Filmmaker Aoife Kelleher introduces her documentary Testimony, a profoundly moving documentary that chronicles the fight for justice by survivors of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes, which receives its Irish TV premiere on RTÉ One on Wednesday, 22nd July - watch now via RTÉ Player.
I first became interested in the subject of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries in 2013, while making One Million Dubliners, a documentary which explored life, death and memory through the stories connected to Glasnevin Cemetery, Ireland's largest burial site. It was while researching the history of Glasnevin, that I became aware of the case - or the scandal - 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 £1,500,000. Included in the site was a small piece of land where 133 women who had died in the High Park Magdalene Laundry were buried. 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 in the plot at High Park 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 highlight the treatment of the women from the High Park Magdalene Laundry in One Million Dubliners. Shane Mac Thomáis, the historian and tour guide in Glasnevin, who was the central subject of that film, also wanted the story to be included. I met with Claire McGettrick from Justice For Magdalenes—who had played a key 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.
Unfortunately, those plans never came to fruition. The sudden death of Shane Mac Thomáis changed the nature of our final days of filming on One Million Dubliners. Our focus turned to Shane’s funeral and burial in Glasnevin and the story of the High Park women was never included in the film. It always lingered in the back of my mind.
The harrowing discoveries made by Catherine Corless at Tuam should have been a watershed moment in Ireland.
Throughout the years that followed, I stayed in contact with Justice For Magdalenes and gained a profound respect for all that Claire McGettrick, Maeve O’Rourke, Katherine O’Donnell, Mari Steed and James Smith had accomplished, as a tiny group of activists working pro bono and in their spare time. I also met with survivors from Magdalene Laundries and Mother & Baby Homes. I felt that it was important to show the extent of the work that had been done by Justice For Magdalenes, the impact that this work had had on the lives of survivors and the work that remained to be done in order to achieve meaningful reconciliation and redress. It took several years but, eventually, producers Rachel Lysaght, Farah Abushwesha and I secured the funding to make Testimony.
Above all, we were determined to highlight the shortcomings of both the Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalene Laundries - also known as the McAleese Committee - and The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, as well as the redress schemes which followed these investigations.
The harrowing discoveries made by Catherine Corless at Tuam should have been a watershed moment in Ireland. During that period of soul-searching, we, as a country could have instigated the comprehensive process of truth-telling necessary if we are to reckon with our past and lift the stigma from those who were rejected, incarcerated and exiled. Instead, what has been done by the state has been limited and piecemeal: focusing on some institutions and not on others; providing redress to some survivors and nothing at all to others.
The indifference with which survivors have been treated, in life and in death, is currently evident in Bessborough, where, just this month, An Coimisiún Pleanála has upheld permission for a developer to build 106 apartments at the site of the former Mother and Baby Home in Cork. Spokesperson for the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home Support Group, Carmel Cantwell, said that she is 'devastated’ by the decision.
Carmel’s mother, Madeleine Walsh, was seventeen years old, and had left her home in Tipperary to work as a housekeeper in London, when she confessed to a priest at a Catholic Church in Golders Green that she was pregnant. The priest sent her to The Crusade of Rescue, a charitable organisation in Ladbroke Grove, which arranged to have Madeleine returned to Ireland, one of at least 2,434 women whom the Irish government, with the Catholic hierarchy, paid to have transported from the UK to Mother and Baby Homes and other institutions around the country.
Madeleine arrived into Cork Harbour, where she was met by a man in a suit, who put her into a black car and drove her to Bessborough Mother & 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.
On the 24th of October, 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 but she does recall hearing the nuns squabbling about whether the needle had been sterilised.
The film combines the stories of survivors of Ireland's institutions, with those of the activists who have devoted years to campaigning on their behalf
Madeleine’s son, William, was born on the 26th October, 1960. Though he was born healthy and fed well, within two days, his condition began to deteriorate. Madeleine too was sick and incapable of advocating for William when he was moved to what was known as the ‘dying room’. Though her health improved, 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 his tiny feet. When William was moved to St. Finbarr’s hospital, Madeleine was told that she couldn’t visit him. After he died, at only six weeks old, she never saw his body.
Though Madeleine was assured by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary that her baby had been buried in a beautiful plot in the grounds of Bessborough, alongside many of the nuns’ graves, she later discovered that William had been interred 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 his remains.
William was one of 923 babies and children who died at Bessborough. Throughout the course of its investigation, the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was only able to establish the burial place of 64, meaning that the location of more than 850 remain unknown. The Commission concluded that it was likely that some of those babies and children were buried in unmarked graves. Madeleine says that she cannot comprehend how planning was upheld ‘on land where children are missing’. She and other survivors hope that the government will now bring the site into public ownership and prevent any construction from going ahead.
I interviewed Madeleine in May, 2025. Though more than sixty years have passed since William’s birth and death, the pain and trauma of those terrible weeks were as acute for her as ever. So, too, was the shame she felt as a result of her pregnancy and the treatment she received at the hands of 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 in Ireland who would judge her. She wasn’t sure that she wanted her face to be shown in the documentary.
After filming her interview, Madeleine decided that she wanted her story, and William’s, to go out into the world. She agreed to have her face appear in the film and to have her full name included in the titles. Since appearing in the documentary, she has spoken in public on several occasions, including at a commemorative event in Bessborough.
Madeleine’s story - and William’s - is just one of those featured in Testimony. The film combines the stories of survivors of Ireland’s institutions, with those of the activists who have devoted years to campaigning on their behalf and asks what remains to be done if we, as a nation, are to come to terms with the abuses of our past.
Testimony, Wednesday 22nd July at 9.35pm on RTÉ One and the RTÉ Player
