had got out or died, my initial thought was, where are these women now? Is there anything I can do?,” he recalls. O’Riordan began contacting relatives of survivors online. Between 2006 and 2014, he spoke to 165 survivors. He was once denied access to a convent and escorted off the premises by police; years later, he found out there were women inside who wanted to speak. The first survivor who made contact was Maureen Sullivan,
who became the catalyst for his 2009 film The Forgotten Maggies. The documentary follows the lives of Sullivan and three other women and their search for justice. Survivor Kathleen Legg had kept her secret hidden for 69 years. Determined to get their stories heard, O’Riordan submitted the film to the Galway Film Festival, but it wasn’t selected. “I was so upset. I flew back from the UK and went down to
the Galway Film Festival headquarters with one of the cameramen and did a protest,” he says. The festival agreed to show it and the film was launched to
critical acclaim, drawing media attention from around the world. It became the first Irish-made documentary on the subject to be shown on TV at the time. A few weeks later, O’Riordan was at a cinema screening
in Waterford. “This woman burst through the door and said, ‘I’m a Magdalene survivor – I want to tell my story too’,” he recalls. The woman was Marina Gambold who went on to become a
lead campaigner. Her book Whispering Hope, co-written with O’Riordan, became a number one bestseller. The film led to more women coming forward and the
formation of the Magdalene Survivors Together group. Alongside pressure from other groups, such as Justice For Magdalenes, it catapulted into a national campaign. Realising none of the survivors had met or spoken with senior government officials, O’Riordan wrote to the Department of Justice requesting a meeting. The department agreed, but wanted to keep it out of the media. It was an opportunity he couldn’t let go. “I put out a press release saying ‘we were told not to tell you, but we’re telling you’,” he says. “Suddenly, a whole load of
“I realised there were women out there trying to tell their stories but nobody was listening,” Steven O’Riordan, director, The Forgotten Maggies
“The greatest challenge, at the outset particularly, was outright hostility from some entrenched lay Catholic readers and a deep suspicion on the part of the institutional Church itself.” Patsy McGarry, religious affairs correspondent, The Irish Times)
“Interviews like these remind me why I’m in the job – to learn, listen and provide a platform for others.” Sophie Warburton, feature writer, The Sun
media turned up and the story propelled forward again.” There were marches across Ireland and a charity single raising money for a monument. Sinead O’Connor, who sang on it, had spent time in a Magdalene Laundry herself. In 2010, the Irish Human Rights Commission issued a report. In 2011, the United Nations Committee Against Torture called for an independent investigation. In 2013, the McAleese report confirmed extensive state
involvement. On February 19 2013, the Irish prime minister (taoiseach) issued a state apology. O’Riordan stood arm in arm with the survivors as they left parliament and remembers them clasping each others’ hands in front of the cameras and waving them up to the sky. In 2018, survivors were invited to an event in Dublin to
receive a public apology and Nuala Cunningham, producer and director of TV and film company New Decade, was asked to film it. She recalls the crowd waiting to greet the 220 women and the cheers as they stepped off the bus. “It was easily one of the most emotional filming experiences I have had,” she says. One thing that struck Cunningham when the women received
the invitation was the fear many of them still felt: “Some of them feared it might even be a trap and they were being brought back to Ireland to be locked up again.” Although the survivors had contributed to the McAleese report, Cunningham says many felt as if they had been ‘assessed’ – they wanted to be not only heard but also believed. “I think they thought that people still judged them,” she says. It inspired Cunningham to make the two-part documentary Ireland’s Dirty Laundry, which was shown on RTE in 2022. Cunningham believes there are still a lot of questions to be
answered, particularly around the documentation held by the state, including medical records and polio and vaccine trials. “It’s something we’re working on,” she says. For O’Riordan, it was a story he stumbled on by chance: “I remember a nun ringing me in 2009, saying I was completely wasting my time and I’d be better off concentrating on something else that would give me more benefit to my life. I always think back to that and think how wrong she was.”
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