Louise Brangan
speaker
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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There's nothing to interrupt that system.
You do become absorbed by it.
So there was a few, a small handful of nuns who had written reflective pieces about their time being in these institutions, which was really, really revealing.
But also I have to say for them, you know, I don't know if you know anyone who left the nunnery or abandoned a vocation.
Like that was a risky thing to do.
They really, they were another kind of fallen woman as well.
Having at once brought pride on their family, you know, like it was a great thing once to have like a priest and a nun in the family.
And imagine your daughter comes home having abandoned your vocation.
It was incredible shame on a family.
So they were incredibly brave to have done it and then to have spent time writing and reflecting to sort of reveal what had happened to them.
Once people found out you were from or you had been sent to St Mary's, it was always usually St Mary's, but you'd been at a Magdalene Laundry, then it wasn't just that they judged you.
It seemed that people wanted to let you know that you had been stigmatised.
And some of the women described really cutting comments of being excluded.
And so, you know, I felt like a very important part of the story, not just to stay inside the institution, but to talk about it afterwards, because that's part of the lasting effect of an institution, not just that it happened to you and that you had to deny yourself and your name and everything about you for months or years, however long you were in that laundry, but then to leave and to have to deny that that happened to you, that the worst possible thing has happened to you.
And you have to pretend it never happened for fear you'd be socially exiled again.
And what came up across so much of the testimony was how people began to fib and to fabricate, to make up stories about their past life, about where they had been.
And, you know, there's one story from a woman from Carmel who, when someone asked, you know, she had been in an industrial school in Wexford and then had been sent to Sunday's Wells in Cork.
But essentially, as far as she's concerned, she is from Wexford.
She gets her first job working in a hospital.
She's in the tea room.
Showing 281–300 of 509 · page 15 of 26
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