Abortion information - the law

The Eighth Amendment has been officially repealed today.

18-9-2018

Abortion information - the law

Citizens Information

19-9-2018

• Introduction
• Rules

Introduction

On 25 May 2018, there was a constitutional referendum on the proposal to replace Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution with the text “Provision may be made by law for the regulation of termination of pregnancy.” A majority of voters approved this proposal and the Bill to amend the Constitution has been signed into law.

The amendment will allow the Oireachtas to pass laws regulating the termination of pregnancy. The Government has published an outline of the legislation it intends to introduce (pdf).

On 25 May 2018, there was a constitutional referendum on the proposal to replace Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution with the text “Provision may be made by law for the regulation of termination of pregnancy.” A majority of voters approved this proposal and the Bill to amend the Constitution has been signed into law.

The amendment will allow the Oireachtas to pass laws regulating the termination of pregnancy. The Government has published an outline of the legislation it intends to introduce (pdf).

Until new legislation is enacted, there is no change to the current legal situation. Abortion remains illegal in Ireland except where there is a real and substantial risk to the life (as distinct from the health) of the mother. This includes a risk arising from a threat of suicide. The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013 regulates the limited circumstances in which a pregnancy can be legally terminated. The Department of Health has published guidance for health professionals on the operation of the Act.

Women may not be prevented from travelling abroad to get an abortion. It is not lawful to encourage or advocate an abortion in individual cases. It is lawful to provide information in Ireland about abortions abroad, subject to strict conditions. This document explains the rules about providing such information.

Rules

Information about abortion services in other countries may be made available under certain conditions. The law on the subject was passed in 1995 and is usually known as the Abortion Information Act. Its full title is Regulation of Information (Services outside the State for Termination of Pregnancies) Act 1995. The Act sets out how information about legal abortion services outside Ireland may be given to individuals or groups in Ireland.

Information about abortion abroad may be made available by doctors, by specific agencies or by 

etc. etc.

compleet KLIK

Art. 8 EVRM: Recht op gezinslaven

 Nederlandse vrouw  (22) opgepakt in Qatar nadat ze is verkracht

10 - 6- 2016

De Volkskrant


Een 22-jarige vrouw uit Utrecht zit sinds maart vast in Qatar. De advocaat van haar familie, Brian Lokollo, zegt dat ze is gearresteerd nadat ze aangifte had gedaan van een verkrachting.

Het ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken bevestigt de arrestatie, maar benadrukt dat er nog geen tenlastelegging is.

Lokollo zegt in het NOS Radio-1 Journaal dat de vrouw wakker werd in een vreemd appartement, mogelijk nadat ze was gedrogeerd. "Ze was uit geweest in een hotel waar je alcohol mocht drinken. Ze was de dansvloer opgegaan en toen ze daarna terug kwam bij haar drankje, was haar na de eerste slok al duidelijk dat er iets in was gedaan."

Weerzinwekkend

Van wat er daarna is gebeurd kan ze zich weinig herinneren, zegt Lokollo. "Er is een flard dat ze met een man het hotel uitloopt en in een taxi stapt. Het volgende is dat ze wakker wordt in het voor haar onbekende appartement en tot ontdekking komt dat ze is verkracht."

Toen de vrouw aangifte deed tegen de man, werd zowel de man als zijzelf opgepakt, zegt de advocaat. Verkrachting wordt in Qatar beschouwd als buitenechtelijke seks en is daarom strafbaar voor beide partijen.

De familie van de man zou er op aandringen dat de vrouw trouwt met de man. Dat zou de buitenechtelijke seks opheffen, maar het is voor Lokollo onduidelijk of de aanklacht daarmee komt te vervallen. "Ik heb haar afgeraden dat te doen.'

Afgezien van het feit dat het weerzinwekkend is, weet ik niet welke andere consequenties een huwelijk in Qatar heeft. 
 Ik noem maar wat, maar misschien heeft ze straks geen vrije beschikking meer over haar paspoort.

Het verweer van de verdachte zou zijn dat de seks vrijwillig was en dat hij ervoor heeft betaald. Lokollo: 'Mijn cliënt ontkent dat.' 

