Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Home survivors needed for academic investigation

Survivors of Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes in the North are being encouraged to come forward and share their experience with a working group investigating the institutions.

Academics from Queen’s University in Belfast and Ulster University will spend a year examining the institutions’ operation between 1922 and 1999. They will interview former residents and comb government and institutional records.

It is claimed that, as recently as the 1980s, new-born babies were being forcibly taken from their mothers and given up for adoption by nuns in the North’s laundries, women forced into homes in Belfast and Newry after becoming pregnant.