Luke Flanagan (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish to share time with Deputies Wallace, Daly, Boyd Barrett and Collins.

I support this motion tabled by Sinn Féin. I signed my name to it because what else could one do. These people need justice and they need it before it is too late. The longer we wait, the less likely it is that they will get justice.

I started reading the report produced by Justice for Magdalenes and I must say it is very hard work to read it. If it is hard work to read the report, it must have been absolute hell to exist as those people were forced to exist. I consider myself very lucky that myself and my wife were not born 30 years earlier than we were because, given that my two children were born outside wedlock, my wife would probably have been put in care and my children taken away from me. I would probably have ended up in England and everyone would have ended up miserable. If one imagines oneself in that position and asks if one deserves justice, the answer is yes, of course.

One particular story in the report stood out. Often mothers and daughters were in the same facility and in one case, a mother was in the same chapel as her daughter, week after week but she was not told it was her daughter. I am trying to understand how anyone could be so cruel as to do that to someone. It is fairly obvious it was cruel. It was fairly obvious to Deputy Shatter in December 2009 that it was wrong, when he said there was "irrefutable evidence" that there was State complicity in the Magdalene laundries. That is still true today and he needs to act on it today.

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