Module 12 - Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd (the "Good Shepherd Sisters") ; Gods bruine bonen

Updated:  4th March 2016

KLIK

BRON (en transcripties) 

tip 1 

(en elke beetje fatsoenlijke doe-het-zelf-zaak 

heeft voor een habbekrats prachtige timmermanspotloden, 
bij stembureau's zit er al een handig kettinkje aan) 

Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story Catherine Corless’s research revealed that 796 children died at St Mary’s. She says the nature of their burial has been widely misrepresented

‘I never used that word ‘dumped’,” Catherine Corless, a local historian in Co Galway, tells The Irish Times. “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words.”

The story that emerged from her work was reported this week in dramatic headlines around the world.

“Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway’s mass graves” – TheGuardian.

“Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers” – The Washington Post.

“Nearly 800 dead babies found in septic tank in Ireland” – Al Jazeera.

“800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers” – New York Daily News.

“Almost 800 ‘forgotten’ Irish children dumped in septic tank mass grave at Catholic home” – ABC News, Australia.

Corless, who lives outside Tuam, has been working for several years on records associated with the former St Mary’s mother-and-baby home in the town. Her research has revealed that 796 children, most of them infants, died between 1925 and 1961, the 36 years that the home, run by Bon Secours, existed.

Between 2011 and 2013 Corless paid €4 each time to get the children’s publicly available death certificates. She says the total cost was €3,184. “If I didn’t do it, nobody else would have done it. I had them all by last September.” 

 

The children’s names, ages, places of birth and causes of death were recorded. The average number of deaths over the 36-year period was just over 22 a year. The information recorded on these State- issued certificates has been seen by The Irish Times; the children are marked as having died variously of tuberculosis, convulsions, measles, whooping cough, influenza, bronchitis and meningitis, among other illnesses.

The deaths of these 796 children are not in doubt. Their numbers are a stark reflection of a period in Ireland when infant mortality in general was very much higher than today, particularly in institutions, where infection spread rapidly. At times during those 36 years the Tuam home housed more than 200 children and 100 mothers, plus those who worked there, according to records Corless has found.

What has upset, confused and dismayed her in recent days is the speculative nature of much of the reporting around the story, particularly about what happened to the children after they died. “I never used that word ‘dumped’,” she says again, with distress. “I just wanted those children to be remembered and for their names to go up on a plaque. That was why I did this project, and now it has taken [on] a life of its own.”

In 2012 Corless published an article entitled “The Home” in the annual Journal of the Old Tuam Society. By then she had discovered that the 796 children had died while at St Mary’s, although she did not yet have all of their death certificates.

She also discovered that there were no burial records for the children and that they had not been interred in any of the local public cemeteries. In her article she concludes that many of the children were buried in an unofficial graveyard at the rear of the former home. This small grassy space has been attended for decades by local people, who have planted roses and other flowers there, and put up a grotto in one corner.

In light of Corless’s article a Children’s Home Graveyard committee was established last year. In recent months its secretary, Teresa Killeen Kelly, addressed the congregation after Mass at Tuam Cathedral, explaining the work of the committee and asking for donations towards a plaque. Copies of Corless’s article were handed out.

As John Lowe, another member of the committee, explained this week at the site of the former home, the group’s aim is to raise €15,000 for a plaque with all the names of the children on it. So far they have raised €7,000, and €2,000 has been paid for initial drawings of the plaque.

In 1840 a workhouse was built on a site off what is now Dublin Road. When the workhouse closed, the building was taken over, and from 1925 until 1961 it was used as the mother-and-baby home. After that it lay derelict for several years, until it was demolished and a new housing estate and playground built in its place. In the years that it was falling into disrepair, the large building and surrounding land became a natural magnet for curious local children.

orless writes in her article about hearing of boys who “came upon a sort of crypt in the ground, and on peering in they saw several small skulls. I’m told they ran for their lives and relayed their find to their parents.”

On St Patrick’s Day this year Barry Sweeney was drinking in Brownes bar, on the Square in Tuam. He fell into conversation with someone who was familiar with Corless’s research, and who repeated the story of boys finding bones. “I told her that I was one of those boys,” Sweeney tells The Irish Times in his home, on the outskirts of Tuam. “I got a phonecall from Catherine a couple of weeks later.”

Sweeney was 10 in 1975, and the friend he was with on that day, Frannie Hopkins, was 12. They dropped down from the two-and-a-half-metre boundary wall as usual, into the part of the former grounds that Corless and local people believe is the unofficial burial place for those who died in the home. “We used to be in there playing regular. There was always this slab of concrete there,” he says.

