Madeleine Bridget Walsh was 17 years old in the spring of 1960, when she discovered she was pregnant. Terrified of bringing shame upon her family, she determined to leave home and applied to Miss Brophy’s Catholic Employment Bureau, an agency that arranged work placements for Irish girls in England. Miss Brophy’s agreed to pay Madeleine’s fare to London and secured a position for her as a housekeeper in the home of a Jewish family in Golders Green.
As Madeleine’s pregnancy progressed, she began to make desperate plans for her labour. Alone and afraid, she couldn’t bear the thought of presenting herself to a doctor and decided that the best course of action would be to go down into a tube station: a warm, dry place to give birth, where she could wait to be found and brought to hospital. But as her belly began to swell, Madeleine realised she would have to make arrangements much sooner. With nowhere else to turn, she went to St Edward the Confessor Roman Catholic Church in Golders Green and told the parish priest that she was pregnant. To her surprise, he seemed unfazed by her confession and she realised that he must have been accustomed to dealing with Irish girls in her “condition”.
As she spoke about the circumstances of her son William’s birth and death, it was clear that, though more than 60 years had passed, the pain and trauma of those terrible weeks was as acute as ever
The priest gave her the address of The Crusade of Rescue, a charitable organisation with its headquarters in Ladbroke Grove. Founded in 1859 to provide residential care for poor Catholic children, the organisation had since shifted focus and become a registered adoption agency. From the 1930s to the 1970s, The Crusade of Rescue was involved in the repatriation from Britain of pregnant Irish women in order to have their children placed for adoption. During this period, the Irish government, with the Catholic hierarchy, paid for at least 2,434 women to be returned from Britain to mother and baby homes and other institutions in Ireland.
The charity made arrangements to have Madeleine sent to Ireland. She arrived into Cork Harbour, where she was met by a man in a suit, who put her into a black car and transferred her to Bessborough mother and baby home. For the next three months, the girl who still didn’t know where babies came from worked the night shift in the labour ward.
RM Block
On October 24th, Madeleine’s waters broke. Throughout the 72 hours of her labour, she was not seen by an obstetrician. Instead, she was attended to by two nuns, who locked her hands in manacles and insulted her every time she cried out in pain. At some point, she was given an injection. Madeleine doesn’t know why or what substance it contained but she does recall hearing the nuns squabbling about whether the needle had been sterilised.
Madeleine’s son, William Gerard Walsh, was born on October 26th, 1960. Though he fed well and appeared to be in excellent health, within two days his condition began to deteriorate. Madeleine too was sick and incapable of advocating for William when he was moved to the so-called “dying room”. She cried out for her boy but he was never brought to her and, though Madeleine’s health improved following a course of antibiotics, she was rarely allowed to spend time with her son during his final weeks in Bessborough. She recalls sitting in a freezing corridor trying to warm William’s tiny feet. She described her “harrowing” attempts to feed him as she watched her tiny baby wither away. When William was moved to St Finbarr’s hospital, Madeleine was told that she couldn’t visit him. When he died, she never saw his body. William was six weeks old, one of 923 children who died at the Bessborough mother and baby home.
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I interviewed Madeleine in May of last year. As she spoke about the circumstances of her son William’s birth and death, it was clear that, though more than 60 years had passed, the pain and trauma of those terrible weeks was as acute as ever. So, too, was the shame she felt as a result of her pregnancy and the treatment meted out to her by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Madeleine was concerned that, if she spoke publicly about her experience, there might be people at home in Ireland who would judge her. She wasn’t sure that she wanted her face to be shown in the documentary.
The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (2021) found that, between 1922 and 1998, Madeleine and William were among 56,000 mothers and 57,000 children admitted to 14 Irish mother and baby homes. An additional 25,000 women were admitted to County Homes, which often functioned similarly for unmarried mothers.
These are not tales from the distant past. Throughout Ireland, the UK and the United States, there are men and women, some not yet in their 40s, who were separated from their mothers in these institutions and placed for adoption by the religious orders who ran them. More than a thousand of them were involved in vaccine and other trials conducted by the Wellcome Foundation and Glaxo Laboratories – both now part of GlaxoSmithKline – without any of the required consents from their mothers or legal guardians.
Many of the women sent to mother and baby homes were also confined in Magdalene laundries, either before or after the birth of their babies. There, along with the women and girls sent to the laundries – by the clergy, by their families or by the courts and other organs of the state – they worked for no pay in businesses that were run for profit and they were frequently subjected to physical and psychological abuse. If they were brave enough to try to escape, they were often escorted back to the laundries by social workers or members of An Garda Síochána.
