique. She was sexually abused by her grandfather and after he died, she was sent to a laundry by her parents. Thought wild, she was shunted from one laundry to another until she was in the convent at Sean McDermott Street. She recalls, “Soon I realised this laundry was a holiday camp compared to the last one. For one thing, everyone in our building was young. There was nobody older than 16. For another, we didn’t have to work all day. We didn’t have to make rosary beads or scapulas, and we had more free time. Sometimes we played our version of tennis in the yard.” Marie left the laundry when she was 15. Raped on the streets, she made her way home, only to discover she was pregnant and was sent to another laundry by her parents. Her first child was taken by the nuns and given up for adoption. Marie then developed a drinking problem. She writes: “I’m not drinking now, but it’s never far from my head. The temptation is always there. I think of the nuns, and want to drink and forget it all.”

The Maggies believed that they were in the laundries for a reason: society neither believed that the conditions were so atrocious nor thought of the women incarcerated there as victims. It took O’Riordan’s obsession with finding and chronicling the survivors’ individual narratives into a powerful tool to bring about a state apology. The horrific stories belong to the dark ages and it is unreal to think that the last laundry was operational less than 20 years ago. Ultimately though, the book is one of survivors reaching out and forcing the world to recognise what they went through; it is about women coming together and finding a voice.

Whispering Hope: The True Story of the Magdalene Women

(HISTORY)

By Nancy Costello, Kathleen Legg, Diane Croghan, Marie Slattery and Marina Gambold with Steven O’Riordan

Orion, UK

ISBN 978-1409158295

304pp.