Until alarmingly recently, the Catholic Church, acting with the Irish state, operated a network of institutions for the concealment, punishment and exploitation of "fallen women." In the Magdalene laundries, girls and women were incarcerated and condemned to servitude. In the mother-and-baby homes, women who had become pregnant out of wedlock were hidden, and in most cases their babies were adopted—sometimes illegally. Mortality rates in these institutions were shockingly high, and the discovery of a mass infant grave at a mother-and-baby home in Tuam made international news. The Irish state has commissioned investigations. Caelainn Hogan—a brilliant young journalist, born in an Ireland that was only just starting to free itself from the worst excesses of Catholic morality—has been talking to the survivors of the institutions, members of the religious orders that ran them, and priests and bishops. She has visited the institutions, and studied Church and state documents that reveal about how they operated. She has produced a startling account of how an entire society colluded in this repressive system, and of the damage done to survivors and their families. In the great tradition of Anna Funder's
Stasiland
and Barbara Demick's
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea,
this is an astounding portrait of a deeply bizarre culture of control.