EDITORIAL

THE national focus might be on the Donegal South West by-election in a few weeks time but in Clare, early preparations are being made for the main event – the general election – now looking more likely to be held early next year.
With Fianna Fáil deep in the doldrums, Fine Gael supporters in the county are eying up the possibility of pinching a third seat. 
This is clearly the message as two local election poll toppers, Martin Conway (North Clare) and Johnny Flynn (Ennis East) this week declared their interest in joining Joe Carey and Pat Breen on the party ticket.
Fine Gael will pursue a three-candidate option with the two sitting TDs to be ratified at a selection convention and another person added by party headquarters.
Mayor of Shannon, Tony Mulcahy, who garnered 3,408 first preference votes at the last election, has  declared he won’t be putting his name forward at the selection convention.
Any ambitions of regaining a third seat in Clare are long gone as far as Fianna Fáil is concerned. The party will be fighting a rearguard action to hold support at 2007 levels. However, the party is looking for a strong candidate from West Clare to sweep up votes for Tony Killeen and Timmy Dooley.
Independent James Breen has confirmed that he will be making a big effort to regain the seat he surrendered to Fine Gael in 2007.  He bounced back in the 2009 local elections to head the poll in Ennis West and has been rebuilding his profile since.
Also in slips for the election is Kilbaha-based rural resettlement campaigner and sculptor, Jim Connolly.
Green Party councillor, Brian Meaney, has not made his position known yet while there is speculation in relation to a few candidates for both the Labour Party and Sinn Féin.
With the principal players in place and the supporting cast soon to be assembled, Clare is well prepared for the opening scene of the general election drama.

Magdalene Laundries inquiry

YET another dark side of Irish history was revisited this week when the Irish Human Rights Commission (IHRC) called on the Government to immediately establish a statutory inquiry into the extent of State involvement into how women and girls were treated in the Magdalene Laundries and to provide redress to the survivors.
A list of findings in a newly published IHRC report essentially conclude that “the State may have failed” to protect the constitutional and basic human right of  young women who were residents of the Magdalene Laundries  run by the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Sisters of Charity and the Good Shepherd Sisters.
Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) wrote on three occasions in the past year to the four religious congregations seeking dialogue but none offered to meet the group. This week’s report follows from the advocacy group’s request to the IHRC to assess its case. It claimed the treatment of women and girls in the laundries violated their constitutional rights, including rights to bodily integrity, not to be tortured or ill-treated; the right to earn a livelihood; to communicate; the right to individual privacy; travel; to one’s good name and to one’s person.
It is, of course, widely accepted that various organs of State were responsible for women being sent to the laundries. There is an overwhelming body of evidence in survivors’ tales of isolation, denial of education, hardships in working and living conditions and physical and mental cruelty in the laundries, which were run as profit-making operations. The issue to be determined is to what extent was the State culpable.
The Government has asked the Attorney General to consider the report but said it regretted that relevant departments were not given the chance to contribute to the commission’s considerations “to facilitate a fully-balanced evaluation of all the facts”. The Government, in noting that the Magdalene Laundries were run by a number of religious congregations, said while the commission is entitled to conduct an inquiry itself, it has decided not to do so but is calling instead for a statutory inquiry.
The IHRC is treading warily in stating the State “may have failed” to have protected the women’s rights.  In preparing the report, the IHRC focused its attention on examining the involvement of the State as the “primary bearer of human rights obligations to its citizens”. The organisation maintains the State should also call upon the Church to honour its moral obligation to find the money to pay its share of compensation to survivors.
The IHRC’s report reveals that there was State involvement where girls and women entered the Magdalene Laundries following a court process; in the absence of access to clear information, serious questions arise in relation to the State’s duties to guard against arbitrary detention, compulsory labour and servitude. While some women were detained through the courts, the reports notes how single mothers were often moved in by their family or clergy after their child was adopted and some residents had an intellectual disability.
IHRC Commissioner Olive Braiden said, “We are dealing with a small and vulnerable group of women who the Government admitted as far back as 2001 were victims of abuse, but who have received no proper recognition for the hurt they experienced and continue to experience. They were omitted from the Residential Institutions Redress Scheme based on the argument that there was no State responsibility, although it is clear that the State and Irish society in general bears responsibility for the way they were treated.”
Ms Braiden said the lack of public records meant only a statutory inquiry would uncover the truth. “It is important that these women in their advancing years are not forgotten.”
Professor James Smith, spokesman for JFM, in welcoming the report’s findings and recommendations, said, “The time to act is now. The Government must move beyond its ‘deny ‘til they die’ policy. Only then will it disprove one Magdalene survivor’s telling observation: ‘they’re hoping that in 10 years, we’ll all be under the sod and they can relax’.”
The last laundry, in Dublin, closed in 1996 so this issue is certainly not something that relates to the dim and distant past. There are plenty of people out there who know exactly what happened in these laundries – both the people who ran them and the residents. However, all the citizens of the country need to know and to this end, a statutory inquiry is the way to go.