Bessborough was Ireland's most notorious Mother & Baby Home. From 1922 to 1998 almost 20,000 women and children passed through its doors. In the first book of its kind, historian Michael Dwyer takes us inside Bessborough. Using an array of historical sources, Dwyer pieces together the relationship between the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts who ran the home, the local authorities who paid them to maintain women and children there and the state departments who oversaw its operation. Dwyer charts Bessborough's 76 year history and addresses the many controversies surrounding the Mother & Baby Home from vaccine trials to the extraordinarily high infant death rate and the mystery which still surrounds the location of over 800 infant remains.

'I promised that I would one day write a book and tell the world about the home for unmarried mothers. I have at last kept my promise.' In Ireland, 1951, the young June Goulding took up a position as midwife in a home for unmarried mothers run by the Sacred Heart nuns. What she witnessed there was to haunt her for the next fifty years. It was a place of secrets, lies and cruelty. A place where women picked grass by hand and tarred roads whilst heavily pregnant. Where they were denied any contact with the outside world; denied basic medical treatment and abused for their 'sins'; where, after the birth, they were forced into hard labour in the convent for three years. But worst of all was that the young women were expected to raise their babies during these three years so that they could then be sold - given up for adoption in exchange for a donation to the nuns. Shocked by the nuns' inhumane treatment of the frightened young women, June risked her job to bring some light into their dark lives. June's memoir tells the story of twelve women's experiences in this home and of the hardships they endured, but also the kindness she offered them, and the hope she was able to bring.

Girls Like You... tells the story of 'Margaret', the name assigned to the author while in Bessborough House Mother and Baby Home. After spending seven months in the home 'Margaret' gave birth to a baby girl in September 1973. Written with pathos and humour, Girls Like You... is a reflection on growing up in the early 1970s in the Irish Midlands. It is a story of love and loss, secrecy and abandonment, forgiveness and integration. It deals with the fallout of this period of Irish history on one individual and her immediate family while exposing the cost of an Irish solution to an Irish problem, a cost which still reverberates in society today as the truth slowly trickles out.

Dublin, summer 1980; Kate Bush is on the radio, Nadia Comaneci is cleaning up at the Olympics and in one house by the Liffey, a spiky but sensitive ten-year-old girl is minding her troubled ma and her two brothers. But when a tragedy splits the family apart, the girl realizes that the only person she can depend on is herself.

'At least in The Handmaid's Tale they value babies, mostly. Not so in the true stories here' Margaret Atwood '[A] furious, necessary book' Sinéad Gleeson Until alarmingly recently, the Catholic Church, acting in concert with the Irish state, operated a network of institutions for the concealment, punishment and exploitation of 'fallen women'. In the Magdalene laundries, girls and women were incarcerated and condemned to servitude. And in the mother-and-baby homes, women who had become pregnant out of wedlock were hidden from view, and in most cases their babies were adopted - sometimes illegally. Mortality rates in these institutions were shockingly high, and the discovery of a mass infant grave at the mother-and-baby home in Tuam made news all over the world. The Irish state has commissioned investigations. But the workings of the institutions and of the culture that underpinned it - a shame-industrial complex - have long been cloaked in secrecy and silence. For countless people, a search for answers continues. Caelainn Hogan - a brilliant young journalist, born in an Ireland that was only just starting to free itself from the worst excesses of Catholic morality - has been talking to the survivors of the institutions, to members of the religious orders that ran them, and to priests and bishops. She has visited the sites of the institutions, and studied Church and state documents that have much to reveal about how they operated. Reporting and writing with great curiosity, tenacity and insight, she has produced a startling and often moving account of how an entire society colluded in this repressive system, and of the damage done to survivors and their families. In the great tradition of Anna Funder's Stasiland and Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea - both winners of the Samuel Johnson Prize - Republic of Shame is an astounding portrait of a deeply bizarre culture of control. 'Achingly powerful ... There will be many people who don't want to read Republic of Shame, for fear it will be too much, too dark, too heavy. Please don't be afraid. Read it. Look it in the eye' Irish Times 'A must read for everyone' Lynn Ruane 'Republic of Shame is a careful, sensitive and extremely well-written book - but it is harrowing. It would break your heart in two' Ailbhe Smyth 'Hogan's captivatingly written stories of people who were consigned to what she calls the "shame-industrial complex" puts faces - many old now, and lined with pain - to the clinical data ... Brilliant' Sunday Times 'Utterly brilliant. Please read it' Marian Keyes 'Riveting, immensely insightful and horrifically recognisable' Emma Dabiri '[A] sensitive, can't-look-away book ... Through moving stories, Hogan shows how the past is still present' NPR

This collection raises incisive questions about the links between the postcolonial carceral system, which thrived in Ireland after 1922, and larger questions of gender, sexuality, identity, class, race and religion. This kind of intersectional history is vital not only in looking back but, in looking forward, to identify the ways in which structural callousness still marks Irish society. Essays include historical analysis of the ways in which women and children were incarcerated in residential institutions, Ireland’s Direct Provision system, the policing of female bodily autonomy though legislation on prostitution and abortion, in addition to the legacies of the Magdalen laundries. This collection also considers how artistic practice and commemoration have acted as vital interventions in social attitudes and public knowledge, helping to create knowledge and re-shape social attitudes towards this history.

'I read Bessborough in one sitting, veering from fury to devastation within a matter of pages. A vitally important book.' Louise O'Neill 'A powerfully important book that demands to be read' Irish Examiner For over seventy years, Bessborough House, a grand country mansion on the outskirts of Cork city, operated as one of Ireland's biggest mother and baby institutions. Women and girls who walked up its stone steps were warned never to reveal their true identities and gave birth to babies they would not be allowed to keep. In Bessborough: Three Women. Three Decades. Three Stories of Courage, a trio of remarkable women confined there in the 60s, 70s and 80s, tell their truths. Their vivid accounts take us right inside the walls of the secretive institution and give us a deep insight into how their experiences impacted their lives afterwards. The result is a stark portrait of a system that split families apart -- and a moving account of love, loss and reconnection.