This article contains spoilers for Small Things Like These.
The historical drama Small Things Like These is the story of an ordinary man, Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy), who makes an extraordinary choice in 1980s Ireland. The film is based on the award-winning 2021 novel by Claire Keegan.
“If you want to get on in this life, there’s things you have to ignore.” Eileen Furlong’s (Eileen Walsh) advice to her husband Bill is both familiar and harrowing. Familiar because the instinct of self preservation when faced with power imbalance and injustice is natural to the human condition. Harrowing because giving in to this instinct is what allowed institutions such as Ireland’s Magdalene laundries and their associated human rights abuses to flourish.
Between 1922 and 1996, at least 10,000 women and girls were confined in religious-run detention homes known as Magdalene laundries.
Women were sent to these institutions for a variety of reasons. They included having a child outside of wedlock, being referred by a court of law and being a victim of sexual abuse. Detainees of the laundries engaged in forced labour which was used by religious orders as both a “disciplinary process” and a form of violence.
These women lived in a constant state of “emotional and psychological turmoil”. They were often not informed why they were detained in these institutions, or how long they would be there for. One survivor of a Magdalene laundry in New Ross recalled being deliberately locked out on a balcony on a winter’s night by a nun where she almost “died of the cold”. This is just one disturbing example of the various forms of maltreatment experienced by survivors of these institutions.
Bill’s discovery of Magdalene detainee Sarah Redmond (Zara Devlin) in a coal shed changes the course of his life, and that of his family.
The audience is not shown the fallout generated by Bill’s decision to help Sarah. But we clearly understand that violating the will of the influential Sister Mary (Emily Watson) – who holds prominent social standing, controls admission to the town’s secondary school and has power to cancel the convent’s orders with Bill’s coal business – could have serious repercussions for the Furlong family.
The form of everyday resistance that Bill offers is dignified rather than dramatic, and individualised rather than collective. Yet the parade of locals who gape at him leading Sarah openly through the town at the film’s close – a stark contrast to the sense of (complicit) secrecy which surrounds the laundry – shows that his actions are nevertheless transformative.
With any cultural representation of the past, there’s a trade off that often emerges between creative licence and historical accuracy. Two such trade offs emerge in Small Things Like These.
First, while the film’s microscopic focus on the lives and experiences of people in a small community is admirable, this depiction occludes the role of the state in relation to the laundries.
In 2013, the McAleese Report found that the Irish state was directly involved in five main aspects of the laundries: entry routes, workplace regulations and state inspections, funding and financial assistance, exit routes and death registrations, burials and exhumations. While the Catholic church was instrumental in the operation of these institutions, the role of the state cannot – and should not – be overlooked in depictions of the laundries.
Second, there is a slight tendency in the film to conflate the laundries with mother and baby homes. The youthful appearance of detainees such as Sarah suggests that she likely gave birth to her first child in the laundry. Yet as Irish historian Louise Brangan has highlighted, when it came to unmarried motherhood usually “repeat offenders” who had a “second ‘illegitimate’ baby” were sent to laundries in the post-independence period.
There were certainly overlaps between these institutions. Of the women who entered the laundries, 3.9% had been referred there from mother and baby homes. These institutions, however, had separate historical trajectories.
The first laundry opened in Ireland around 1765, while the establishment of mother and baby homes for first-time unmarried mothers was suggested by the Vice-Regal Commission on Poor Law Reform in 1906. Conflating these institutions risks overlooking nuances in the experiences of women who went through their doors.
Overall, Small Things Like These is a thoughtful, slow-burning and memorable portrayal of a traumatic episode in Ireland’s history. As Cillian Murphy has reflected, the laundries constitute “a collective trauma I think that we all went through in the country and that we’re all still recovering from”.
At a time where redress for and remembrance of Magdalene survivors have not yet been adequately addressed by the state, the messages held by this film – including its underlying philosophy that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men (and women) to do nothing – cannot afford to be overlooked.
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Ciara Molloy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
