Cillian Murphy: ‘Magdalene laundries were a collective trauma for people of a certain age’

Within days of each other, in September 1996 and 250km apart, one door closed in Ireland and another opened.

In Dublin, Ireland’s last so-called Magdalene laundry closed on Sean McDermott Street. Meanwhile in Cork, the Enda Walsh play Disco Pigs launched Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh as manic duo Pig and Runt. Their breathless 90-minute joyride travelled the world before a screen adaptation crash-landed at the 2001 Berlin film festival.

On Thursday in Berlin, the two doors from 1996 reopened. The Disco Pigs trio reunited for the world premiere of Small Things Like These, a mournful meditation on an Ireland many would prefer to leave in the past.

Adapted faithfully by playwright Enda Walsh from Claire Keegan’s prize-winning novella, Cillian Murphy plays Bill Furlong, a Wexford coal merchant whose unspoken grief collides with a stranger’s shame with untold social consequences for all.

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Delivering coal to the local convent in New Ross in 1985, Furlong sees a local woman making another delivery: her screaming daughter. Subsequent visits see his story turn as gloomy as the river Barrow’s dark as stout waters.

With strong performances and a sure touch by director Tim Mielants, the film is likely to be even more talked-about – and divisive – than the original novella.

When I started getting work in the 1990s you would see movies like this all the time, it was part of our culture and lives

Where Keegan increased the pressure paragraph by paragraph, the filmmakers employ relentless rhythms and searing sound design to ramp up the tension levels of a man – and a world – on the brink.

Straight off his demanding title role in Oppenheimer, what made Cillian Murphy take a deep dive into such dark material? The 47-year-old recalled brainstorming with his producing partner Alan Moloney for ideas that would bring him together with his favourite creative friends. When his wife reminded him of Claire Keegan, a favourite author, he found the rights to Small Things Like These were still available. Some 40 years on from the film’s fictional events, based on a familiar reality, what traces remain in today’s Ireland?

While Murphy says he doesn’t feel qualified to “speak for the nation”, he adds: “I do think that it was a collective trauma for people of a certain age, I think we are still processing that,” he said in Berlin on Thursday. “Art can be a really useful balm for that wound.”

Costar Eileen Walsh plays Bill’s gently chiding wife, who foresees the dangers lurking in her husband’s empathy.

Reuniting with her former Disco Pig helped boost their on-screen familiarity, she says, just as the subject had a remarkable familiarity to her own life. Just as in the Furlong house, Walsh grew up one of five daughters, with a coal merchant father.

“The family [in the film] are so representative of the nation of Ireland, that weight and that shame, guilt and control,” said Walsh, who visited this material before with her role in the 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters.

Another friend of Murphy who helped get the project to the screen is his Oppenheimer costar Matt Damon. In 2022 he set up Artists Equity, a new studio, with his friend and fellow actor Ben Affleck. In Berlin, Damon remembered his involvement with the Irish film began during a break in filming in the New Mexico Desert.

[ Cillian Murphy: ‘People in Ireland are kinder and more understanding and a bit more copped-on’ ]

“I’d already called Ben and told him what I was witnessing and how incredible it was,” he said. “Then a couple of days later Cillian told me, ‘I have my next movie I really want to do.’ And I said, ‘We are starting a studio. Can we be a part of it?’”

In Berlin, without even mentioning the word Marvel, Damon described this latest project as a conscious push to get serious films made again.

“When I started getting work in the 1990s you would see movies like this all the time, it was part of our culture and lives,” he said. “I am really grateful to be able to bring a movie like this into theatres. This film doesn’t pander, it asks the audience to care about cinema.”

At a press conference that was at times jarringly jovial given the film’s subject matter, there were few questions and, instead, many statements of praise. One German critic suggested, somewhat ambiguously, that “Ireland cannot have enough such films”. Meanwhile an Indian journalist said the film, and Enda Walsh’s script, “had everything you want from a film: grief, laughter, friendship”.

Talking to The Irish Times before the premiere, Enda Walsh said his job as screenwriter was to champion the “clarity and simplicity” of Keegan’s “brilliant three-act structure”.

“My sense was ‘I need to get the hell out of the way’,” he said. “When I read the book I began to feel very anxious, it builds up its own quiet anxiety about it as you walk with this person.”

Writing the script over three months, he thought often of his mother and how she kept her faith throughout the revelations of the 1990s. And he found himself reflecting on the class component of Catholic Ireland.

“Systemically, in manipulative way, we were aware of it and went along with it all because it was the ‘right’ thing to do,” he said. “You could feel better for yourself if you gathered around a collective notion that there is a group of women who are bad.”

At nearly 30 years’ distance, Walsh wonders in hindsight if his Disco Pigs characters back in 1996 were “trying to burn the old Ireland up, trying to go out there and make a new life and a new version of Ireland for themselves. But I think they failed”.

Maureen Sullivan doesn’t need any books or films to tell her about the Good Shepherd laundry in New Ross, Co Wexford. She survived it. Aged just 12 in the mid-1960s, she was sent there because of two men. One, her stepfather, had physically and sexually abused her for years. The second man, a local priest who heard of the case from a nun in whom Maureen confided, removed her from her Carlow home to New Ross.

Incarcerated for four years in three separate institutions, deprived of her constitutional right to education, a nun said later the priest kept the abused girl out of school for fear she would “corrupt the innocence ... of the other children if you mixed with them”.

The title of her harrowing 2023 memoir, Girl in the Tunnel, refers to where the laundry nuns hid their underage resident when inspectors called.

Now 71, she has read Small Things Like These and thinks the novella is “lovely and very well-written”. While she respects Keegan’s dramatic intent and artistic licence, she says it bothers her that Keegan chose to set her novella in New Ross in 1985 as the laundry there closed down in 1967.

