Society Abandoned These Women but Still Our Taoiseach Failed to Apologise

The Independent
February 6, 2013

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/society-abandoned-these-women-but-still-our-taoiseach-failed-to-apologise-29051715.html

WHEN Taoiseach Enda Kenny stood up in the Dail yesterday afternoon he had the look of a man who wished he was somewhere else. Soon it was clear why. He wasn't about to deliver the fulsome apology to the Magdalene Laundry victims that the country expected.

The failure of the State to say sorry to the thousands of women who suffered harsh conditions over seven decades in Ireland's notorious Magdalene Laundries has outraged many. Retribution was being sought by the 'inmates' of these harsh institutions, and their families.

The report into the Magdalene Laundries was to be the women's day, their vindication, and the time for the State to put its hands up to verify and reaffirm stories we have heard over the years of the suffering they have endured.

There are undoubtedly legal reasons why the Taoiseach was guarded and didn't make an outright apology. His own backbenchers were said to be upset and puzzled by his omission. One can assume that one of the reasons he didn't go further was that it would open the flood gates when it comes to the question of compensation.

He did say the women had been sent into the laundries during a time when there was a harsh and authoritarian Ireland. The stigma of the branding of the women needed to be removed. "I'm sorry for those women that they lived in this kind of environment," he said.

The biggest surprise in the report was that it was not as shocking as we expected. It said there were only records of 10,012 women, and not 30,000 as had been previously thought, being committed to 10 different Magdalene Laundries between 1922 and 1996. It confirmed for the first time that the State was involved in the admission of more than one-quarter of these women, but there was no evidence that it acted illegally in sending them there.

We now know from the report that women were referred by the courts, gardai, or were transferred by industrial or reform schools. Other women and young girls ended up there after being rejected by foster families or being orphaned, homeless or simply poor.

The report urged the public not to mix up the Magdalene Laundries with the industrial schools also run by religious congregations, saying that the vast majority of Magdalene residents had given no evidence of being physically or sexually abused.