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Dublin, February, 2022   It’s late afternoon, blustery There are clouds overhead Doors are closed, the pavements are quiet The building comes up on my right, grey and brown and dominating Window after window after window Count the numbers it takes up on Sean McDermott Street Lower: 69 to 72 It used to be even larger, before the fire in 2006, before Dublin City Council officials started talking health and safety concerns, before they demolished the sewing room and the packing room, tore down almost all of the ironing room and most of the laundry building To find what’s left of the laundry I have to walk around the back, onto Railway Street, where I photograph the portion of the wall that still stands, a white cross embedded into it I record the six windows with the bars across them Through one of the windows, I can see the remnants of an extractor fan If I look a bit further, past the rubble and the nettles, I can see the circles on the concrete floor where the washing vats once stood There are no photographs of the interior of the laundry building taken during the hundred years or more of its operation, nor are there any from the decade it lay unused before the fire Really, there are only a handful of photographs from inside any of the Laundries, which began in the mid-18th century as refuges for ‘fallen’ women, but which became increasingly more punitive after political independence in 1922, when a faltering, insecure State fused with the Irish Catholic church to turn women’s sexuality into a sin for which they might end up atoning their entire lives There’s that staged image you can find on an internet search, taken inside an unidentified laundry in the early 1900s, the one where a nun and four unsmiling girls stare at the camera There’s another photograph from sometime in the 1940s, in another unnamed laundry, in which more unsmiling women and girls stand in a cluster underneath the fluorescent lights, two of them holding up a neatly-folded sheet There’s Father Jack Delaney’s film