It wasn’t until 1997 that divorce was legalised in Ireland, for example. It was illegal to be gay until 1993, a date that I always have to go back and check, because it can’t be true, it just can’t. It is, though. The last Magdalene Laundry, those abusive homes for pregnant girls, closed in 1996, although there was a mother and baby home open in Northern Ireland until at least 1998. And in 1992, the year before the first disappearance, a fourteen-year-old girl was placed under house arrest by the state, to stop her leaving Ireland to have an abortion. She had been raped by an older man who
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