Dirty Secrets Hidden on Craggy Island

In the Irish Catholic State

' Mary Norris ended up in a Magdalene laundry for disobeying an order. A teenage servant in Kerry, she took a forbidden night off, and was taken away to a convent where the nuns had her examined to see was she still a virgin (which she was). From there she was dispatched to the Magdalene laundry in Cork. Immediately on arrival, the nuns changed her name – standard practice in all the Magdalene laundries. "When I went in there," recalls Mary, "my dignity, who I was, my name, everything was taken. I was a nonentity, nothing, nobody." '

Imprisoned, dehumanised and forced to work as a slave. Pour encourager les autres. Place in authority a corps of uniformed functionaries who are cut off from normal social interaction and deny their fundamental human nature as sexual beings and you have disaster in the making.