The Dark History Behind Claire Keegan's "Small Things Like These"

Her novel is not about the Magdalene Laundries, Claire Keegen tells The Guardian. It is “the story of a man with five daughters, in a marriage, who’s running a coal yard and is probably a workaholic, and maybe facing some kind of midlife crisis”. And yet, peripheral as it may be, the presence of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries makes itself felt throughout the book’s 116 pages. The town feels it, Bill Furlong (the protagonist) feels it, and the reader feels it, too. And if the reader knows the history, they feel it more strongly still.

The Magdalene Laundries were a 231-year collusion between the Catholic Church and the Irish State, spanning from 1765 until 1996. Here, unwed mothers, women with cognitive disabilities, victims of abuse, and those deemed too flirtatious to be out in public were locked up for periods of months or years and forced to labour under gruelling conditions. They were slaves in all but name, abused both physically and emotionally by the nuns who ran the institutions. 

In Keegan’s Small Things Like These, we get a glimpse of this abuse. It is the run-up to Christmas of 1985, and Bill, the local coal and timber merchant, is having his busiest season. He rises early one morning, gets into his truck, and prepares a delivery to the laundry on the other side of the river. The bolt on the coal shed is frozen stiff, but he manages to shift it, and, when he opens the door, reveals a young girl lying in the corner “just about fit to stand, with her hair roughly cut”. She beseeches him to ask the nuns about her baby.

For, you see, it was not only mothers who were locked away. When the women and girls gave birth, their babies were taken from them, and either kept in homes or forcibly put up for adoption. Some were sent to the US. The majority remained in Ireland, in institutions like Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, where, between 1925 and 1961, at least 796 children died. 

Their remains were discovered in 1975, when two boys foraging for apples scaled the home’s 10-foot walls and jumped down to the flagstone on the other side. They had wondered why the top of the wall was covered in glass, and when the flagstone cracked upon their landing, it seemed they had their answer. Swimming in a septic tank beneath, they uncovered the skeletons of dozens of children and babies. The boys reported the incident, but the authorities did nothing, and, soon after, the ground was levelled and a playground built atop it.

At this point, you might be asking: how could this happen? How could a practice so barbaric — a practice which many knew about — continue until four years shy of the 21st century?

The answer, as Keegan reveals to us in Small Things Like These, is collective ignorance through individual fear. “If you want to get on in life,” says Bill’s wife Eileen, “there’s things you have to ignore.” 

And so it might be, as the author says, that Small Things Like These is not about the Magdalene Laundries. But one cannot deny that the knowledge of their atrocities changes our reading of the book. When we understand the extent of the nuns’ power, backed by both church and state, we understand Eileen, we understand the silence of the communities who watched and let it happen. For what would happen to Bill, his wife, and his daughters if he attempted to expose the laundry and save the girl in the coal shed? What would happen to the nuns? When the prospect of change seems so slim and the outcome of rebellion so dire, can you blame people for doing nothing? 

Keegan, at least, seems not to. Her characters are individuals trying as best they can to make it through a struggling existence. Each has their own troubles, and does not want to get wrapped up in the troubles of others. And yet you wish — you really wish — that people would do more.

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