British film-makers have a mixed record when it comes to retelling the history of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes . The injustices of these institutions – virtual prisons for so-called “fallen” women and clearing houses for their babies before adoption abroad – were unflinchingly detailed by Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters from 2002 (set in Ireland, filmed in Scotland). But then there was last year’s Hammer Horror mishap, The Women in the Wall , which dishonoured the suffering of the women sent to the laundries with its hokey plot and a tone that lurched from twee to hysterical.
Now, Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell are the latest to turn to this stain upon 20th-century Irish history with their series Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace – a spin-off of their blockbusting tear-jerker Long Lost Family, in which blood relatives separated for decades are brought back together (ITV, Monday, 9pm). The subject, as the latest season begins, is “foundlings” – infants abandoned by their parents and who grew up knowing nothing of their family history. [ Cillian Murphy: ‘Magdalene laundries were a collective trauma for people of a certain age’ ] One such example is Dubliner Martina Evenden, found outside a church in the city in 1967.
Several years ago, she uploaded her DNA to a public website, hoping it might help her contact her birth mother. It was a shot in the dark that paid off when researchers for Long Lost Family contacted he.