The stories of those who were incarcerated in Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries and the activists who have devoted years campaigning on their behalf are the subject of a new documentary feature film, Testimony, which was released in cinemas across the UK and Ireland last Friday. Although there have been other beautiful documentaries made on similar topics, including Sinéad O’Shea’s Pray For Our Sinners (2022) and Margo Harkin’s Stolen (2023), the focus of Testimony is on the ways these women and children were failed by the church and the State and what remains to be done if we, as a nation, are to come to terms with the abuses of our past.
I first became interested in the subject of Ireland’s institutions when I was working on my first feature documentary, One Million Dubliners, in 2013. It was while researching the history of Glasnevin Cemetery that I became aware of the story of the High Park graves.
In 1993, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity sold a site at High Park to a property developer for IR£1.5million. Included in the site was a small piece of land that was the final resting place of 133 women who had died in the High Park Magdalene laundry. In order to facilitate the sale, the bodies of the women were to be exhumed and moved to Glasnevin. While the exhumations were taking place, the bodies of an additional 22 women were found on the site and it was discovered that only 75 death certificates existed for the now 155 women. Before any attempt could be made to confirm their identities, the bodies were cremated and reinterred.
I had hoped to include the story in One Million Dubliners. Shane Mac Thomáis, the historian and tour guide in Glasnevin who was the central subject of One Million Dubliners, also hoped that the story would be included. I met Claire McGettrick from Justice For Magdalenes, who had played a defining role in achieving a State apology for the survivors of the laundries and who was also a passionate advocate for the rights of the High Park women, and we began to plan the piece.
The harrowing discoveries at Tuam could have been a watershed ... Instead, what has been done by the State has been limited and piecemeal: focusing on some institutions and not others; providing redress to some survivors and nothing at all to others.
Unfortunately, our plans didn’t come to fruition. The sudden and tragic death of Shane changed the nature of our final days of filming. Our focus turned to Shane’s funeral and burial in Glasnevin and the story of the High Park women was never included in One Million Dubliners. It always felt like unfinished business.
Throughout the years that followed, I stayed in contact with Justice For Magdalenes and gained a profound appreciation for all that Claire, Maeve O’Rourke, Katherine O’Donnell, Mari Steed and James Smith had achieved, as a tiny group of activists working entirely pro bono. I also met survivors from the Magdalene laundries and the mother and baby homes, many of whom were interested in sharing their stories. When producers Rachel Lysaght, Farah Abushwesha and I secured funding for a film in 2023, we were ready to hit the ground running.
Above all, we were determined to highlight the shortcomings of both the interdepartmental committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalene laundries and the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, as well as the redress schemes that followed these investigations.
The harrowing discoveries at Tuam could have been a watershed. During that period of abjection and shame, we, as a country, could have instigated the comprehensive process of truth-telling and reconciliation necessary if we are to reckon with our past and lift the stigma from those whom we rejected, incarcerated and exiled. Instead, what has been done by the State has been limited and piecemeal: focusing on some institutions and not others; providing redress to some survivors and nothing at all to others.
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For 34 years, Madeleine Walsh lived with her secret in shame and silence. It was only when her daughter, Carmel, chanced to move within a few kilometres of Bessborough that Madeleine finally shared her story with another soul. With Carmel’s support, Madeleine approached the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and requested access to any information in the order’s possession relating to William’s birth, death and burial. Though she was assured by one of the sisters that William had been interred in a beautiful plot in the grounds of Bessborough, where many of the nuns were buried, Madeleine later discovered that William had been buried in an overgrown, five-acre Famine grave, at Carr’s Hill in Cork, with no headstone or marking that would enable her to identify the location of her infant son’s remains.
Since learning about her brother, and about her mother’s experiences in Bessborough, Carmel Cantwell has been campaigning for an inquest into William’s death. On November 11th, she was part of a delegation to the European Parliament where the issue of the mother and baby homes was discussed. The redress scheme for survivors of the homes will be reviewed in 2026 and it is hoped that the European Parliament can pressurise the Irish Government to broaden the scheme.
After filming her interview, Madeleine decided she wanted her story, and William’s, to go out into the world. She agreed to have her face appear on-screen and to have her full name included in the titles. Since appearing in the documentary, she has spoken in public on a number of occasions, including at a commemorative event in Bessborough and at a recent awards ceremony in London. Whenever she talks about her experiences, she states her full name and holds her head high.
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It is her hope, and mine, that the full history of the Magdalene laundries and the mother and baby homes will soon become a required aspect of the secondary school curriculum, so that students may be fully informed about the horrors of our past and we can ensure that they will never be repeated.
