Sarah Redmond: The Woman in the Coal Shed

Overview

Sarah Redmond is a minor yet pivotal character in Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These. She is a young woman incarcerated in the convent's Magdalen laundry, discovered by coal merchant Bill Furlong when he delivers coal on a Sunday morning in December 1985. Sarah appears in only four chapters, yet her silent presence drives the novel’s central moral crisis. Her character represents the thousands of women imprisoned in Ireland’s institutional system, stripped of identity, dignity, and freedom. Through Sarah’s story, Keegan dramatises the gap between the nation’s proclaimed ideals—as framed by the epigraphic 1916 Proclamation—and the harsh reality of institutional hypocrisy.

Plot Role

Sarah functions as both victim and catalyst. In Chapter 6, Furlong first encounters her locked in the coal shed, terrified and disoriented. The Mother Superior immediately orchestrates a cover-up, forcing Sarah to claim the confinement was “only playing hide and seek.” Furlong’s brief interaction with her—learning her real name, sensing her fear—ignites a slow-burning guilt that culminates in his decision to return and rescue her. Sarah’s role is essentially reactive; she speaks fewer than a dozen lines, yet her vulnerability exposes the corruption Furlong has long tacitly accepted. Without her, the novel’s exploration of moral courage would lack a concrete focus.

Motivations and Traits Shown Through Actions

Sarah’s primary motivation is survival. She obeys the nuns out of terror, answering to the name “Enda” and eating when told. She initially lies to protect herself, parroting the cover story. However, her few honest moments reveal a deep longing for connection: she asks Furlong to take her to the river to drown (as recalled in Chapter 8), and later she reaches out to stroke a donkey figurine in the Christmas manger—a gesture suggesting residual childlike wonder. Her silence is not passivity but learned self-protection. When Furlong finally leads her out of the coal shed, she leans on him gladly, showing that she still trusts in human kindness despite years of abuse.

Chronological Arc

Sarah’s arc is compressed into a single week. She first appears in Chapter 6, locked in the coal shed overnight. After Furlong alerts the nuns, she is cleaned up and brought to breakfast, where she sits “in a type of daze” with nothing before her. Here she reveals her true name and origin: Sarah Redmond, from beyond Clonegal. The second encounter occurs when Furlong returns on Christmas Eve, retrieves her, and leads her through the town. During this walk, she vomits, pauses at the nativity scene, and eventually climbs the hill toward Furlong’s home. The narrative cuts off before we learn her ultimate fate, leaving her future ambiguous but hopeful.

Relationships

Bill Furlong: The only person who treats Sarah with genuine compassion. He calls her “a leanbh” (child), offers help, and later risks his social standing to rescue her. For Furlong, Sarah mirrors his mother’s possible fate, personalising the systemic injustice.
Mother Superior: Represents institutional control. She dictates what Sarah says, suppresses her identity, and uses psychological manipulation to maintain authority. Their relationship is one of total power imbalance.
The young nun: A minor figure who shows nervousness but ultimately complies with the cover-up, illustrating the silence and complicity demanded by the institution.

Key Decisions and Consequences

Sarah makes few autonomous decisions, but each carries weight:

Choosing to trust Furlong: When he first asks her name, she hesitates but gives it—a small act of self-assertion. This trust allows Furlong to later rescue her.
Leaving the convent with Furlong: She willingly goes with him, despite fear. This decision frees her from immediate confinement but ensures a precarious future.
Remaining silent during the walk: Her silence in the face of townspeople’s stares spares Furlong further confrontation, but it also underscores her internalised trauma.

For Furlong, his choice to act has profound consequences: he faces social ostracism, his wife’s displeasure, and likely economic repercussions. Yet he experiences unprecedented joy, believing “whatever suffering he was now to meet was a long way from what the girl at his side had already endured.”

Theme and Symbol Connections

Sarah is a living symbol of the hypocrisy Keegan critiques. The epigraph invokes a republic that “cherishes all the children of the nation equally,” yet Sarah is a daughter whose existence the convent denies. Her confinement in the coal shed—a dark, cold space—mirrors the literal and metaphorical darkness of Ireland’s Magdalen system. The bare feet and ill-fitting clothes signify deprivation and loss of identity. Her encounter with the donkey at the manger echoes the nativity’s themes of refuge and rejection, subtly linking her suffering to Christ’s own marginalised birth.

Sarah also connects to the theme of silence and complicity. Her enforced silence represents the larger societal silence that allowed these institutions to operate for decades. Through her rescue, Keegan explores class and economic hardship, since Furlong’s own working-class origins make him more sympathetic than those with status to lose. The novella critiques the Catholic Church’s hypocrisy, showing how the nuns’ professed ideals crumble before their desire for control.

Finally, Sarah becomes a symbol of family and legacy. Furlong explicitly thinks, “Had it not been for Mrs Wilson, his mother might very well have wound up in that place.” Sarah thus stands for the countless women erased from family histories, while Furlong’s rescue affirms that acknowledging this past is the first step toward breaking the cycle.

Five Questions and Answers

Why is Sarah locked in the coal shed?
The novel never explicitly states why, but the context suggests it is a punishment—likely for attempting to escape or for disobedience. When Furlong finds her, she is terrified and has been there all night. The Mother Superior dismissively calls it “a big nothing,” but the reader understands it as a routine form of institutional discipline.
What does Sarah’s real name signify?
Her name “Sarah Redmond” is a key detail. “Sarah” is also the name of Furlong’s mother, creating a direct parallel that personalises his decision to help. It suggests that rescuing Sarah is, symbolically, an act of fidelity to his own origins and to the mother he lost. “Redmond” marks her as from a specific rural place beyond Clonegal, grounding her in a world outside the convent.
Why does Sarah say she was “only playing hide and seek”?
She repeats this line under coercion. The Mother Superior prompts her, and Sarah obeys out of fear. This lie illustrates how the institution forces inmates to participate in their own victimisation. It also reflects the widespread social narrative that denied the brutality of the laundries, reframing abuse as harmless games.
How does Sarah’s plight affect Furlong’s character arc?
Sarah transforms Furlong from a passive, conscientious man into an active moral agent. Before her, he gave money to a poor boy but avoided larger confrontations. Sarah’s suffering forces him to confront his own complicity. By the end, he chooses to act despite fearing consequences, achieving a personal victory that redeems his earlier acquiescence.
What does Sarah’s rescue represent thematically?
Her rescue embodies the possibility of individual moral courage breaking through systemic silence. Furlong’s act is small—helping one person—but it stands against the machinery of the Church and state. Sarah becomes a symbol that change begins with one compassionate action. The open ending suggests hope, but Keegan’s author’s note reminds readers that countless real women were never saved, making Furlong’s choice both exceptional and necessary.