Say sorry, Enda

EDITORIAL

THE findings of the Magdalene Laundries Report shouldn’t have come as any great surprise to most; except in establishing the extent to which various organs of the State were complicit in sending women to such institutions.

 

Even the dogs on the street could tell you that young children and women were being sent to work in laundries run by orders of nuns.

In recent years, media exposés, TV and radio documentaries and books presented first-hand accounts from survivors of the Magdalene Laundries regime and this provided a substantial body of evidence for the State to address.

Whatever about people in the past being genuinely unaware of how the nuns were operating these laundries, very few could make such a claim nowadays.

The report, prepared under the chairmanship of Senator Martin McAleese, makes for sad but compelling reading about another shameful aspect of our social history.

What makes it shocking in terms of a timeline is that the doors closed on the last Magdalene Laundry in Waterford in 1996, the same year crime reporter Veronica Guerin was shot dead and just one year before Mary McAleese was elected President of Ireland.

The State has, at last, acknowledged that of the 10,000 girls and women who passed through the portals of Magdalene Laundries around the country between 1922 and 1996, 26.5% were there by order of State bodies. The route to the laundries facilitated by the State included the criminal justice system (8.1%); industrial and reformatory schools (7.8%); health and social services sector (6.8%) and mother and baby homes (3.9%). A significant number of entries to Magdalene Laundries were also by way of transfer from another laundry.

And what of County Clare girls and women in all of this? There is no reference to a Magdalene Laundry in Ennis. However, the McAleese Report includes a 1905 British Home Office document titled List of Religious and Charitable Institutions in which Laundries are carried on, in which there is an entry for No. 153; No. 42 factory district; Convent of Mercy, Ennis, County Clare; religion RC.

The report also details the experiences of three teenagers from the county sent to Limerick’s Good Shepherd Convent in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Drawing on Clare County Council records, it’s explained that the young girls were sent to the laundries by the health authorities (then the county councils) because their foster families would no longer be paid for taking care of them once they turned 15.

According to the report, 261, or 2.3%, were from the county but would have been sent principally to Good Shepard Convent in Limerick or Galway. It is believed that this is, in fact, an under-estimation of the real figure, as Clare women could also have been sent elsewhere.

Add further to that the number of females from the country who ended up in these laundries in other circumstances outside of State involvement and God knows how many broken people, broken families and broken dreams there were during that era.

The only counties with more women and girls spending time in the laundries were Cork, Dublin, Limerick, Tipperary and Wexford.

The report also reminds us of the norms that were in Irish society for so long. Everything was fine on the surface and problems were hidden; people with mental illness, physical or intellectual disabilities and a range of other serious health were given little consideration. Young women, who had babies outside of marriage, also fell into this category and often by way of punishment they were shipped to a laundry.

While there is no explicit reference to it in the report, a lot points to views on marriage, which have changed considerably in the past few decades.

In the past, on the one hand, the sanctity of marriage and the family unit was held up as the cornerstone of Irish society yet the State, when it suited and often without consent, divided families on the death of a spouse, sending children to separate institutions, including laundries; hundreds upon hundreds of them never to meet their siblings again. The Catholic Church had quite an influence in this scenario.

Also, in cases where intervention and support for families in crisis was needed, the easy option was to dispatch the children to residential institutes. There is plenty of evidence to show it was, in fact, often the first option considered.

Dr McAleese and his team deserve credit for completing a very difficult assignment. The report has received a broad welcome from groups representing former residents of the laundries.

There has also been a positive reaction from Church leaders, spokespersons for voluntary and social justice organisations, as well as politicians.

It’s fair to say that every citizen in the country has been moved by the stories that have emerged in the Magdalene Report and even more so by the bravery of the women who have come forward to talk openly to the media about their personal experiences.

All that is missing is a formal apology from the State through Taoiseach Enda Kenny on the floor of Dáil Éireann. He met a delegation of former laundry residents at the Dáil and thankfully what he had to say was well received.

He will travel to London at the weekend to speak with a British-based group at the Irish Embassy.
Irish Women’s Survivors Support Network in Britain represents almost 500 former residents of industrial schools, orphanages and laundries, including up to 40 former Magdalene residents.

When these private meetings are out of the way, the Taoiseach cannot afford to delay any further in making the apology to the Magdalene survivors.