Small Things Like These

Comparative · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

Claire Keegan’s 2021 novella is short enough to read in an afternoon and heavy enough to carry a full comparative answer. A coal merchant delivering fuel before Christmas finds something in a convent shed that the whole town has quietly agreed not to see, and the exam wants you to explain exactly why he can’t do the same.

Small Things Like These is set in New Ross, County Wexford, in the weeks before Christmas 1985. Bill Furlong runs the local coal and timber yard, works from before dawn to keep five daughters fed and educated, and has spent his adult life quietly grateful for a kindness nobody was obliged to show him. His mother, an unmarried teenage domestic servant, was never turned out by her employer, Mrs Wilson, at a time when almost any other household would have shown her the door. Furlong grew up in that house instead of the workhouse or the laundry that swallowed girls in her situation, and the novel never lets the reader forget it.

On a delivery to the local convent, Furlong finds a girl locked overnight in the coal shed, freezing and desperate to be let out. She is one of many young women effectively imprisoned in the convent’s Magdalene laundry, working without pay and without any legal way out. The convent also runs the only good girls’ school in town, and everyone in New Ross, Furlong included, understands without being told what happens to families who make trouble for the nuns.

The novel is on the comparative course for 2027 and 2028. It rewards close, patient reading rather than a quick plot summary, and the material below is built around the questions a comparative essay actually asks.

Institutional Power and the Cost of Silence

The convent’s authority in New Ross is not enforced by force; it is enforced by everyone’s understanding of what will happen if they cross it. Mrs Kehoe, who is genuinely fond of Furlong, spells out the exact price of interference: his younger daughters’ education, his standing in the town, his business.

Then do the sensible thing and look after your family and business, is my advice.Mrs. Kehoe, Scene 138, Kehoe’s pub storage room

That advice is not cruelty for its own sake. It is the town’s whole survival strategy, spoken by one of its kinder members. Furlong’s answer to it, worked out slowly and mostly in his own head, is the line worth building an essay around.

They’ve only as much power as we give them, I thought.Bill Furlong, Scene 138, Kehoe’s pub storage room

For Theme or Issue or Cultural Context, this pairing gives you the whole mechanism of institutional power in one exchange: a community that polices itself on the Church’s behalf, and one man quietly working out that its power depends on his cooperation.

Moral Courage versus Self-Interest

The clearest conflict in the novel is not really between Furlong and the convent. It is between Furlong and his wife, Eileen, who loves him and is trying, in her own hard-headed way, to protect their family from a fight they cannot win.

If you want to get on in life – there are things you have to ignore.Eileen Furlong, Scene 82, Furlong and Eileen’s bedroom

Eileen is not written as wrong. Her fear is entirely reasonable, and the novel lets her case stand. But Furlong cannot make the distinction she needs him to make, between his own daughters and the girls locked in the shed.

But what if it was one of ours?Bill Furlong, Scene 82, Furlong and Eileen’s bedroom

This is what I’m saying to ya – they are not ours.Eileen Furlong, Scene 82, Furlong and Eileen’s bedroom

That exchange is the essay in miniature: self-interest is not stupidity or malice here, it is Eileen’s entirely rational fear for her own children, set against Furlong’s refusal to draw the line where safety says he should.

Small Kindness against a Cold System

Furlong’s decision does not come from nowhere. It comes from a single act of kindness that shaped his whole life, and the novel keeps returning to it as the source of everything he eventually does.

You’ll be sleeping in this house now William. I’ve had a room made up for you.Mrs. Wilson, Scene 83, the Big House drawing room, after the funeral

Mrs Wilson’s decision to keep an unmarried servant girl and her son under her roof, instead of turning them away, is the novel’s proof that one person’s choice can outweigh what a whole system expects of them. It is also, quietly, the model Furlong is following when he finally acts himself.

Come on, Sarah.Bill Furlong, Scene 162, the convent coal shed, Christmas Eve night

Two words carry the whole climax. After a novel spent watching Furlong hesitate, absorb warnings, and turn things over privately, Keegan gives him almost no speech at the moment that matters most. The kindness that saved him becomes the kindness he passes on, and the smallness of the phrase is the point: goodness in this novel is rarely a speech, it is a decision followed immediately by an action.

The Magdalene Laundries as Cultural Context

The convent’s laundry is not an invention. Ireland’s Magdalene laundries operated from the eighteenth century into the 1990s, run by religious orders with the tacit support of the state, taking in women judged to have broken sexual or social norms, unmarried mothers among them, and holding them as unpaid labour, often for years. The last one closed in 1996. Keegan sets her novel in 1985, close enough to living memory that many readers’ grandmothers or great-aunts could have been sent to one, and she never turns the historical fact into a lecture. It sits underneath the plot the way it sat underneath the town: known, and unspoken.

For Cultural Context, this is as concrete as evidence gets: a real institution, a real complicity between Church and state, and a fictional case study that lets you argue about how a society decides which of its own members are disposable.

Keegan does not confine that history to the convent. Furlong’s own mother narrowly avoided the same fate, and the novel keeps drawing the line between his family’s respectability and the girls’ captivity thinner than the town would like to admit. That closeness, rather than distance, is what makes the cultural context land as more than background detail.

Why Comparative Essays Reach for This Text

Examiners see this novel work particularly well against texts built around a single ethical decision rather than a sprawling plot, because Keegan gives you a clean, well-evidenced case study: one man, one convent, one choice, made against the advice of almost everyone who cares about him. It also compares productively with texts where a community’s silence is the real subject rather than any single villain, since New Ross has no obvious antagonist beyond the habit of looking away.

Small Things Like These: Using This in the Exam

How to use it: this novel is strong on Theme or Issue and Cultural Context because the convent’s power and the town’s silence are the same mechanism looked at from two angles. It is equally strong on Literary Genre, because Keegan’s restraint, what she leaves unsaid, is one of the most distinctive features of the writing on the course. Anchor your paragraphs in the coal shed, the bribe in Sister Mary’s office, and the walk home, and you can answer almost any comparative question the exam sets.

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