The Fallen

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE A haunting and brilliantly researched history which interrogates the culture of shame in Ireland, and tells the full story, for the first time, of the women confined within the walls of the Magdalene Laundries in the 20th century. Everyone familiar with Ireland’s history has heard of the Magdalene Laundries, places where “fallen” women were sent for reform, but few understand that the Laundries were part of a larger carceral system in Ireland. There were prisons, but also asylums, industrial and reformatory schools, Mother and Baby Homes, and County Homes, each of which operated alongside the Magdalene Laundries. Taken together, this system of confinement held over one percent of the Irish population, a staggering rate that outstrips the current rate of mass incarceration in the United States. The Magdalene Laundries specifically targeted towards women, and the actions that could necessitate a woman’s reform were vast: wearing a short skirt, smoking, defiance, or, most troubling, pregnancy out of wedlock. Women were taken off the street, admitted by their families, or sent by the state when a girl had no family. Once a woman entered the system, it was almost impossible to leave. In writing this book, Louise Brangan has pulled the curtain back on the insecurities of a young nation, showing that Ireland believed that if women could be controlled, so could an entire populace. She shares the stories of the girls who were kept there: Eileen, who was born into a Mother and Baby Home; Carmel, who was forced to take a new name when she entered the Laundries; Brigid, so broken by twenty-seven years on the inside of a laundry, who discovered that once she was released she was completely unsuited to life in everyday society. These stories, taken directly from the historical record, restore the dignity of the women who were sent away and recontextualize the decades that the Laundries acted as a de facto carceral system for the women of Ireland. This has remained one of the darkest and most misunderstood periods of recent history. The Fallen compels us not only to confront this shameful past, but to ask a deeper question: what do we choose to remember?

Dr. Louise Brangan is an Irish academic who researches injustice and punishment. She is a 2023 BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, the playwright of The Ireland We Dreamed Of, and winner of the 2024 RSL Giles St Aubyn Award. She lives and works in Scotland.