'The “care home” was in fact a recent rebrand of one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries run by the Roman Catholic Church. Between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries tens of thousands of Irish women, pregnant and unwed or simply, like O’Connor, deemed “difficult,” were disappeared into such institutions. In addition to their incarceration and punitive abuse, the women were used as forced labor.'

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/08/05/incomparable-sinead-oconnor/