Recreation time was making Rosary beads or knitting Aran sweaters,” she said, “but the reward for speaking was imprisonment”. The determined words of Carlow’s Maureen Sullivan, one of the youngest survivors of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene laundries. Maureen has just published her memoir Girl in the tunnel – my story of love and loss as a survivor of the Magdalene Laundries, where she bravely recounts her agonising journey from a monstrously violent home in Carlow town to the cold and brutal Magdalene laundry system and her desperate, gruelling fight for freedom and for justice.

The marriage did not work out. “Then I had to bring my daughter up on my own, try and get bits of jobs. It was very, very hard. You always had this past in your mind. You couldn’t say where you were, where your education finished.” When Maureen Sullivan was just twelve years old, she confided in her teacher that she was being physically and sexually abused by her stepfather. Never, in her darkest imaginings, could she have dreamt that she would be the one who would face a harrowing punishment.Before I was two my mother married that lame pig jobber from Green Lane in Carlow town called Marty Murphy. He is, I suppose, the only father I ever knew. He hurt me the day I was carried into his house, with a hard slap to my legs, and he hurts me still today, though he has been dead for years. The mental, physical and sexual torture I suffered in my childhood, that can never be erased or settled. I live with it. No one could see how cruelly the nuns were treating her, and she would later be moved to the laundry at St Michael’s Convent in Athy, when she was only 13 in 1966. Maureen Sullivan grew up in Carlow town. When she was just twelve years old she was placed in the Magdalene Laundry at New Ross, County Wexford, where she was forced to work long hours scrubbing floors and washing clothes, and denied an education. After two years she was transferred to another laundry in Athy, County Kildare and then to a school for blind people in Dublin. After she left the school, she returned to Carlow before moving to England. She is now an advocate for other survivors.

In time she remarried, this time to a man from Westmeath, and they had a son. In 1988, matters came to a head. “I couldn’t get a decent job because I didn’t have the education and it just all hit me one day.” She took an overdose. “I was taken into hospital. I was got in time and was pumped out, and the rules there was if you try anything like that you have to go for counselling. I didn’t know what counselling was.” There was also the un-faminist remark that "women in those days were fit from walking and from work" It is perhaps the only anti-feminist comment Sullivan makes in the book. However as someone who walks most places and never learned to drive (because there was no one there to teach me, my poor disabled body has suffered due to this) it was a little upsetting to read that. After my father died that room was left empty, except for a small table in the corner on which his billhook lay. Bestselling author Cathy Kelly is returning to HarperFiction in a three-book deal, negotiated by Lynne Drew, publisher, general fiction, with Jonathan Lloyd at Curtis Brown, for UK and Commonwealth rights. Survivor testimony has always been at the heart of Justice for Magdalenes Research, the ground-breaking advocacy and research project for former inmates of Magdalene laundries. They have gathered numerous survivor accounts as part of their oral history project (Maureen Sullivan’s among them), made many important submissions to the McAleese committee’s Inquiry into State Involvement with Magdalene laundries, most of which were shamefully ignored, given help with survivors’ legal needs, and produced valuable research outputs, of which the latest is a study of Donnybrook Magdalene laundry, run by the Religious Sisters of Charity.The tunnel of the book title was where Sullivan was hidden if inspectors or outsiders arrived at the laundry and might ask questions. Once, when she was 14, she was forgotten about in that tunnel. She became hysterical. It took days for her to get over it. Nobody ever spoke about my father except Granny, who told me he was a kind and gentle person. Is it possible to miss something you never had? It feels like it. Even now, the child that’s left in me calls out for her father in the dark and cries when he doesn’t come. If my father hadn’t gone out that day, and hadn’t caught a chill that led to such a serious illness that he didn’t survive, I would have had a childhood where my parents’ love for one another surrounded me and my brothers too. I think often about fate and how the event of his death changed the path of my whole life, even before I was born. When I was on the way, safe in my mother’s womb, I was a child of a loving marriage, with two parents planning a future for me, one of happiness and warmth. Mark Coen, co-editor of a book on the Donnybrook Magdalene laundry, holding copies of a ledger from the laundry from the 1980s. Photograph: Alan Betson I then took it up that when the nuns hid her in the tunnel it was for her safety ie to keep her away form her stepfather. Another misconception. Marty, however, never went without. He was fed first and always had a supply of his two great loves, Erinmore tobacco and Irel coffee, which came in a bottle and was stirred into hot water. He took it with milk. Not having any milk when Marty wanted coffee was a sentence for punishment, so myself and my brothers pre-empted this and other things we would get in trouble for by taking preventative action. It’s something I still struggle with today, as I find myself fretting if I run out of milk, even though I’m the only one here.

She and Arnie Stephenson, in later life her employer at Irish Skincare in Carlow and a great supporter, met a nun who had denied at a previous meeting that Sullivan had ever been in the New Ross laundry. She insisted, instead, that Sullivan had attended St Aidan’s school near that laundry. Not allowed to speak, barely fed and often going without water, the child was viciously beaten by the nuns for years and hidden away in an underground tunnel when government inspectors came.Granny told us that my father was out riding one day and got caught in the rain. A few days later he fell gravely ill. He died three days after that. That’s how the story was told to me anyway. I feel really sad, a truly great and deep sorrow, when I think about my young mother at his bedside, with him slipping away so fast, and then at his graveside with a toddler, a baby in her arms and another on the way.