In his kitchen, Sweeney demonstrates the size of this concrete flag as he recalls it: it’s an area a little bigger than his coffee table, about 120cm long and 60cm wide. He says he does not recall seeing any other similar flags in their many visits to the area.

Between them the boys levered up the slab. “There were skeletons thrown in there. They were all this way and that way. They weren’t wrapped in anything, and there were no coffins,” he says. “But there was no way there were 800 skeletons down that hole. Nothing like that number. I don’t know where the papers got that.” How many skeletons does he believe there were? “About 20.”

When Corless was researching the home she looked at old maps of Tuam. One was an 1840 Ordnance Survey map that shows the then workhouse. At the rear of the site is a space she believes to be the sewage tank for the workhouse, although it is not labelled as such. Later maps have “sewage tank” written in the same space.

But there is confusion about what dates these maps relate to. One map Corless shows The Irish Times is dated 1892. It describes the building on the site as “Children’s Home”, but in 1892 the building was a workhouse. It did not become a home until 1925. Corless had not noticed this until her attention was drawn to it.

She is sure that a sewage tank operated on the site in the early part of the 20th century because minutes of the workhouse’s board meetings published at the time by the Tuam Herald report problems of overflowing. 

 

Would it have taken up the entire space of what is now known as the unofficial graveyard for the babies who died at the home? “No,” she says. “Maybe a third of the area.” She believes that what Sweeney and Hopkins found was the former sewage tank, which she had previously referred to in her article as a crypt. It seems this is where the story of “800 skeletons dumped in a septic tank” has subsequently come from.

Corless has not been contacted by anyone from any State department, asking to have access to her research. Nor has her work been corroborated by anyone else. “I would definitely be willing to share my research,” she says.

In response to Corless’s story, Minister for Children Charlie Flanagan confirmed this week that there will be a Government inquiry into all mother-and-baby homes.

Corless has proved that 796 children died while at St Mary’s in Tuam – a shameful statistic that would not have been known without her years of dedicated work. It seems clear that at least some of these children lie in the small plot of land at the back of the Dublin Road housing estate. Excavation might be the only way to be sure. “Our intention in setting up this committee was not excavation,” she says, “but I would welcome the truth.”

Reticulata en Poetilia latipinna Vinken blote billetjes in zeegras

Chester Zoo

Justice for Magdalenes research has published a guide, and said it will “empower” survivors when applying for the funds.

MAGDALENE SURVIVORS HAVE been provided with a guide to the redress scheme by a group that advocated for some of the women in their fight for compensation.
JFM (Justice for Magdalenes) Research, the survivor advocacy group, has published the Survivor Guide
to Magdalene Restorative Justice Scheme. It said that a number of survivors had expressed difficulty in filling out the application form for the compensation.

Entitlements
JFM Research said the guide aims to assist survivors in understanding their entitlements under the scheme developed by Mr Justice John Quirke and announced by the government on 26 June.
Mr Justice Quirke recommended in a report that the Magdalene survivors should all receive cash payments in the range €11,500 (if their duration of stay was three months or less) to €100,000 (duration of stay of 10 years or more).
If the cash payment due is above €50,000, Justice Quirke recommends that it should paid in the form of a lump sum of €50,000 plus an annual payment related to the notional remaining lump sum, to be paid weekly.
The members of JFM Research have been assisting the 40 survivors in contact with them since JFM left the political arena in May 2013.
It said today:

Some survivors have expressed difficulty in understanding their entitlements under the Magdalene Restorative Justice Scheme and have sought assistance with their applications. Therefore JFM Research has compiled this guide to inform, empower and enable survivors and provide guidance in filling out the application form for the scheme for those who are interested in availing of it.

According to JFM Research, the guide’s aim is to provide information “in an unbiased manner to enable survivors to make their own decisions about participating in the scheme”.
A number of survivors have indicated that they have difficulty in accessing their records from the religious orders and JFM Research has provided a sample letter at the back of the guide to assist them with this.
The guide will also be made available to survivor groups, including those specifically representing Magdalene women, as well as relevant NGOs, Citizens Information Centres and family resource centres.
JFM Research said that the guide is “intended solely as an aid to survivors and is not intended to supplant or replace any official documents” created by the Magdalene Restorative Justice Scheme or the Irish State.
Survivors who have not already registered with the scheme are encouraged to do so by phoning 01 4768660. The guide will be available to download from www.magdalenelaundries.com

 

 

Read: Magdalene survivors to meet with President at Áras today>

Read: Magdalene group seeks meeting with Shatter over ‘deeply unfair’ redress scheme>

Read: ‘Today is about justice’: Magdalene redress scheme details announced>

“The laundries were commercial enterprises that operated on a low cost basis to provide services to the public and indeed the State, the State benefitted from services that were based on forced or compulsory labour in the past.”

