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 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

So I had spent all these years reading archives, meeting survivors, seeing the realities of what had happened in the laundries, how they had been mentally degraded, how they had been put through this unrelenting 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ad nauseum religious regime.

And then to read the report and it kept saying, well, they weren't physically beaten.

It wasn't as bad as the industrial schools, which also has created this hierarchy between institutions, which has been very damaging between survivors to have been pitted against each other like that.

I find reading that and, you know, I put weeks aside to just read it really, really slowly because it is so enormous.

I found reading that so upsetting because I couldn't believe what I was reading.

I could not believe that they had met survivors, that they had taken evidence, that they had a privileged access to archives, the religious archives that we still don't have access to.

And what they had done was they reduced it down to what was provable.

And, you know, also they based their claims that the women could leave on the nun's official archive.

But even if the girls could have walked out the door, like some of the women escaped, some of the girls escaped literally by opening the door and running out onto the road.

But the reason they felt they couldn't escape is they were constantly told day in, day out, you are nobody.

Nobody is coming for you.

Nobody wants you.

You don't belong anywhere.

So they were mentally imprisoned there.

Yeah, so the story of Bridget and the story of Macaulay is really coalesced just in the course of my research.

So Bridget was brought to... I had Bridget's testimony, who was given to me by the person who took it.

And they had said Bridget had given this testimony, but she hadn't wanted it shared publicly because she was still so afraid of the nuns, but she had died since, so I could have it.

So...

You know, I was really honoured to have it.

And, you know, her life story is basically she was 12.

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