Sir,—Seán Patrick Donlan is wrong about Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (‘Quiet people? Ireland’s early eighties on screen’, HI 33.6, Nov./Dec. 2025), when he writes that the novel is—in relation to the institutional abuse of women and children in the Catholic Church’s laundries—‘its own kind of handwashing’ and absolves ‘the wider state and society … of any guilt for the institutionalisation of so many women’.
Granted, most novels are primarily concerned with individual motivation. This is one of their main characteristics as an art form, and in this respect Small Things Like These is an excellent example. But Keegan does a number of other things in this work that, to my mind, mean that Seán’s assessment is very wide of the mark.
The first is that she succeeds in creating an overall atmosphere of oppression and repression—precisely redolent of the period she describes—that explains why an individual act was all that the character of Furlong could achieve in relation to what he witnesses. Second, a key passage relates an exchange between Furlong and the local pub landlady, in which she comments to him, pointedly, that ‘surely you must know these nuns have a finger in every pie’. He counters with, ‘Surely they’ve only as much power as we give them?’, but she replies, ‘I wouldn’t be too sure’. This is a certain but light-touch way of highlighting the broader linkages between the laundries and the structure of power in the country at the time.
Any Irish person reading the novel, who lived through this period, will have instantly understood what Keegan meant here, and throughout the book. But for those less familiar with the history, the ‘Note on the Text’ that is appended to the novel (which Seán dismisses as a ‘blunt extratextual guide’) makes clear that the institutions in question ‘were run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish State’. In other words, she’s crystal-clear about where guilt lies.
I can see why Seán didn’t like the film of the book. I agree that it didn’t successfully translate the novel to the screen, though it was a good effort. But to accuse the original author of ‘handwashing’ does a significant disservice to a novel that should be read by anyone who wants to understand how it felt to live in an Ireland where such places existed.—Yours etc.,
KEN MULKEARN
Manchester