 
The Irish Times

The Irish Human Rights Commission (IHRC) has repeated its 2010 call for a statutory inquiry into the Magdalene laundries.

It also said comprehensive compensation was needed for survivors of Magdalene laundries including unpaid wages and pensions and rehab for forced labour, a watchdog has claimed.

In its Follow-up Report on State Involvement with Magdalen Laundries, published today (Tuesday), the IHRC found “the State failed in its obligations to protect the human rights of girls and women in the laundries.” 

It called for “a comprehensive redress scheme that provides individual compensation, restitution and rehabilitation for the women in accordance with the State’s human rights obligations.”

This followed its review of the facts set out in the report of the Interdepartmental Committee chaired by Senator Martin McAleese, presented to Government last February and, after it revisited its own 2010 report “in light of information now available”.

It concluded: “Girls and women placed in the Magdalene laundries did not have their human rights fully respected in relation to equality, liberty, respect for private lives, education, and to be free from forced or compulsory labour or servitude.”

Des Hogan, acting chief executive of the IHRC told the media today that the mandate of the McAleese Committee was fact-finding only. “It had no remit to consider the human rights law or indeed any legal implications of the placement of girls and women in the laundries by the State and other actors”, he said. “Our report takes the facts established in the McAleese report and filters them through the prism of the human rights obligations ofthe State,” he said. 

He noted “the duty of the State to vindicate the rights of its citizens under the Constitution and under international human rights law. Our report today focuses on this duty.”

Sinéad Lucey, senior enquiry and legal officer with the IHRC, emphasised that it was “not an investigative report. It is a human rights analysis drawning from all the information at our disposal, including the additional information which has come to light through the McAleese report.”

The McAleese report considered “only the actual acts of State engagement with the laundries”, while the IHRC reflected on “the wider issue of State responsibility.” This included its “actual engagement” with the laundries through, for example, commercial contracts for laundry services, its use of laundries as State remand or social care facilities, and whether it exercised “due diligence” over what went on in the laundries where compulsory or forced labour was concerned,for instance.

IHRC commissioner Prof Siobhán Mullally said they were calling “for a comprehensive redress scheme that provides individual compensation for the impact of the human rights violations which occurred to each individual woman who resided in the laundries.” 

What was clear “is that the issue of remedies is not a case of one size fits all,” she said.

“The laundries were commercial enterprises that operated on a low cost basis to provide services to the public and indeed the State,” she said. “I’m sure it is a shock for all of us to learn that the State benefitted from services that were based on forced or compulsory labour in the past.” 

Formally launching the report, acting chair of the IHRC Mark Kelly also called for “the formal appointment of a Chief Commissioner designate and the completion of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Bill. ”

The IHRC issued other recommendations which included:

- Restitution and rehab for survivors including housing, health and welfare, education and assistance to deal with psychological effects.

- The State should scrutinise its interactions with other parties to ensure regulatory and oversight functions are robust enough to prevent human rights breaches.

- Independent and prompt investigations into all credible allegations of abuse.

- Immediate introduction of compulsory inspections of residential centres for people with disabilities by the Health Information and Quality Authority.

- Reform laws to ensure a rigorous system of accountability and oversight in relation to the granting of licenses for exhumations and cremations.

Human rights body repeats call for statutory Magdalene inquiry Irish Human Rights Commission says unpaid wages and pensions need to be paid; Monument voor Mosquita; meisje Y

BRON

Cleta en Goofy; patroontekenen op 9 hoog

Nee schat, koei groeit niet in plastic pakkies
daar zitten 4 poten aan !

Dáil Éireann, Kenny on Magdalene report

                              

PRIME TIME

Report will get 'appropriate response'

The Irish Times - 
February 13, 2013

MARIE O'HALLORAN and MICHAEL O'REGAN

The Government will make a “considered and appropriate response” to the McAleese report on the Magdalene laundries, Minister of State Kathleen Lynch has told the Dáil.

Ms Lynch, who has long campaigned on the issue, said, “We will try to do this in a way that recognises the full complexities of the issues arising and meets the needs, insofar as we can, of the women who worked there.”

