The Best and the Worst in People

The Irish Magdalene laundries are now infamous: they were run to house unmarried pregnant (‘fallen’) women, who laboured in unpaid servitude for years or decades. Their babies were taken away from them and adopted out. The women were indefinitely incarcerated, locked into the buildings, and worked at menial jobs all day. Approximately 30,000 women were so abused, and thousands of infants died or were adopted out. The last Magdalene laundry closed in 1996.

How could this happen? How could the local people go along with such abuse of their own daughters and sisters? Claire Kegan explores this complicity with the church in her short, gentle, thoughful but pointed novella, Small Things Like This.

In a small town in Ireland in 1985, Bill Furlong is the coal merchant, with a thriving business, a wife and five daughters. He is very conscious of his lucky life.

Furlong had come from nothing. Less than nothing, some might say. His mother, at the age of sixteen had fallen pregnant while working as a domestic […]

His mother’s employer, Mrs Wilson, kept her on, and let the boy be brought up in her house, ‘took him under her wing, helped him along with his reading’.

The Catholic convent in the town

is a powerful-looking place […]. The Good Shepherd nuns, in charge of the convent, ran a training school there for girls, providing them with a basic education. They also ran a laundry business […] with a good reputation.

Local gossip is that the girls who worked in the laundry are of ‘low character’, ‘common, unmarried girls’. Others said that the nuns had hearts of gold, but there is also talk that they got good money out of the industry and from the foreign adoptions of the babies.

While delivering coal to the convent, Furlong sees a ‘dozen young women and girls, down on their knees with tins of old-fashioned lavender polish and rags’. One girl, heartbreakingly, asks him to take her to the river so she can drown herself. The girls leap back into their labour when a nun appears. Furlong remains quiet.

The urge to say something about the girl grew but fell away.

His wife Eileen thinks there is no reason to make trouble.

such things had nothing to do with them, and there was nothing they could do.

A few days later, Furlong finds a girl locked in the convent coal-shed, barefoot. She speaks little, but asks about her fourteen-week old baby who has been ‘taken’ from her. The nuns are wary of Furlong now, and make a pretense that the girl is a runaway and will be taken care of. Again, Furlong goes along passively, but now with growing discomfort.

What will it take for Furlong to stand against the power of the church as well as the implicit warnings given by his neighbours?

Always, Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people.

In this delicate little novella, Claire Keegan beautifully outlines the little town, the questionable morality of the Catholic church, its power over the village, and the determination and strength of character it takes to ‘do the right thing’. Furlong is no simple hero; he is a man conscious of the basis for his comfortable life, and his growing unease with the situation is simply but wonderfully described.

Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?