What's the Rush with Magdalene Apology?

By Michael Clifford
Irish Examiner
February 9, 2013

http://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/michael-clifford/whats-the-rush-with-magdalene-apology-222123.html

[with video]

WHAT kind of apology should Enda Kenny have issued last Tuesday?

What kind of apology did Mary Lou McDonald want him to issue?

Is it all about tokenism and point-scoring, rather than attempting to make amends to women who have endured too much for too long?

The furore over the failure of Kenny to issue an apology to survivors of the Magdalene laundries says plenty about the body politic and wider society in this country. Knee-jerk is the default reaction to everything, from guaranteeing banks to studying a detailed report on human suffering.

There is no doubt but that an apology is due to the survivors, particularly the minority that were in those institutions for long terms. That could have been issued at any time over the last decade or so. Instead, it was assumed that immediately on publication of Martin McAleese’s report into the laundries an apology would be issued by the Taoiseach on behalf of the State.

What was the rush?

The report is 1,000 pages long, and requires a certain amount of digestion.

The Dáil is due to debate the report in a fortnight. By then, anybody with any interest would have familiarised themselves with the contents of the document. Surely for an apology to mean anything to the survivors, and to register properly with all others, that would have been a more appropriate time.

Kenny did tell the Dáil: “Far from jumping to conclusions, everybody should read this report carefully and reflect on it deeply.”

Instead, we had the knee-jerk reaction that informs much of public life in this country.

McDonald’s attack on Kenny was the most vocal, and conveyed the most passion, not to mention anger. “I’m disappointed for the women, for the survivors that you cannot stand and say ‘the State was culpable, the State was negligent, you told the truth, we believe your stories and for that we collectively say sorry’.”

She went on: “What went on in the Magdalene laundries was a very Irish form of slavery.”

She may well be correct in that assessment, but it’s not a detail she garnered from the report.

She hadn’t read the report at the time. Was it that she felt the report was irrelevant to any apology, and one should be just issued as a token? Her response was replicated across politics and the media. The driving motivation, apart from political opportunism, is to be seen to be feeling survivors’ pain. In such a milieu, the room for proper reflection is totally wiped out.

The denizens of the Labour party have upped the ante, responding to political and media noise, and it is now likely that Kenny will issue an apology sometime soon, well ahead of the debate. What force can such an apology have? He will be saying sorry because he was forced politically to do so. It will, in effect, be a “gritted teeth” apology, which will do no justice to him as the leader of the State, or the survivors.

Kenny’s contribution on the day was cack-handed. He should have addressed the survivors, and explained that the debate would highlight the wrongs that they suffered and action would be forthcoming. There may well be a case to be made that he should have been thoroughly briefed about the report in advance and have all his ducks lined up.

But, to be fair to him, the contents of the report surprised many. For instance, the detail that more than a third of the 11,500 women “stayed” – were incarcerated might be a more accurate description of it – in the laundries for less than three months. Six out of every 10 women were there for less than a year.

There are survivors who were kept in the laundries for long years, and their testimony, as it has appeared in the media, is heartbreaking. The report establishes that their experience wasn’t widespread, but it is no less relevant for that.

The conditions as reported were atrocious. In particular, the fact that many did not know when they would be released reflects on a callous regime and a State that had entirely forsaken these citizens.

“I thought I’d be there for life and die in there. I was frightened,” one survivor told McAleese’s committee.

The report should also be seen in the context of the times. The survivors suffered horrendously, but women in general, and particularly the majority who lived in poverty, endured harsh conditions. In a country with a moribund economy and socially in rapture to a power-obsessed Church, it was women who bore the greatest brunt.

The demand for an immediate — and what couldn’t but be tokenistic — apology goes further than the body politic. In wider society, there is a great urge to bury the past and what it said about the country. Yes, there is acknowledgement of, and sympathy for, the survivors of all forms of institutional abuse from the black and white Ireland of newsreels. But there is also a wish to get it done and dusted, and let’s not dwell on a national psyche that allowed this stuff to go on. It’s all very well to blame de Valera’s Ireland, and even the Church, but there seems to be little stomach to look beyond the usual culprits, and examine wider society’s national DNA.

The rush to apologise also fails to take note of what has unfolded in this area in the past. Compensation must be paid to those who suffered at the hands of the State, but experience shows that lawyers and doctors are fast out of the blocks to hop on any governmental scheme.

Back in the late 90s, at the height of the Hep C scandal, it emerged that lawyers involved in the Brigid McCole case received a total of £1.35 million, while the subject of the case, Mrs McCole, was awarded just £175,000.

The residential redress board has cost more than €1 billion, of which at least €157 million — and counting — has gone to lawyers. Doctors have got in on both those schemes as well. In fact, if one were to look at setting up schemes on the hoof, there is no better example than the free medical card for over-70s. With the Government over a barrel, the GPs managed to get a contract that paid four times what they received for “ordinary” medical cards.

Incidentally, the average award at the redress board was around €67,000, and most of those in attendance would have suffered sexual abuse, or extreme physical abuse.

At that rate, survivors from the Magdalene laundries might expect something in the region of €20,000 to €50,000, figures that the Government could well afford even in today’s climate. Nevertheless, care needs to be taken that a scheme doesn’t become another trough for lawyers or doctors.

So cut Kenny some slack on this occasion. His address on the publication of the report was cack-handed, but he may well have had a point in suggesting that the report be read, and reflected on, with an apology forthcoming when everybody is aware what exactly the apology is for.

Excavation of the past has been painful for society as a whole, but at least those who were subjected to cruelty have, over the last decade or so, seen the truth brought out into the light. Taking time to consider that truth is no bad thing.