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	Magdalene Victims Awaiting Apology The Irish Times February 26, 2010 http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2010/0226/1224265201453.html Madam, – British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has issued an apology to child migrants who were sent between the 1920s and 1960s to Britain’s former colonies, where many of them suffered abuse. Several hundred of the more than 130,000 child migrants involved in this scheme were either Irish or of Irish background. In Ireland, the Government, members of the Catholic hierarchy, and various religious congregations, have apologised for the physical, sexual and emotional abuse of children, including children in State residential institutions. Survivors of the Magdalene Laundries still await their apology: from the State, which was complicit in referring women and children into the laundries; from the religious orders that operated the profitable laundries; from the Irish hierarchy which reaped the benefits of that profit; from families that banished daughters, sisters and cousins behind convent walls; and from Irish society, which turned a blind eye while sending their dirty laundry to be scrubbed clean. Is the abuse experienced by these woman and children somehow fundamentally different? Is it conceivable that nuns abused children and didn’t abuse adult women in a different part of the same institution? Or, is contemporary Irish society suggesting the Magdalene women somehow deserved the treatme
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