The night our family rescued 15 women from a Magdalene Laundry

At a time when most Irish people chose to ignore the thousands of girls and women locked up in Magdalene Laundries, one Galway family went to extraordinary lengths to break 15 young women free from one such ‘prison’.

It was a feat that could have come straight from a heist movie involving an insider, a getaway van and a heroic family in the west of Ireland in the early 1960s.

A new two-part RTÉ series, Ireland’s Dirty Laundry, details the desperate escape attempts by young girls incarcerated in the laundries, which often ended up heartbreakingly in failure, with gardaí returning them to the religious orders.

Along with new identities, the documentary reveals that female inmates, some just young girls, were assigned a number prefixed by the letter PEN, which stood for penitent, meaning someone who is repenting.

Labelled the “Maggies”, the women were sent to the laundries where they worked for nothing, some for their entire life, simply for being unmarried mothers or regarded as morally wayward or for transgressions such as going to the cinema twice in a week.

Inside the walls, they described being stripped of their clothes, ordered to take male names like Joseph and Francis, and being subjected to forced labour, in some cases child labour.

One of the survivors tells RTÉ she was so young she was lifted and placed into the laundry baskets to hand out the sheets to other women.

The survivors detail a daily grind of round-the-clock work and prayers in a prison-like system amid extreme verbal cruelty and physical abuse.

They reveal how they found out later how desperate letters sent to relatives telling of the inhuman conditions were never posted.

Many died inside the walls, but the RTÉ documentary details the extraordinary exploits of one family prepared to challenge the power of the Church.

It began when Ena McEntee, who lived in a corporation estate in Mervue in Galway city with her husband Hugh and her three young sons, got a job inside the Magdalene Home Laundry in the city around the end of 1963.

The church narrative was that the laundries housed fallen women atoning for sin, but Ms McEntee was appalled by the plight of the captive young women she worked alongside.

Hearing her stories around the dinner table at home, her sons, Andy and Hugo, who were in their early teens, hatched an elaborate plan to break the girls out of the laundry before sharing it with their parents.

It involved their mother opening the laundry door to let the girls out before they were then taken down an alleyway at a sprint by the boys to a waiting van driven by their father with a third brother, Declan, poised to open the back door.

“Mum opened the inner door, I think it was four girls the first time,” recalls Andy, who was 12 or 13 at the time. “I never saw anybody as scared. I thought we were scared until I saw these girls coming down. We ran up. Hugo was standing at the end of the walkway and he took two girls hand in hand and I took two and we went back to the van.

“We drove down by the side of Eyre Square, straight up past the front of the laundry. We parked outside the house, everyone piled in. There was an utter sigh of relief.

“We thought we were breaking every law in the book. We were not breaking the law at all. We thought we were stealing these girls. We were breaking them out of prison.”

Over the next few weeks, the girls stayed inside the house, making tea and listening to the radio until the family got to the second stage of the plan.

“In the meantime, either they and my parents were contacting people they were associated with in England or whatever and my father was making arrangements to get them safely away,” Hugo says.

One evening, the girls piled into the back of the van and were driven to Athenry railway station.

“My dad looked after the financing, the girls got on to what we called the boat train and they went to England that way,” Hugo adds. “We were responsible for putting at least 15 people on the feeder train.”

Eventually, the religious order rumbled their operation. “The nuns finally copped on it had to be an inside job and the only outsider that was inside was my mother,” Andy says.

Hugo remembers his mother got money and a letter from the laundry to say her services were no longer needed. “She read it to us. In celebration, she went down and got a Guinness for my father. We laughed and laughed at the success we had. At this stage, we didn’t care who knew what. We were so happy — and it was over.”

The documentary examines the web of shame and deep church control that led to the State conspiring with families, parishes and religious congregations to keep and enslave females in the laundries. About 12,000 lived and worked in them from 1922 until 1996 when the last one, in Dublin’s Seán McDermott Street, closed.

In the documentary, elderly women tearfully describe their shock and confusion at being young and being sent away, sometimes as a result of domestic and sexual abuse. “You were constantly being told, ‘Nobody loves you. Nobody wants you. Your mother dumped you’,” Maureen Sullivan says.

James Smith, associate professor at Boston College, said families colluded in abandoning female relatives.

“Families dumped daughters and aunts and sisters who were deemed ‘in the way’ or perhaps the objects of shame,” he says.

‘Ireland’s Dirty Laundry’ is on RTÉ One on Wednesday at 9.35pm

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