Like many other survivors, she fears, too, the film will be “another lost opportunity” if, like the novella, it focuses less on the women inside and more on those outside.

“I think people are still ashamed of what they believed in and how they covered up,” she said. “The church only done what they got away with, families were to blame as well.”

[ Maureen Sullivan: ‘I don’t believe in these unmarked graves for survivors, still being treated like nobodies’ ]

While the film keeps the laundry women as ciphers, it adds layers of community complicity to brief novella scenes. His wife urges him to “remember what you have ... in this life there are things you have to ignore”.

A local pub landlady – with insinuating concern – urges him to “look after your family and your business”.

Maureen Sullivan’s life after the institutions took her to London and back again to Ireland, where “the past caught up with me”.

Maureen has her own theories about the harshness in Catholic Ireland, and is certain that not everything of the period has been confined to history.

“I think it all came largely from the land, who owns what,” she said, recalling Irish inheritance rows settled with people disappearing into asylum, mental hospitals or other institutions.

“Everybody turned a blind eye,” she said, “because they were afraid to speak out in case it caught on that they were up to something themselves.”

She is a regular visitor to New Ross today, working through her pain and trauma at its source. Next week she returns with a French documentary team, after similar visits with crews from Germany and Australia.

“Nothing from Ireland,” she adds. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

She notices a similar discrepancy in the reception to her memoir, with waves of empathetic callers from readers in Canada and “wonderful emails from America”.

“Their hearts are in the right place, they are disgusted,” she said. “In Ireland, people just ask, ‘how did you survive?’”

She is not the only one to notice such an emotional divergence towards survivors.

Prof Katherine O’Donnell of UCD’s school of philosophy is a member of the Justice for Magdalenes Research group. It pushed for the 2013 State apology to those who went through the Magdalene Institutions; the group also lobbied successfully for the Magdalene Redress scheme.

Despite three decades of revelations about Catholic institutions, many survivors struggle with how sporadic spells of public attention, shock and sympathy soon pass again.

Prof O’Donnell suggests this is less because of public feelings of shame about the period and more because nobody has been held to account. Everyone and no one was responsible, in a sense.

The difficulty of discussing the era and its consequences is compounded, she thinks, because Irish people won’t – or can’t – talk about class.

That Keegan’s novella does just that is, she thinks, its mark of genius. Though Bill Furlong employs men in his own coal yard, in the dark economic days of 1980s he is hugely dependent on the local nuns: not just for their custom but his social standing – and his five daughters’ education.

“When the economics of Ireland changed, a lot of people were able to stand up but back then a lot of people were precarious, even employers,” said Prof O’Donnell.

[ A Magdalene laundry and its clients: Holles Street, Fitzwilliam Tennis Club, Captain Americas ]

The class questions in Catholic Ireland go even deeper, she adds, given that a convent required would-be nuns to bring with them a middle-class dowry. Many of the women they supervised in laundries and homes, meanwhile, were lower class. One group of women, she says, were “doing a job for the nation” to contain another group of women.

“We can’t talk about this because we don’t know the questions to ask or who to hold to account,” she said. “Similarly we don’t have the grammar or vocabulary for how much class mattered – and matters still.”

As well as evasion of responsibility and class confusion, she sees a final impediment to mature discussion in our younger generations.

“My international students know all about the laundries and homes,” said the UCD professor, “but my Irish students, by and large, haven’t a clue.”

That may be about to change. After years of demands by survivors and their allies, the system of laundries and homes will be offered soon as optional modules in the Junior Certificate English and History course.

Even though no Irish release date for the film has been fixed, Prof O’Donnell is curious to see how it plays out in Ireland, particularly with younger viewers: “I think when the movie comes out, there may be a shock-and-awe moment.”

Access to adoption records, previously closed, are now available to survivors

After decades of official denial and obfuscation, even campaigners agree that progress – however slowly – is happening in Ireland at State level.

The Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme Act was signed into law last July, with the payments scheme scheduled to open this quarter and staff are being trained. Work continues, too, on the National Centre for Research and Remembrance on the site of the former Magdalene laundry on Sean McDermott Street.

Dublin City Council transferred ownership of the site in July 2022 to the Office of Public Works (OPW) for repair and surveying works; a master plan for the project was approved by Government in last July.

A public consultation process generated 200 submissions, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, with “a significant number from survivors”.

As well as a museum and place for reflection, the new centre will include social housing, educational and community facilities as well as a “research centre with repository of records”.

After controversy over recorded testimony to the Mother and Baby Homes commission, in particular reports evidence was destroyed, the department says it is willing to release information to individuals in line with data protection rules via a so-called “subject access request (SAR)”.

“Where ... the records relating to that person include an audio recording of their evidence before the Confidential Committee, the Department provides a copy of their audio recording to individuals,” a spokesperson added, with SAR applications possible via the department website.

As well as information requests, the department says it provides social work support on request, as well as counselling through the National Counselling service.

Access to adoption records, previously closed, are now available to survivors and the department says almost 10,000 applications for information have now been completed.

Even with this progress, survivors and campaigners are maintaining pressure for access to all religious order records to complete the picture.

“The records here are crucial,” said Catriona Crowe, a writer and former Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland. “Hopefully the Centre for Research and Remembrance will make this material available, openly and transparently, for everyone.”

As cinema-goers worldwide watch Bill Furlong make his fateful choice, Maureen Sullivan says she is not getting her hopes up, but will still go to see the film.

Perhaps enough time has passed for survivors of Ireland’s laundries and homes to be recognised, finally, for who are: fellow citizens whose human rights were violated. Achieving such an emotional breakthrough, shifting the foundation of Ireland’s public discourse from sporadic sympathy to honest empathy, would be no small thing.

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