Her party colleague Dominic Hannigan called for “an official State apology to every woman who was sent to the laundries. Anything less is not good enough.” He read testimony from Maisy Kay, a woman who spent time in a laundry and on one occasion “got a fist to the face” from a nun.

Both were speaking during the debate on Fianna Fáil’s Private Members’ motion calling for an immediate and unqualified apology to the women who spent time in the Magdalene laundries, and a comprehensive redress scheme.

Ms Lynch described the motion as hypocritical and galling. She said that for 14 years in government Fianna Fáil chose to “completely neglect the tragedy of the Magdalene laundries. The Irish Women Survivors Support Network and others were stone-walled and fobbed off for years when all they wanted was recognition and an acknowledgment of the wrong done to them.”

She reiterated that “there is absolutely no hesitation on the part of the Government in making a considered and appropriate response to this report”.

Ms Lynch highlighted that just over 60 per cent of the 10,000 women spent less than a year in the laundry and said the report clearly illustrated the stigma attached to time in the laundry “derives from misconceptions relating to how women came to be in the laundries”.

Disservice
Labour TD Eamonn Maloney said Fianna Fáil had done itself a disservice by “prostituting the issue this evening to get some gain out of wrongfooting the Government”. He accused Fianna Fáil of turning its back on the women.

Mr Maloney said the laundries “were more accurately described as prisons ... because these people weren’t paid and these people could not leave at their own will”.

“We are looking at Irish female slavery in this Republic,” he said, adding that the laundries “made money ... lots of money” because some of the women in the laundries worked in the accounts section and knew about it.

Moving the Fianna Fáil motion, Dara Calleary said the Government had to be dragged kicking and screaming into giving a full apology for wrongs inflicted.
Mr Calleary said the Taoiseach’s statement after the publication of the McAleese report was amateur, heartless and unfair and as a result the physical incarceration of these women continued mentally.

The Dáil should stand up to the faceless people behind the Government’s response and demand that the women be allowed to begin their journey to personal, mental and physical redemption.

He said the State’s response needed to include healthcare provisions, social protection, pensions and redress.
“And most importantly of all the State, the Government, every one of us need to say one word, sorry,” said Mr Calleary.

Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald said the treatment of the women was “illegal, not just wrong and awful and heartbreaking’’.
“The law was breached, the women were brutalised,” Ms McDonald added.

RTE

Stock paarden

• 

  RTÉ

  13:42
  
  

  RTÉ’s Political Correspondent David Davin Power has been told the McAleese report finds 'significant State involvement' in Magdalene Laundries.
  He says: "Taoiseach anticipating that issue will be raised at LQs. Primed to respond. Inconceivable he won't apologise in some form."
  
  
  
  
  neer dan 1000 pagina's over leugens, en dan?
  zit je naar een beeldscherm te kijken
  Doet ie 't of doet ie 't niet?
  Tijdperk afgelopen
  
  Mercedes Benz waar 't licht uitvalt, kassa
  
  
  9-89 jr, aantallen, percentages, stigmata, stigmata in a harsh culture, geen seksueel misbruik, stigmata, vrouwen die zelf terug kwamen, stigmata, van 9 tot 89 jaar
  debat over 14 dagen
  en als je luistert naar wat ie zegt is er inderdaad weer 's een verdomde hoop moed nodig om die rotzooi alleen nog maar te  lezen
  goddank het is er.
  goddank ik heb nooit de ambitie gehad politicus te worden
  Dát was heel verstandig.
  "t Is er!
  
  Soms is het heel plezierig om je buren te kennen
  en opgelucht te zijn dat die niet naast me woont, en die niet en die niet. En die ook niet.
  Dat scheelt dan weer  het zoeken naar een klusjesman achteraf
  
  klik 
  
  
  
  

  

  Wist U dat
  

  

op de dag van het laatste oordeel
zal Christus niet verschijnen

Abused in the past and abandoned in the present

Opinion:
 James M. Smith*

She remains anonymous by choice. She values her privacy above all. She lives alone and never married. She attends daily Mass. She will never again live in Ireland. She celebrated her 78th birthday recently. She is a survivor of the Magdalene laundries.

Her mother died when she was seven. At 14, her father remarried but she and a younger sister were unwelcome in the new family household, the only home they ever knew. Poverty was her only crime.
She was taken to the Good Shepherd convent in New Ross, her younger sister sent by train to the congregation’s Limerick house. The Good Shepherds managed industrial schools for children at both locations and a reformatory school for girls in Limerick.

