Outside Our Door is a socially engaged research & walking-tour project uncovering the history of the Magdalene laundry that operated in Dún Laoghaire—St Patrick's Refuge, Crofton Road—from the 19th century until 1963.No registers survive, & its history has never been publicly told. Through 6 months of research, & collaboration with the Loughlinstown Over 50s community group, a fuller account than either archive or personal recollection alone could offer has been reconstructed.

Research from national archives, census returns, death certificates, & the oral history archive of Justice for Magdalenes Research was brought to the community group & discussed against their lived experience of the town's institutions. A 90-minute walking tour was developed with the group, taking participants through Dún Laoghaire's institutional past—from its social divisions between slum housing & summer villas, through the convents & religious institutions, to the laundry site itself & a closing act of collective reflection at the seafront. The tour makes use of oral testimony, archival documents & community storytelling to give voice to a history that has, until now, gone almost entirely unrecorded. Outside Our Door contributes to the wider public reckoning with Ireland's institutional history by recovering a previously undocumented local chapter of it & by demonstrating a model of community-engaged historical research in which lived experience and archival evidence inform one another directly.

Please note that the details of events listed above are provided by the relevant Local Authorities.