FOR decades Britain has provided an escape hatch for Irish women.

There’s a long history of boats and trains releasing the Irish into the anonymous streets of London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. 

Irish workers have been travelling across to Britain for centuries.

For women Britain has commonly offered refuge, not only from religious institutions such as the Magdalene Laundries, but from the Irish state, when it comes to their bodies and their rights over them.

What is now seen as a combination of Catholic power and state piety brought about decades of punishing discrimination for those female citizens deemed to be beyond accepted limits of respectability. 

Key to a coercive control of women and their reproductive freedoms was the silencing of their voices. 

A 1950s Dail Eireann (Irish government) report stated: “The unmarried mother’s greatest need is secrecy.” 

This was an acknowledgement that Irish society did not accept an unmarried woman’s right to have a child. 

It justified the funding of networks of Catholic institutions, state-funded concealments in church-owned properties: mother and baby homes, orphanages and Magdalene Laundries. 

It provided the setting for thousands of women and girls being sent into silence and punishment as their pregnancies outside of wedlock stripped them of their legal autonomy. 

Or they were just trouble — many girls were sent into Laundries not because they were pregnant, but because they might become so.

Behind the shroud of secrecy an economy flourished; armies of unpaid workers supplied hotels, hospitals, restaurants, government departments and the army, with boiled clean, starched and ironed laundry. And babies were supplied to childless families across the world. 

In the 1990s, following the discovery of mass graves of women and children buried on convent grounds, the stories of this period of Irish history began to surface. 

Government commissions on child abuse were set up. The United Nations committee against torture urged the Irish government to further its inquiries. 

Numerous religious institutes were found guilty of permitting or covering up acts of rape, molestation, beatings and mental cruelty. 
The brutality of institutions was not isolated to the confines of holy ground. Religious orders ran schools and other public services.

Their influence permeated every area of society, including families. 
Women deemed troublesome often found Britain a benign retreat from what they faced at home. 

Taking the boat or plane and disappearing into a foreign culture, they carried with them their sense of shame, guilt or trauma, often as a tightly held secret that was never talked about. 

And Britain has provided refuge in another way. Since 1980 an estimated 170,000 women have travelled from Ireland to Britain in order to have safe, legal abortions.

In May of this year Irish citizens will vote in a referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment to the Constitution, the abortion referendum.

This amendment puts the foetus’s right to life on an equal footing with the woman’s. 

It has meant that women facing giving birth to unviable foetuses have had no recourse than to head for the nearest airport. (Last week a report in the Irish Times announced that  Liverpool Hospital, “one of the main UK hospitals offering abortion services to Irish women in cases of fatal foetal abnormality has scaled back access due to staffing issues.”)

The site of the latest round of struggle to give Irish women equal rights as citizens focuses on this present-day restriction. 

It is another test of Irish society’s acceptance of the rights of women and the conversations taking place throughout the country are intense and widely varied, with recognition of differences and continuing focus on what is necessary for the country, what is the right thing to do. 

Irish women who are now living their lives in Britain should have their say. A campaign being run by London Irish Abortion Rights Campaign is urging women to go home to vote. 

So far this campaign has tended to focus on younger women, the social media-savvy, young professionals who are as comfortable in hipster Shoreditch as they are in their town or village in Ireland. But what of those women who have been here longer, who arrived in silence and imposed secrecy? They too should be involved in the conversations that are radically changing Ireland.

The play, She Had a Ticket in Mind, written by this writer, offers an opportunity to explore many of the stories of women and girls through the last decades. 

This one-act play interweaves fragments from real and imagined lives. It intermingles testimonies with excerpts from Irish TV shows including The Late, Late Show, and features cameo roles for iconic figures such as Peig Sayers, infamous storyteller of the Aran Islands. 

The play is haunted by the ghosts of silenced women of laundries and homes. Above all, it carries the memory of Ann Lovett, a 15-year-old schoolgirl from Granard, Co Longford, who died giving birth beside a grotto on January 31 1984.

The play runs from April 5-7 at Etcetera Theatre, Camden High Street, each performance is followed by audience discussions with representatives of campaign groups including Everyday Stories and London Irish ARC. For more information visit www.etceteratheatre.com.