"Furlong had come from nothing. Less than nothing, some might say. His mother, at the age of sixteen, had fallen pregnant while working as a domestic for Mrs. Wilson, the Protestant widow who lived in the big house a few miles outside of town. When his mother’s trouble became known, and her people made it clear that they’d have no more to do with her, Mrs. Wilson, instead of giving his mother her walking papers, told her she should stay on, and keep her work. On the morning Furlong was born, it was Mrs. Wilson who had his mother taken into hospital, and had them brought home."
Although it would have made an absolutely terrific opening to the novel, this paragraph actually opens the second chapter. It is deceptively simple. The subtext of the information presented here will not reveal itself as significant for some time. To begin with, the description of Furlong’s mother as having “fallen” pregnant seems a bit off. Maybe it is a cultural thing, but generally speaking, you don’t hear women described as having fallen pregnant much. On the other hand, one used to hear unmarried pregnant women being described as “fallen” a lot more often than is heard today. Then there is the identification of the kindly Mrs. Wilson. In just about any other country on earth, singling out one particular aspect of identity to point out as “Protestant” would probably seem quite odd. But this story takes place in Ireland where they consider the difference between Catholic and Protestant to actually be important. One can extrapolate from this measure of identification that by “her people” the narrator is referring to the Catholic family of Furlong’s mother. Of course, the single most significant aspect of the subtext of this deceptively simple description is the fact that Bill Furlong is an adult. That may not seem especially unimportant, but it will prove to be very close to a miracle.
"The times were raw but Furlong felt all the more determined to carry on, to keep his head down and stay on the right side of people, and to keep providing for his girls and see them getting on and completing their education at St Margaret’s, the only good school for girls in the town."
Mrs. Wilson provided not just a home for Bill Furlong to grow up in but insisted he receives an education. The result of this privilege from being raised in a nice Protestant home is that he is able to carve out a standard of living that is hardly one of wealthy, but noticeably improved over many of the others living in the community. His daughters attend a school run by the Good Shepherd nuns at a convent that is also home to a laundry business. This “good school” becomes the focus of dramatic conflict for Furlong personally and the plot of the book when some of the darker rumors swirling around town about the girls working in the laundry are ultimately revealed to him as being more than just gossip. Eventually, of course, it will be revealed that the “only good school for girls” in the area is one of the notorious “Magdalen laundries” which became the focus of a blistering report released by the Irish government detailing the horrific conditions suffered by unwed mother and their children within institutions like the Good Shepherd convent, school and laundry between 1922 and 1998. But before this story can get to that place in history, Bill must deal only with what he thinks to be true, what he suspects to be true, and how vital it is to stay on the right of people who are not terribly interested in what is true. People like, for instance, his wife.
“But if we just mind what we have here and stay on the right side of people and soldier on, none of ours will ever have to endure the likes of what them girls go through. Those were put in there because they hadn’t a soul in this world to care for them. All their people did was leave them wild and then, when they got into trouble, they turned their backs.”
In addition to his first round of luck inside his mother’s womb that came with her being employed by the Protestant Mrs. Wilson, Bill also enjoyed a bit of luck when it came to marrying well. Eileen did not exactly come from money, but marrying into a solidly middle-class family was a much more fortunate occurrence than it could have been. Of course, marrying someone raised in that milieu does come with its own subset of problems. Such as, for instance, the propensity to judge women who find themselves in circumstances similar to Bill’s own mother. Once Bill has learned that things may not be quite what they seem with the Good Shepherd nuns, he can’t just let it go and sit back satisfied that he has it pretty good. But things are not so good that he has been afforded the luxury of upsetting the apple cart. And just in case he might be tempted to forget that, Eileen is there like a little shoulder devil engaged in a battle of logic with his own conscience. Eileen’s part in this tale is another element that may not seem terribly important. After all, this story is specifically about that horror tale outlined in the “Final Report of the Commission of the Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes.” The thing about systemic corruption in any institution, however, is that the power of the institution is only as great as its ability to convince good people to look away. Or, as Bill replies to another good person advising him to look away, “Surely, they’ve only as much power as we give them.” That the conflict of the story situates Bill as the protagonist and the Good Shepherd convent as the antagonist is undeniable, but it takes a village to raise an official government commission three decades after the fact.
