Content Warning: The source material contains depictions of physical and sexual violence against minors. It also depicts suicide, drug abuse, acts of terrorism, violence, and murder.

In Ireland, through much of the 20th century, state-funded institutions that were run by the Catholic Church perpetrated widespread abuse of women and children. This institutional abuse played out against a backdrop of civic tensions and violence stemming from English colonialism and its aftermath.

In the 1800s, poverty and starvation were rampant in Ireland since the English colonial forces redirected resources to the Anglo-Irish upper classes and to England. From this period and through the early 1900s, institutions like industrial and reformatory schools emerged with the aim to help Irish children. They housed children who were orphaned, separated from their parents due to financial hardship, or because the state deemed their households to be unsafe or immoral. Usually, the conditions in these institutions were appalling.

The laundries were church-run workhouses where “immoral” women—often young, unwed mothers—were incarcerated. These young women were ostensibly meant to learn new skills that would grant them independence; but, in reality, this institution became a source of free labor for the church. The mothers were placed in different institutions from their children, and they didn’t have access to information about each other.