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

Well, the overwhelming nature of the institution itself, it wasn't that it was high drama.

It was incredibly monotonous, focused on religion and labour and prayer and silence, and in some ways was trying to right it.

So you got that sense of it's not necessarily about physical beatings and physical punishments, though, of course, that features as well.

But the whole regime was to essentially what the nuns would say was to clear out their mind.

so that they could take custody of the senses, so that there was nothing left of them.

And one woman said, you know, who's in the book, Nora, she said, you realised even if you turned to spoke to someone, what did you really have to say to them, anyone?

You're from nowhere.

You have no name of your own.

You have no history.

And as far as you can see, you have no future.

So, you know, we know about the haircutting.

We know about the silence.

We know about the prayer.

But in some ways, to read it in this way and to have read the testimony over and over again, the overwhelming sense of personal erasure, of self-degradation, was so startling to me.

And the other feature of the regime was humiliation.

The nuns would insult them, put them down, belittle them in ways that were so acute, so...

sharp, so focused on someone's exact weakness.

That was the thing that really hurt and damaged people when they left, because the only thing worse than having to be, you know, pushed down and made known into a silent mass is to be pulled above the parapet and then to be insulted in front of everyone.

Well, that's how I came to this, because my previous research had been on prisons in Ireland from the 1970s.

And that was, you know, when you research prisons,

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