Tinteán

Book review by Frank O’Shea

GIRL IN THE TUNNEL. By Maureen Sullivan. Merrion Press. 241 pp. €16.99

In books by Irish writers dealing with the Famine time or the War of Independence or stories set in the Troubles of Ulster, the reader has an idea what to expect. They will be uncomfortable reads but they are about times past or a place that in the south of Ireland we regarded as a different country. Then there are books set in the years when you were a young person in Ireland, when you felt you were living in a modern democracy. It was a time when you spent energy trying to master algebra and Irish, you went to Mass and marched in May processions and followed your county team. It was your youth, a good time in a beautiful country.

But then you come across a book that paints a different picture of those times. Up the road, in Carlow, barely a hundred miles away, a little girl, not yet ten years old was being beaten black and blue by her churchgoing stepfather; in time his abuse would become sexual and involve full rape. When she eventually told her well-meaning teacher, Sister Cecilia, that good nun did what you did in those times: she told the priest, the decision would be his. The child’s mother was brought in and within 24 hours, the poor child was on her way to what Cecilia told her was a new school in New Ross in a nearby county.

Except it was not a new school, though there was a school on the property to which she was sent. Her mother gave her a pencil case as a going-away present and she held it close until it was torn from her hand by a nun in this new place; she literally has never seen it since. It is time to give the girl her name Maureen, but that was taken from her in her new home and she would in future be called Frances. And, though she slept in the dormitory with the other New Ross schoolgirls, she was not sent to school. Instead, aged barely 12, she was sent to work among the 40 adult women in the laundry – a Magdalene laundry connected to the school by the tunnel which gives this shocking story its title.

It was explained to her recently that the reason she was not sent to school but instead used in the laundry and scrubbing floors and making rosary beads was because it was feared she would tell the children what had happened to her.

The Magdalene laundry would be periodically inspected by ‘men in suits … to check on conditions.’ When they came, Maureen would be locked out of sight in the darkness of the tunnel for hours on end while the inspectors composed reports that ignored the poor health of the overworked and undernourished women workers. ‘Bones and shrunken eyes. Yet along came these men in suits, who nodded and probably had a cup of tea and some cake with the nuns, and signed us away again and again.’

In 2012, Victorian writer Maureen McCarthy wrote a novel titled The Convent. The central character enters a convent, the book describing in some detail her strict postulancy and novitiate and early profession years. The order in question were the Good Shepherd nuns, who ran a Magdalene laundry in Abbotsford in inner Melbourne. The nuns in New Ross were also of the Good Shepherd order and here is how they are described, not in a work of fiction, but by someone they were caring for: ‘What absolute devils they all were. Every single one of them.’

Maureen spent two years in New Ross before being ‘trafficked’ to a smaller Magdalene laundry in Athy, run by the Sisters of Mercy. Her two years there were equally unpleasant, before she was passed on again to an institution for the blind in Merrion in Dublin. Her time here was more pleasant, though she had to learn how to speak to young women of her own age as well as to the residents, one of the latter teaching her to swim. After a year, she was surprised to learn that she could leave at any time and could earn money for her work. Only just seventeen, her life started.

This book is not great literature, which is probably one of its strengths. The story is so upsettingly shocking that polished prose might take the reader’s attention from what is being described. Now back living in her original home town Carlow, the author is involved in groups attempting to help survivors of abuse of all kinds.

Dear reader, you may not thank me for what I am about to say to you, but I say it as loudly as I can: if you read only one book this year, Girl in the Tunnel must be that book.

Frank is a member of the Tinteán collective.