JFM demands immediate government action for Magdalene survivors
Justice for Magdalenes (JFM), the survivor advocacy group, is this week providing every TD and Senator with a redacted copy of its recent principal submission to the Inter-Departmental Committee investigating State involvement with the Magdalene Laundries. We d¬o so with survivors’ consent and identities have been protected.
Justice for Magdalenes (JFM), the survivor advocacy group, is this week providing every TD and Senator with a redacted copy of its recent principal submission to the Inter-Departmental Committee investigating State involvement with the Magdalene Laundries. We d¬o so with survivors’ consent and identities have been protected.
“State Involvement with the Magdalene Laundries,” a 145-page document with an additional 30-page index of supporting materials, offers overwhelming and irrefutable evidence of State complicity in the abuses experienced by young girls and women in these institutions. The original submission was supported by some 795 pages of newly gathered survivor testimony which is consistent with the 3,707 pages of archival evidence and legislative documentation also provided to the Inter-Departmental Committee.
JFM’s decision to make the redacted document available comes in light of the announcement last week by Minister for Justice, Mr. Alan Shatter, T.D., that the Inter-Departmental Committee’s final report now may not appear until the end of the year. Originally, the final report was to be published by “mid-2012,” and then no later than this month.
As stated in our press release last week, JFM is gravely concerned by this additional delay and calls on the government to issue an immediate apology and to initiate meaningful discussions towards providing redress and restorative justice to all survivors. The UN Committee Against Torture recommendation (June 2011) called on the State to ensure that survivors obtain redress within one year. The State has failed to do so. Meanwhile a population of aging and elderly women is left waiting.
Moreover, Minister Shatter has refused to discuss an apology or redress until after the publication of the Committee’s final report. JFM has, in turn, repeatedly asked Mr. Shatter to set a threshold for State involvement short of the final report so that survivors can access entitlements without further delay, e.g., statutory pensions and lost wages.
JFM is urging all Oireachtas members to read “State Involvement with the Magdalene Laundries” and to press Minister Shatter to take action within the Dáil’s Autumn session. Survivors’ entitlements should no longer be held hostage to a political system that is not delivering on its promises.
JFM has also written to Minister for State with responsibility for older people, Ms. Kathleen Lynch, T.D. In our letter, we refer Minister for State Lynch to JFM’s proposed Restorative Justice and Reparations Scheme, submitted on 14th October 2011, which outlined a Dedicated Unit within the Department of Justice to provide services for Magdalene survivors. Given the ongoing delays to real Government action, JFM is asking Minister Lynch to make available a dedicated help line and outreach service to Laundry survivors as soon as possible.
Three years into this campaign, 22 months after the IHRC recommendation, 15 months after the United Nation’s Committee Against Torture recommendation and ensuing Government Statement on the Magdalene Laundries, by refusing to apologise and provide redress, the Fine Gael and Labour government continues to fail survivors of the Magdalene Laundries.
Will the all too familiar policy of “deny ‘til they die” become “delay ‘til they die”?
September 18, 2012
The 145 pages of Justice for Magdalene’s submission to the inter-departmental committee investigating State involvement in the Magdalene Laundries makes you ashamed to be Irish.
JFM describes from testimony how the women suffered abuse of various kinds — their hair was forcibly cut, they were beaten with belts until they bled and once the door to the outside world was shut on them, they were referred to by number not by name.
Over the course of the submission, JFM hold religious orders and the State directly and indirectly responsible for systematically humiliating, imprisoning and enslaving thousands of young Irish girls.
The submission made to Senator Martin McAleese’s committee is 145 pages long but includes a 30-page index explaining the 3,707 pages of archival evidence, legislation, and other materials including 795 pages of survivor testimony.
According to the submission, the State sent women and girls to the laundries and ensured "they remained there — in most cases, without any statutory basis for doing so".
JFM argue that the State used the laundries as a way of dealing with births outside marriage, poverty, homelessness, promiscuity, domestic and sexual abuse as well as youth crime and infanticide. It chose to enslave women with the nuns rather than develop a female borstal.
"It repeatedly sought to funnel diverse populations of women and girls to the Magdalene Laundries and in return, the religious orders obtained an entirely unpaid and literally captive workforce for their commercial laundry enterprises," they wrote.
Survivors and witnesses told JFM how the women washed, ironed and sewed from dawn to dusk, were regularly beaten, not allowed to talk to one another and punished if they laughed. There was no regard whatsoever for their health or medical needs. If they stepped out of line, they were "put down the hole".
"This was a four by four room… There was nothing in it, only a bench — no windows. You were put in there; your hair was cut, more or less off completely. Your hair was cut, and you were there all day without anything to eat," one woman recalled.
Even for the "good" girls and women upstairs, food was scarce. Mary C recalled "they were out rooting in the bins — they were rooting in the bins... They were hungry."
The women and girls in the laundries were also denied contact with girls in other convent complexes. In Limerick, the nuns kept women separate from children in the industrial school, often their own children.
One witness described how a "lady in particular didn’t know that after she gave birth, her daughter was brought up in the same complex and remained there until she was 16 years old".
"My worst memory goes back to that lady and her daughter... the daughter at one end of the church and the mother at the other end of the church and neither of the two of them knowing each was there. There is something wrong with a society that permitted that sort of thing to go on. There is something wrong."
Meanwhile, Ciaran C, the laundry manager in Limerick, said the laundry was designed so the women could not see out or be seen inside.
He recounted to JFM how the nuns split two sisters, sending one to New Ross and the other to Limerick "and that they did not tell M that her sister had died for a year — and then only to punish her". When being castigated for some misdemeanour they told her: "Oh by the way, your sister died last year’, just like that. So M had a nervous breakdown, and her nerves were never 100% afterwards."
Another woman, Sara W, said that during her time in Donnybrook the nuns did not tell her her mother had died, so "I was writing to my mother, that was dead... I wrote to my mother every week but got no reply".
In return for taking these women, the nuns got direct capitation grants from the State and also valuable state contracts for cleaning laundry and commercial laundry work from various Government departments and agencies. Such was their faith in the religious orders, the State chose not to supervise the religious orders’ operation of the Magdalene Laundries.
THE State also failed to enforce its own health and safety legislation in the laundries and turned a blind eye to the fact these school-age girls weren’t receiving an education, weren’t being paid for working 12-hour days and had been cut off from family, friends and the outside world.
JFM also demonstrate how the State never ensured that social welfare contributions were being paid for this secret workforce and never questioned why women who were sent in on probation never again exited.
In the words of the report’s authors: "If [as the survivors unanimously say] they were not free to leave, the committee needs then to determine on what basis the State allowed [and indeed helped] one group of Irish citizens [the nuns] to imprison another group [the women and girls] without lawful authority."
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