But the two sisters were put to work in the Magdalene laundry with its population of adult women workers. For the next five years she washed society’s dirty laundry and received no pay. When she refused to work the nuns cut her hair as punishment. The hair grew back but to this day the loss of her education angers her. To her, it was a prison in all but name. There was no inspector, no child welfare officer. She was abandoned and no one cared.

Sixty years later this woman lives with the stigma and shame attached to these institutions. These are the indelible stains on her life.

And, in her case and others, there are life-long material consequences to having spent time in the Magdalene laundry. Her application to the Residential Institutions Redress Board was rejected. The 10 laundries were not among the institutions covered, thus her application was deemed “ineligible”, and the review board refused her appeal.

Friends helped her apply for a statutory pension, but once again her years working in the Magdalene laundry did not count when calculating her entitlement. She was never paid so no stamps were submitted on her behalf. After endless bureaucratic delays and reams of paperwork, she receives a meagre $7.50 a week from the Irish State – that is, after an Irish bank deducts international wire transfer and currency conversion charges.

This is the plight of one Magdalene survivor: abused in the past, abandoned in the present.

This morning as she wakes in her rented apartment here in the US, the Cabinet will meet in Dublin to discuss the final report from the Inter-Departmental Committee Investigating State Involvement with the Magdalene Laundries. This afternoon the report is to be published. It remains to be seen how or whether the Government responds. In either case, today’s events will have an impact on the rest of her days.

She is not alone, nor is her experience exceptional. Survivors can be found all across Ireland, the UK, the US and beyond, each with her own story to tell, all of them anxiously awaiting news from Government Buildings this afternoon.

Some contributed to the work of the interdepartmental committee – they completed surveys, submitted testimony that was often difficult and painful to recall, and travelled to Dublin or London to meet the committee chairman, Senator Martin McAleese, in person.
In doing so, they showed admirable courage and resilience.
 
Others felt unable to participate. Their time in the Magdalene laundry remains a carefully guarded secret.

They fear jeopardising established identities – husbands, children and grandchildren know little about this part of their past. Or they have a deep distrust that justice will be forthcoming. They have been disappointed before. For some, the risk is paralysing.

And still, the women’s testimony is compelling. It rebuts government claims that they entered these institutions “voluntarily”. It contradicts the religious orders’ assertion that women were free to come and go as they pleased. Some survivors describe their experience as tantamount to “slavery”, living behind locked doors and barred windows.

They insist, moreover, that members of An Garda Síochána routinely brought women to the laundries and/or returned women who escaped – regardless of whether the State was involved in committing them in the first place, and in the absence of any statutory basis for doing so.


The women’s testimony corroborates historical archives that disclose the transfer into the Magdalene laundries of children from State-funded residential institutions and unmarried mothers from State-licensed mother-and-baby homes.

There is no evidence to suggest the State made certain the release of these women and young girls. Some would remain to live and die behind convent walls.

Testimony substantiates historical Dáil debates that point to various State agencies contracting laundry work to the nuns’ commercial businesses, and doing so without a “fair wages clause” as stipulated for similar contracts with commercial laundries. Women describe laundry specific to the Army, State hospitals, prisons, agricultural laboratories etc.

It is to be hoped today’s report will answer many of the heretofore unanswered questions about these institutions, for example, how many women entered, why did they end up there, who brought them, how long did they stay, how many died, and where are they buried? It will, as such, help Irish society better understand this aspect of our nation’s past.

Ultimately, however, today will be remembered for how the Government responds to the conclusions about State involvement, the committee’s primary remit. The survivor community will judge the Government on whether Minister for Justice Alan Shatter announces measures that finally affords them justice.

These measures begin with an official State apology. Lost wages must be restored and pensions recalculated to reflect time spent in the laundries. These measures need to be implemented immediately. The Government should then establish a transparent and non-adversarial compensation scheme that is open to all survivors and puts their welfare at the forefront.

Time is of the essence. It is the one commodity many of these women can ill afford. They have waited for justice too long already. The wait must end today.

* James M Smith is an associate professor in the English department and Irish studies programme at Boston College. He is the author of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (2008) and serves on the Justice for Magdalenes advisory committee.

bad girls do the best sheets

1993: RIDDLE OF THE MAGDALENE LAUNDRY DEAD: Who are they?

February 3, 2013 by theraggedwagon

Bron