Nuns without compassion
Flowers at the gate to the Sisters of Charity Magdalene laundry in Donnybrook, Dublin.
ALAMY/NURPHOTO, ARTUR WIDAK
The laundries (which had existed in England and Scotland for two centuries) were institutions, run by nuns, for “fallen” women.
The premise of this book is that, in 1922, Ireland “began to chase a dream: to become the perfect Catholic nation”. This, to me, is hardly exact. Ireland emerged from an uprising, a war of independence and then a civil war, wrecked, poor and partitioned. A nation’s survival rather than perfection was what my parents’ generation sought in the 1920s.
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