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The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland's Legacy of Silence

byLouise Brangan

Louise Brangan reconstructs the lives of women and girls confined in Ireland's Magdalene Laundries through survivor testimony, archives, and institutional records. She examines the network of religious orders, families, courts, employers, and state authorities that enabled unpaid labor, punishment, separation, and silence. The book follows both confinement and the long struggle for recognition after the laundries closed. Brangan shows that abuse was not an isolated religious scandal but part of a wider social system regulating sexuality, poverty, disability, and female independence, whose consequences remain present in Irish public life.

Publisher

The Bodley Head

Publication date

2026-04-30

Format

Hardback

Pages

368

ISBN

9781847928467