Magdalene Laundries - Report Not Final Chapter in Tragedy

Irish Examiner
February 6, 2013

http://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/editorial/magdalene-laundries--report-not-final-chapter-in-tragedy-221777.html

Yesterday’s Magdalene report joined a litany of eviscerating documents detailing our past of neglect, abuse, and harrowing inhumanity.

And though we, as individuals, can sidestep the burden of guilt those horrors bequeath us, we cannot avoid the responsibility of making amends or belatedly showing some simple humanity to those so long denied it.

There have been so many reports — Ferns, Cloyne, the Murphy report on the diocese of Dublin, Raphoe, and too many others — that we might prefer to look away, to consign the horrors of the past to the past, but we cannot. We cannot, if we want to imagine ourselves a moral and decent people, pretend again that we do not know that there are hundreds if not thousands of women in our society who have been misused and betrayed in the name of cruel, medieval mores.

Thousands more died before we finally acknowledged that their lives, or at least a good portion of them, had been denied them, that they had been held against their will in a peculiarly self-righteous Irish gulag.

As one of the Magdalene victims — and even if the word “victim” is too quickly used today it is barely sufficient here — said yesterday: “I was imprisoned for the crime of being pregnant and single.” Others were held because fate made them poor, others for the most trivial reasons, like not having a ticket on a train or a bus.

One of the difficulties of coming to terms with a scandal like this is that our antennae have been adjusted to the rhythms of today. How can any of us begin to understand what it was like to be young, abandoned, poor, interned and more or less enslaved because we fell foul of the diktats of the prevailing theocracy? It is almost a leap too far for a mind driven by the instinct, as the Gospels encourage us, to love your fellow man.

Today we publish a photograph of a 1960s Corpus Christi parade in Dublin’s Sean MacDermott St. At first glance it looks like any Catholic ceremony of the time, a line of veiled women walking together to mark a feast day. They are flanked by two lines of gardai, all more than likely fine fathers or mothers. In a more innocent time we might have thought the gardai were there as part of the ceremonial choreography, in a supportive, protective role. Now, tragically, it is hard not to belive that they were there to ensure that all of the Magdalene women — or girls — went back, even if they did not want to, to the convent where they worked so long and hard for little or nothing. They are not quite riding shotgun on a chain gang, but the comparison is more relevant than is comfortable.

Almost three years ago, in Mar 2010, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a pastoral letter of apology to address the abuses inflicted by Catholic clergy. It would be appropriate if he issued an addendum to that letter to include those women covered by yesterday’s report.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s initial response — and it may not be his final one — is less than inspiring. He said he was sorry about how the 10,000 women were treated and regretted that the stigma attached to them had not been lifted before now. However, he stopped short of issuing a full State apology. This is difficult to understand, especially as Mr Kenny has shown he feels passionately about the issue.

The publication of the report ends one part of this sorry affair but what happens next is most important. Mr Kenny might reconsider and offer a State apology and open a compensation scheme. Even the mostgenerous one, in comparison to what was taken, can only be symbolic.