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
And as I was walking home, as you know, my brain began to clear, I realised...
The 56,000, that's the number of women who were sent to mother and baby homes, which was in the state report.
I think it was that 2020.
So here, this conflation that I was finding everywhere now had somehow been formalized in the big Hollywood film about Magdalene laundries.
And when I was writing the book, you know, and I speaking to my editor, they were saying, you know, just write, just write as if, you know, just say what the Magdalene laundries are.
And I was saying to them, I can't because every time I'm back in Ireland, I'm chatting to people and I say things like, you know, no babies were born in Magdalene laundries.
People used to say to me, are you sure?
I'm not sure about that.
And we have to sort of address this myth head on if we're ever to sort of clear the murk and to begin to understand what this history was all about.
Yeah, the term, you know, that came out of a discussion.
It's quite a stark title in a way, but it was to address that myth head on.
Because when you speak to survivors and you read their testimony, they find it incredibly hurtful to continuously be misrepresented as the fallen woman, which is, you know, the woman who became pregnant outside of marriage when that wasn't what happened to them.
And so I just thought that's really interesting that not only that there were sort of the rumours at the time or that the women in there were the worst of the worst and hence must be the fallen, but that somehow coming back to this point about small things like these and the conflation in our collective memory about what Magda Laundrie's were.
was that we continued to misrepresent them as the fallen, as these pregnant women outside of marriage.
And so I just thought to keep that concept in play, to think about it really directly.
But you're right, I guess I do sort of suggest that if anyone has fallen, it was the sort of collective proverbial us, you know, we'd fallen for Catholic politics.
Fallen for the idea that the good society is based on mass exclusion.
Fallen for the idea that certain people needed to be excluded or banished from society.
And that's not to blame people in any way.
My gosh, we can look around us today and see how easy it is to be convinced by sort of muscular populist politics.
Showing 41–60 of 509 · page 3 of 26
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