Louise Brangan

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509 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Louise Brangan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Women's Podcast · Louise Brangan: Inside Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

You don't come across many good news stories.

But what I found in the 1970s in the prisons, they began to get this real progressive streak.

And I've interviewed all the guys who ran the prisons, read all the archive material and the letters.

And they were saying things like, being in custody too long turns someone into a vegetable.

Better to have someone out in the community than to detain them for a long time.

So they created this system of temporary release.

They were releasing the lads out of the prison, no matter what their crime was.

If they would say...

Oh, is your son playing in the big game at the weekend?

Oh, it'll be important now his dad is there to watch him.

Oh, do you want to go see your sick mother?

So the prisons, the men are coming and going from the prisons because this idea that incarceration is bad for a human being, it's bad for families, bad for communities.

And I wrote that and I knew that, as I said, that was like a good news story.

But I am Irish and I knew that this other shadow land existed.

And when I began to research the Magdalene laundries, like they are like prisons, except in a prison, you know, when you're getting out.

When a prison, you get to keep your name.

In a prison, people are helping you, giving you education or giving you training so that you can re-enter society.

And what the probation document said was, well, the difference between a prison and a Magdalene laundry is that a Magdalene laundry is about a permanent renunciation of the world around you.

They're accepting that this was essentially indefinite incarceration.

One line that really stayed with me from the archive of testimony was this one woman who, you know, she had grown up in an industrial school, had moved on with her life.

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