With the contemplation of The woman on the wall At least two things are confirmed: that the BBC is still one of the best producers of television series and that a part of the Catholic Church is responsible for the greatest cruelties imaginable. As for the quality of the series, it is enough to watch it and appreciate the extraordinary performance of Ruth Wilson, its protagonist, and the sober direction and production in a small Irish coastal town in County Galway.
The series details the atrocities of a section of the Catholic Church, and gives a detailed account of the daily life of one of the six “Magdalene Laundries” that existed in Ireland until the mid-1990s. One of them was in the village of our protagonist. It was an institution run by Catholic nuns, where young single mothers or what were considered “deviant women” worked under a regime of slavery. But cruelty was not limited to the work relationship. When the young women gave birth, their children were taken from them at birth and then sold to the highest bidder.
All this may seem like a monstrosity from the feverish minds of Joe Murtagh and Jamie Hannigan, the scriptwriters of the six chapters of The woman on the wall The report, which is broadcast on SkyShowtime (also on Movistar Plus+), shows that reality surpasses fiction once again. In 2013, the Prime Minister of Ireland, Enda Kenny, apologized for the decades of stigma and harsh conditions of the so-called “Magdalene laundries,” a system of asylums that were run by Catholic nuns, where women were forced to do hard physical labor. Some 10,000 young women, many of them single mothers, were detained and forced to work in these institutions that began operating in the 1920s and were still in operation in the 1990s, according to a government report that was picked up by the BBC.
In The woman on the wall, The character played by Ruth Wilson was one of the victims of the nuns and her persistence, in collaboration with the Dublin inspector played by Daryl McCormack, in the search for her daughter who was taken from her thirty years ago is what manages to reveal the cruelty of an ecclesiastical institution that had the collaboration of the Government. A more than remarkable series that, in addition, allows us to better understand the impiety to which human beings can reach.
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