Politicians Knew All about the Laundries – and They Did Nothing

The Independent
February 6, 2013

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/politicians-knew-all-about-the-laundries-and-they-did-nothing-29051716.html

THE findings by Senator Martin McAleese are a welcome, if predictable, outcome to an impressively swift and efficient investigation of material that has become well known to all of us over the past decade. And no one could take issue with his wish that the report will bring "healing and peace of mind" to those women whose lives were mostly wrecked by their incarceration in one or other of these hideously cruel and vicious places.

That being said, it must also be recognised that the putting right of these innumerable wrongs comes too late for a vast number of the victims who endured the Magdalene Laundries. The system was worse than the industrial schools, where the inmates, who were prisoners, were subject to the law. The young people sent to them served their time and were released at the end of their term imposed by the courts.

Those at the Magdalene Laundries had no end date to their "sentences" and many spent their lives in slavery. Often they were beaten, starved, had their heads shaved as punishment, their identity stripped from them, their names changed, and were kept in captivity for years longer than the industrial school victims.

The tragedy lies in the fact that the Magdalene Laundry system was fully known about from the birth of the State. Its operation has been acknowledged in various ways covered by Mr McAleese's report.

Beyond his findings, however, was a foolproof state system contained in the country's census of population. This recorded all the inmates of Magdalene Laundries throughout the country, as it did with industrial school inmates.

The first 1911 census was pre-independence but is now of the utmost importance since it has been published and can be consulted online. It is the first census to be published. It will be fifteen years before the next census (for 1926, the State's first) is published.

The 1911 census lists, for example, all the inmates of the High Park Magdalene Laundry, 166 women whose ages vary from 15 to 70, and whose untold misery is masked by details of whether they were single, married or widowed, whether they had children and whether the children were alive or dead. Their place of birth is listed. They come from all over Ireland, though more are from Dublin. They are, without exception, described as "Dom," for their occupation as a "domestic servant", concealing the primitive washing of soldiers' underwear and hospital linen.