The Magdalene Songs

The Magdalene Laundries

From 1922 to 1996 more than 10,000 women and girls were incarcerated in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. Operated by four religious orders in ten locations around the country, these for-profit punitive institutions detained individuals against their will and forced them to work long hours, unpaid, under abusive and humiliating conditions. The institutions committed
some of the most serious systematic violations against human rights in
Ireland in the 20th century.

The Magdalene Songs is an ongoing project initiated by Deirdre Brenner to honour the women who were so gravely mistreated by church and state in the Magdalene Laundries by giving voice to their experience. The project brings together prominent female Irish composers – today including Elaine Agnew, Rhona Clarke, Elaine Loebenstein, and Deirdre McKay – in a collaborative work for mezzo-soprano and piano. Each song in the collection sets the words of individual survivors, extracted from interviews conducted by Justice for Magdalenes Research, an advocacy organisation working on behalf of the women who spent time in the Laundries and their families. Each song is named after the woman whose testimony it presents.