At a wedding, a priest sings The Well Below the Valley, an old Irish ballad about an abused woman accused of infanticide. The camera pans around the room, lands on women of all ages listening with an unspoken understanding. Moments later, a young woman is lured away and raped by her cousin. But this is not the only crime. Not the one that will merit punishment, at least. That comes immediately after, when the young woman, Margaret, played by Anne-Marie Duff, tells her friend what has happened. Margaret then watches in horror as the news slowly spreads around the room of wedding guests in unheard whispers. The men all begin to glare at her. Not at her attacker – at her. The next day, Margaret is sent away to a Magdalene Laundry.
This is the opening to Peter Mullan’s brilliant and appropriately harrowing 2002 film, The Magdalene Sisters, and it would serve as my introduction to the Magdalene Laundries. Despite growing up in an Irish family in England, before seeing this film I had no idea what a Magdalene Laundry was. I have since learned that I wasn’t the only one. Far from it.
For those of you who don’t know, the Magdalene Laundries were state-funded, church-run institutions that imprisoned tens of thousands of Irish women and girls and forced them to carry out agonising unpaid labour for profit. Survivors have detailed horrific accounts of physical and psychological abuse. The women included, but were not limited to, unmarried mothers, women who had been sexually abused, those who were considered burdens on their families, and those who were perceived to be promiscuous.
If you didn’t know any of that, you also wouldn’t know that the last Magdalene Laundry closed in 1996.
To say it all occurred in a not-so-distant past doesn’t quite cut it. In 1996, Mission: Impossible was in the cinemas. The Spice Girls released their debut single (incidentally, my first cassette). And all the while, these deplorable places had been operating right under our noses. A known secret.
My shock was twofold. On one hand, it was the simple, visceral outrage about what had happened, what had been allowed to happen, to thousands of women and children in my parents’ home country. But what I really couldn’t get my head around was that I knew nothing about any of it and nor did anyone else I spoke to. My own family were, at best, vaguely aware that such places had existed, but didn’t know the details. Those who knew more seemed to do so only because of films such as The Magdalene Sisters or Philomena or Patricia Burke Brogan’s ground-breaking play Eclipsed, arguably the first work to shed real light on these institutions.
At this stage, I think it is important to say that I have no personal connection to the Magdalene Laundries, despite creating the BBC drama The Woman in the Wall, which is set against the backdrop of the laundries. Nor do I have any ties, that I know of, to any “mother and baby homes” – horrendous, abuse-filled institutions for unmarried mothers and their children, the last of which closed in 1998 – nor to any other similarly horrific institution that ever existed on the island of Ireland. Before I began writing this story, I had never knowingly met a survivor. So who am I to be writing about such a thing?
It is a question I have asked myself repeatedly over the decade I have been imagining this story. For a while, I wrote about anything else possible. But I could not forget what I had learned about the Magdalene Laundries, and every time I mentioned them outside of Ireland, people still had no idea what I was talking about. I needed to get this story out there in any way, shape or form that I could.
The Woman in the Wall begins when a sleepwalking woman wakes to discover a body in her house and has no idea if she is responsible for the apparent murder. With no clear memory of last night’s events, Lorna (played by Ruth Wilson) has no intention of turning herself in for a crime she may not have even committed. Instead, she embarks on an amateur investigation in which she plays both detective and prime suspect. But she can’t trust herself if she falls asleep again, so as she retraces her steps she vows to keep herself awake by any means possible. This voluntary insomnia begins to take its toll, and Lorna slowly loses her grasp on reality. Matters worsen when Colman Akande, a detective from Dublin (played by Daryl McCormack), turns up looking for the “missing” woman.
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If this doesn’t sound like the story of the Magdalene Laundries, it is because it was designed that way. Because so few people outside Ireland know about it, when I finally decided to write about this, I wanted to do so in such a way that would reach as wide an audience as possible. I felt that the best way of smuggling such a story under the radar was to dramatise it, to tell it in the form of this strange “did I do it?” detective story inspired by my love of Alfred Hitchcock and Edgar Allan Poe and the Coen brothers’ back catalogue.
Balancing this type of genre storytelling with authenticity and sensitivity was paramount. We extensively researched the history of the laundries, met with several survivors and worked closely with organisations that have helped shed a light on the Magdalene Laundries. The story we came to tell wasn’t based on any one person or place, but rather inspired by many stories from across the country. It was also imperative that we had brilliant women in front of and behind the camera. We brought on the directors Harry Wootliff and Rachna Suri, Wilson as our lead actor and executive producer, plus Susan Breen as producer.
This is a story that will unsettle a lot of people. Hopefully, for most, it will be for the right reasons. But whatever happens next, whatever the reaction may be, my hope is that some person in some corner of the world outside of Ireland will settle down to enjoy this unconventional murder mystery, and by the end of it all they will have learnt all about this relatively unknown but immensely important piece of recent Irish history.
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The Woman in the Wall airs this month on BBC One and iPlayer.