Andy Harding: Singer/Songwriter

Sometimes the story that inspiures a song makes you angry. Sometimes that story makes you want to weep. The story of the Magdalene Asylums - usually known as the Magdalene Laundries - did both. The Asylums existed to "rescue fallen women" but that definition could include young unwed pregnant girls (sometimes pregnant by their own father) There were inmates (and they were classed as "inmates") imported from psychiatric institutions and jails, women with special needs, victims of rape and sexual assault, pregnant teenagers sent there by their parents, and girls deemed too "flirtatious" or "tempting to men". Others were there for no obvious reason. Nuns ruled the laundries with impunity, sometimes beating inmates and enforcing strict rules of silence. “You didn’t know when the next beating was going to come,” said survivor Mary Smith in an oral history. Mary was incarcerated in the Sundays Well laundry in Cork after being raped; nuns told her it was “in case she got pregnant.” Once there, she was forced to cut her hair and take on a new name. She was not allowed to talk and was assigned backbreaking work in the laundry, where nuns regularly beat her for minor infractions and forced her to sleep in the cold. The Mary in this song is a real woman and her story is true. Only her name has been changed. She arrived, 16 years old and pregnant by her stepfather, at the St Vincents Asylum 40 years before scandal closed the Magdalene Laundries for good. The heartbreaking denoument is true too.