Now, the United Nations Committee Against Torture has agreed to hear Mrs. Coppin’s accusations of systematic human rights violations in the industrial school and the Magdalene laundries, where she spent five years. This time, in what amounts to a test case for all survivors of the laundries, the main target of her complaint will not be the nuns but Ireland itself.

She is arguing that despite having paid roughly $30 million to 696 women who survived the laundries, including $63,000 to her, the Irish state has never admitted its role in supporting the laundries. Yet, according to an official report in 2013, thousands of inmates of industrial schools, including Mrs. Coppin, were sent to laundries directly from state care. Those who escaped were often returned by the police.

Nevertheless, the state refuses to admit any liability for their treatment, or to agree to calls for a full inquiry or truth commission. The religious orders that ran the laundries have neither contributed money for compensation nor admitted to any human rights violations.

Born in May 1949 in Kerry’s “county home” — essentially, a workhouse — to an 18-year-old unmarried mother, Mrs. Coppin never knew her birth father. Her stepfather beat her so savagely that she was placed at age 2 with the Sisters of Mercy in the Nazareth House industrial school in Tralee.

There, she told the police in her initial complaint, the abuse continued. She said that one particularly sadistic nun, whom she named, would regularly strip her and beat her buttocks with a strap until she was welted and bruised. Sometimes the nun would grab her by the hair and swing her around the room. The nuns regularly starved her, locked her in cupboards and kept her out of school to do heavy housework. When the little girl wet herself she would be forced to wear her soiled clothes on her head.

At the age of 12 or 13 she tried to kill herself by setting fire to her clothes. Although she was severely burned, she was denied medical treatment, and received “not even an aspirin,” she said. Her chief abuser would taunt her as she cried out in pain.