Episode 57: Small Things Like These (2024) (Guest: Sean Patrick Donlan)

Episode 57: Small Things Like These (2024) (Guest: Sean Patrick Donlan)

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Description

Small Things Like These (2024), adapted by Edna Walsh from Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel, tells the story of how coal merchant Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) uncovers disturbing secrets in a small Irish town in the mid-1980s. While going about his job delivering coal, Furlong discovers the truth about the Magdalene laundries—the abusive asylums run by Roman Catholic institutions from the 1820s until 1996. During this period, thousands of girls and women were imprisoned, forced to carry out unpaid labor and subjected to severe psychological and physical maltreatment. Furlong’s discovery about the local convent in his town parallels the story of his remembering and having to come to terms with his own traumatic childhood. The film provides a powerful and moving depiction life in a small Irish town, the role of the Magdalene laundries, and the power of the Roman Catholic Church to enforce a code of silence about the abuses taking place within a community.

Guest: Seán Patrick Donlan

Sean Patrick Donlan is a professor at Thompson Rivers University (TRU). Previously, Professor Donlan previously taught at the University of Limerick in Ireland and the University of the South Pacific (Vanuatu and Fiji). Professor Donlan also taught in programs in Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, and Malta, and served as TRU Law’s Associate Dean from 2018-2022. Professor Donlan was a founding member of the European Society for Comparative Legal History, the Irish Society of Comparative Law, and Juris Diversitas. Professor Donlan is also an elected Associate Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, a member of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, and a member of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies. Professor Donlan's research interests include legal history, comparative law, legal theory, film, and Irish history and politics. He has written on these topics, especially on comparative legal history, mixed legal traditions, Edmund Burke, and Irish history. Professor Donlan created and edited Comparative Legal History (2013-2016) and the Juris Diversitas Book Series (2013-15). Professor Donlan's most recent publication is A Companion to Western legal Traditions: From Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (2023, edited, with R.H. van Rhee, A. Masferrer, and C. Heesters).

Timestamps:

0:00   Introduction

2:14    The Magdalene laundries

6:39    Laundries in a broader social context

13:02   The convent’s power and secrecy

17:18   The absence of guilty men

18:31   The banality of evil

20:34  Why the laundries lasted so long

24:00  How they ended

26:02  Inquiries and accountability

28:16   Focus on the laundries in films and popular culture

30:38  The Bill Furlong character

36:20  Ireland in the 1980s

Further Reading:

Seán Patrick Donlan, “Screening for Help – Irish Care and Confinement," Film Ireland (Nov. 21, 2025)

Keegan, Claire, Small Things Like These (Faber & Faber 2021)

McGourty, Courtney, “Not Merely a Shameful Past: The Case for State Responsibility in the Magdalene Laundries,” Opinio Juris  (Aug 11, 2023)

Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to Establish the Facts of State Involvement with the Magdalene Laundries (2013)

Walton, John, “Film Mystery as Urban History: The Case of Chinatown,” Cinema and the City (M. Shiel & T. Fitzmaurice, 2001)

Publication Date

4-21-2026

Disciplines

Law

Episode 57: Small Things Like These (2024) (Guest: Sean Patrick Donlan)

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