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

And then they were told to wish to leave well enough for an owner.

You should be grateful.

How ungrateful you are for the nuns and what happened to you.

So even when they did speak out, they were met with walls of denial at every corner.

And that is still also part of the story of the Magdalene Laundry.

And I think, you know, we talk about the laundry and we talk about the silence and we talk about the shame and we talk about the denial.

But what I learned from reading the testimony of the survivors and from meeting survivors is those rules of the laundry seem to be the rules for everyone in Ireland.

You know, they were more concentrate within the laundry, but really the logic of the laundry was writ large in society.

It was all about silence.

You know, silence and decorum mattered over truth and compassion.

Yeah.

So, yes, the 1990s were this real decade of scandals, you know, and, you know, various priests being outed for having fathered children and for embezzling the church and all of these, all these various sex scandals.

And yet the Magdalene laundries remain relatively, not hidden, but they never reach the level of a scandal.

States of fear is about the industrial schools and the abuse.

That leads to the Ryan Commission and to the redress scheme.

So some of the women who had been in industrial schools go to the commission, give their evidence, and then they continued speaking about how when they were 14 or 15, sometimes younger, they were also sent to this other institution, but they were washing and scrubbing, where they were silent, where their hair was cut, and the commission said, well, that's not an industrial school.

So we don't want to know about that.

Nothing to do with us.

So they got their compensation for having gone to the industrial school, but still denial...

on the Magdalene laundries, because suddenly, apparently, there's a great separation of church and state, and the state could say, well, the church is actually a private institution, it's a private organisation, and we have no responsibility for them.

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