The Magdalene Sisters is a 2002 film written and directed by Peter Mullan about teenage girls who were sent to Magdalene Asylums, otherwise known as the 'Magdalen Laundries': homes for women who were labeled as "fallen" by their families or society

 (though the film itself questions this).--Wikepedia

An excerpt:

Bad girls do the best sheets (AUSTRALIA)

Before the welfare net existed, religious orders used to catch orphans and unmarried mothers abandoned by their families. Alan Gill writes how girls suffered under the nuns' vale of tears.

ONE of the most ancient and thriving products of Irish industry isn't mentioned in the tourist brochures, or the guidebooks, or the economic histories. I don't mean linen, tweed or Jameson's. What I have in mind is shame.

                                         Mary Gordon

                                            NYTimes

....Sanctified slavery......

CBS) Someone once said the only thing really new in the world is the history we don't know. The Irish people are learning that right now and it's a painful experience.

Alan Gill, Orphans of the Empire (Random House).1997, Australia

This deeply moving book is about the 70,000 young so-called orphans who were shipped to Australia from Britain, from 1940 to the 1970's and sent to various homes and orphanages such as those run by the Christian Brothers, Barnados, and other groups. These were children from poor families who were told later their parents were dead.

Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), by James Smith, whose study of the controversial workhouses where socially marginalized and so-called fallen women and girls were confined throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The “laundries”—named for the Magdalene movement, which originally provided refuge homes for former prostitutes—were asylums for women seen as dangerous to the moral fiber of Irish society.

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