Weaving a tapestry of music and words in celebration of a bygone generation of Irish artists, My Father’s Kind is based on a suite of poems by Dermot Bolger. My Father’s Kind depicts many 20th century traditional Irish musicians, including Séamus Ennis, Mary Ann Carolan and Johnny Doherty, exploring not only the iconic music, but the real lives and humanity behind the loved and celebrated figures. Not allowed to speak, barely fed and often going without water, the child was viciously beaten by the nuns for years and hidden away in an underground tunnel when government inspectors came.

I spoke to a person about it recently, and she said ‘well, Maureen, there’s a lot more crime nowadays’, and I said I’d prefer a little more crime than knowing about little children getting abused behind high walls,” she said.Edited extract from Girl in the Tunnel, My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries by Maureen Sullivan. Even at 12 I thought that my mother went down to the hospital and a nurse gave her a baby — Maureen Sullivan

I told on him, didn't I? That was the crime. That's what happened. I told the Church that my stepfather was molesting and raping me, and beating me and my brothers. A nun got me talking, she noticed I wasn’t eating, wasn’t talking, she was way ahead of her time, but I was being abused for a few years at that stage,” said the Carlow native. The Whole Sole Guide to Walking the Camino de Santiago: How I Walked over 500 Miles without Getting a Single Blister or Losing a Toenail At New Ross there was “no schooling, just the laundry every day, from 6am to about 9pm, with cleaning duties in the evening and at weekends”. The women there were adults, many elderly. At twelve, Sullivan finally told a teacher how bad things were at home. The teacher sought help for her in the form of a convent boarding school—and instead Sullivan was sent to the Magdalene Laundries. Kept separate from the other children her age, she was put to work doing laundry, day in and day out, as penance for having been abused.

After my struggles to find a printer for The God Squad in 1988, it is refreshing to see how receptive readers are to this brave memoir by Maureen Sullivan, subtitled “ My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries”. Maureen asks the fundamental question that occurs to everyone who knows about Ireland’s carceral institutions: “Why were they so cruel to me? Why were they so hard? I was a little kid, yet they never let me have a minute to look at a book or sing a song... I was made into a miniature robot for the church to profit from.” This was such a hard read and my heart broke at every sentence for this poor little girl who was so badly treated by most of the people in her life. It infuriated me at the number of people who lied, cheated and turned a blind eye to the horrific abuse that was going on around them. No one wanted to upset the catholic church to save this girl from the appalling and gruesome abuse she received from her stepfather and the nuns.

When Maureen Sullivan was just twelve years old, she confided in her teacher that she was being physically and sexually abused by her stepfather. Never, in her darkest imaginings, could she have dreamt that she would be the one who would face harrowing punishment. Highlights include conversations between The Edge and Brian Cox; Ruby Wax and Ian Robertson; Masha Gessen and Dylan Moran, who will also perform the Irish premiere of his show We Got This; and a football head-to-head with Roddy Collins and Paul Howard. Basiscursus kalligrafie: De belangrijkste technieken en de meest gebruikte lettertypes stap voor stap uitgelegdThat starch and me, we were not friends. My skin reacted to the mix by breaking out in dermatitis, small splits in my over-dried skin that left my hands raw every day. And there was no break from the work to let it heal, so I lived with that every day. I was in constant pain. On top of that, working the press meant I burned myself regularly. The machines were designed to be used by fully-grown adults, not small-sized children.