So very sad and based on the truth. The Magdalene Sisters did run laundries where they worked the young women, often to death, buried in unmarked mass graves. This amazing song is based on the painful lives of thousands of women committed to these "work prisons." They had no judge, no jury that heard their story. Very little was needed to commit them. Many were brought there by angry family members, many more, kidnapped from where they worked in bars, brothels, or dance halls. A parish priest could point that finger, as could almost any man, to "get rid of a woman" for his own selfish reasons. These "asylums" were mostly brutal, a commitment with no oversight except by nuns who ran them for a profit! Washing laundry for hospitals and other institutions, for long hours every day, the inmates were paid nothing. Just used. Horrendous.