This edition of the After Dark podcast impressed me because it showed that what we English think we know about Ireland's Magdalene laundries is wrong. The guest expert Dr Louise Brangan of the London School of Economics emphasises that their inmates were not generally young women who'd had a baby outside marriage. Many had been admitted at a younger age than that for trivial reasons.
It also bears out much of what James Hawes said in his The Shortest History of Ireland. As I wrote in my review of this book:
Hawes shows that the Catholic dominance of Irish society was a post-independence creation and did not fully establish itself until 1937. This dominance, with its satanic trio of institutions – industrial schools, mother and baby homes, Magdalene laundries – was the work of Éamon de Valera, the politician who dominated the first 50 years of the independent Ireland, and Archbishop John McQuaid of Dublin.
Louise Brangan says that in the 1920s the newly independent Republic of Ireland had a young population and there was freedom in the air. It didn't stay there for long.
This is a painful subject but it's a good podcast and gives an important insight into Irish history.
A final point... After Dark is one of the podcasts that appears on BBC Sounds. But if you look on its index page there, you will not find that this edition. Under 27 August 2026, the day it was posted, you will find instead Danny Robbins on "History's greatest ghosts".
I wonder if that is political or religious censorship?
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