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‘You know we’ll blink a few times and they’ll be married and gone.’ ‘Isn’t that the way.’ ‘The years don’t slow down any as they pass.’
What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry.
Not for the first time, Furlong felt that he was poor company for her, that he seldom made a long night shorter. Did she ever imagine how her life would be if she had married another?
People could be good, Furlong reminded himself, as he drove back to town; it was a matter of learning how to manage and balance the give-and-take in a way that let you get on with others as well as your own.
Always, Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people.
Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?
he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another?
Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?
Most of the records from the Magdalen laundries were destroyed, lost, or made inaccessible.
It is not known how many thousands of infants died in these institutions or were adopted out from the mother-and-baby homes.
These institutions were run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish State. No apology was issued by the Irish government over the Magdalen laundries until Taoiseach Enda Kenny did so in 2013.
