Eilis O'hanlon: Mcaleese Report Fails to Do Justice to Suffering of Women

Irish Independent
February 24, 2013

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/eilis-ohanlon-mcaleese-report-fails-to-do-justice-to-suffering-of-women-29090604.html

It would have been welcome had Martin McAleese stuck around afterwards to answer questions and provide clarification on his final report as chair of the inter-departmental committee to establish the facts of State involvement in the Magdalene Laundries, but none of the authors of the last four reports did either, so it wasn't as if the former first husband was breaking with tradition. Nor is it the outgoing senator's fault that the Government initially dropped the baby he handed to them.

But it is his responsibility if the report issued under his name turns out not to be as insightful a document as it seemed on first glance.

Of course, it's easy to pick holes. Whatever failings the McAleese Report may have, it still deserves credit for nailing the myth that the laundries were wholly private institutions over which the State had no power, and the equally poisonous lie, told by the previous government to the UN, that the "vast majority" of inmates went there voluntarily.

Many of its details have also added hugely to the historical picture, including cases of disabled and psychiatrically-ill girls sent to laundries for no other reason than that it was more cost-effective than providing them with proper treatment.

There remains, however, a glaring disconnect between the personal accounts of many inmates and the final report of the McAleese committee. Last year, the Justice for Magdalenes group handed the committee 12 files of supporting evidence, including 795 pages of harrowing survivors' testimonies from girls who were assaulted by nuns, often with keys and belts and other implements, and independent witnesses who attested to the truth of the stories. It could be argued that this treatment was commonplace in Irish society at the time. That's true. But then that makes it even more odd for the McAleese Report to find that a "large majority (of former inmates who provided evidence) said they had neither experienced nor seen other girls or women suffer physical abuse in the Magdalene Laundries" – especially as in Chapter 19 it explicitly states the committee looked at this other evidence, including the report of the Ryan commission into child abuse, which also documented litanies of ill-treatment, as part of its deliberations.

As McAleese notes, there is often a conflict between the testimony of survivors and the written record, but the only way to overcome that discrepancy is to make the widest possible survey of experiences, and the report simply didn't do that. In fact, it admits that the women to whom it spoke "cannot be considered representative" as the sample size was too small, and because there was a bias towards the later years, when the laundries had largely cleaned up their act. There were also issues in using the Ryan Report, as it was impossible to determine if any of the witnesses to that inquiry had been in the 10 institutions which it was this committee's remit to examine. Even so, there's a world of difference between being unable to establish exactly where physical assaults took place, and placing so much emphasis in the final report on the words of inmates who said "we were treated good and well looked after", or doctors who recalled "a group of ladies who appeared to be quite happy and content with their current environment".