Sandra McLellan (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak again on this exceptionally disturbing issue, one of the most important to come before the House since the foundation of the State. I welcome the Taoiseach's official apology to survivors of the Magdalen laundries which he gave in the House on 19 February. It was moving to see so many of the surviving women and their supporters, friends and families in the Visitors Gallery on the evening in question. I also welcome Dr. McAleese's report which is an important piece of work and should be acknowledged as such. I welcome the appointment of the president of the Law Reform Commission, Mr. Justice Quirke, to oversee the issue of compensation. I also welcome the Taoiseach's comments that any scheme should be simple, non-adversarial and non-litigious. All of these developments deserve to be acknowledged as important milestones. The period between the State's apology and Mr. Justice Quirke's report which we should receive within three months gives us an opportunity to take stock of where we are.

While I have noted the importance of the McAleese report on various occasions, there are important deficiencies in its data analysis. The serious methodological problems with the report render it incomplete and, more importantly, raise serious questions about the accuracy of its findings. The authors of the report acknowledge this in the executive summary, under the heading of statistical analysis, when they accept there are "gaps in the data available". At best, the report gives us a partial sense of the numbers of women and girls who were incarcerated, the factors that led to their incarceration and the reasons that determined their continued detention or release. A detailed analysis of the role of the various State agencies such as the Garda, the courts, local authorities and health agencies in the procurement of girls and women for the various laundries is also lacking in the report. There is no indepth discussion of the relationship between the laundries, mother and baby homes and orphanages run by the religious orders named in the report. More fundamentally, the voices and testimonies of the women incarcerated in these institutions are notable by their absence from the report.

There is also an eerie silence when it comes to the various religious orders. We get no sense of the warped power, the superiority, the class elitism and hatred for the poor which underpinned this system. A sense of the violence and terror which were omnipresent in the laundries and crucial to the maintenance of the entire system is entirely missing from the report. There is no blood in the report, no sense of the pain and human despair the incarcerated women experienced on a daily basis. There is no attempt to engage with the long-term effects of this trauma on the surviving women. We are no closer to knowing exactly how many women and girls died in these institutions. More importantly, we know virtually nothing about the factors and circumstances which led to their deaths. The report leaves us totally in the dark on the issue of the sexual abuse and rape of the incarcerated women. Taken together, these omissions and errors render the McAleese report an incomplete piece of work. It sheds the faintest of light on what was, by any standard, an appalling litany of abuse and exploitation.

The State was not some innocent bystander in all of this. It was centrally and actively involved in the creation and reproduction of the system that Dr. McAleese sought to investigate. The idea of the State investigating itself was always going to be fraught with problems in practice. At best, it was a highly questionable exercise. What happened in the Magdalen laundries needs to exposed and excavated for all to see. The appalling litany of abuse and the system underpinned by that abuse is an important part of the story of Irish society. By using the important mirror into this world that we have been given, we can learn much about who we were and are as a people. The story of the Magdalen laundries and the institutional framework that supported them give us important clues and information on how the State operates and tell us in whose interests it functions. We have learned that behind the cold, passive and bureaucratic language of State rhetoric lies an entire State apparatus that is based on violence and consent. We have learned that someone's class position, status, gender and access to power ultimately determines which side of the seesaw will shape his or her life experience.

The lives of the women and girls who lived in the Magdalen laundries, who died in them or who survived are characterised by a form of social death. These women were banished from so-called normal society. Their physical incarceration and the real ideological stigma that surrounded it mean that, to all intents and purposes, they were sentenced to a form of social death. Most, if not all, will never recover.

Having acknowledged its central role in this very Irish trauma, the State must now act accordingly. It should pay careful attention to and accept in the main the recommendations of the Justice for Magdalenes group, as outlined in its document with proposals for a restorative justice and reparations scheme. It is also imperative that the various religious orders that ran and profited from the Magdalen system are called to account without delay.

Thus far, their silence has been deafening. More importantly, I remind the Government and the House that, on 1 June 2011, the UN Committee Against Torture recommended that the State should institute prompt, independent and thorough investigations and, in appropriate cases, prosecutions. To some extent, the State has complied with the first part of this recommendation, despite the flaws and significant gaps in the McAleese report. However, that latter part of the recommendation remains just that - a recommendation that has yet to be acted upon. I call on the Government to demand that the religious orders meet without further delay with the various stakeholders to agree a generous and appropriate package of compensation and reparation.

It is now clear that, even within the confines of the patriarchal, myopic and claustrophobic Ireland of the 1930s through to the late 1980s, there existed a sub-group of women who were even more constrained and oppressed than women in the general society. We now owe it, as a Parliament, to all the women and girls who were incarcerated in the Magdalen laundries to finally right a terrible wrong.

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