Paul Connaughton (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to have an opportunity to speak on this important motion. Recent decades have seen huge progress in Irish society in terms of assessing how the country's most vulnerable people were treated in past decades and an important part of that has been assessment of the circumstances of women and girls who resided in Magdalene laundries across the country. Initially those institutions were designed as places of asylum for women and were found throughout Europe as well as in Canada and the United States. However, by the early 20th century in Ireland, these centres had adopted a more prison-like regime, with enforced labour and long periods of silence. Lest anyone think that these institutions belong to a dim and distant part of Ireland's past, the last Magdalene asylum closed in Waterford just 16 years ago in 1996. Their presence was widely accepted although the residents of the institutions were rarely seen in public. Áras an Uachtaráin, Bank of Ireland, the Department of Defence and the Department of Agriculture all used the services of the laundries. In her 2001 book on the subject, Do Penance or Perish: A Study of Magdalene Asylums in Ireland, Frances Finnegan suggests that it was the advent of the washing machine, as opposed to any moral outcry, that led to the demise of such institutions. Survivors of the institutions report the prevalence of forced labour and the use of women and children as unpaid workers, all of which appear to contravene the 1930 Forced Labour Convention.

The nation as a whole must reflect on the brutal treatment meted out to those women and the silence that surrounded the subject for many years. Such an assessment must be carried out properly and deserves due consideration. It is right and proper that the committee chaired by Senator Martin McAleese is afforded until the end of the year to conclude its work and submit a final report. Fifteen months ago the Government decided upon the establishment of an interdepartmental committee to consider the circumstances of the women and girls who lived in the institutions. That was the correct decision to take as a first step to establishing the truth about what happened inside the walls of the institutions. The proper course of action is that sufficient time is taken to produce the report. After decades of silence, the very least we can do for the women and girls who lived in the institutions, often working for paltry or non-existent wages, is to give their cases the consideration they merit. To rush the report would not provide justice to the women. The time specified is not too long to allow for the production of such an important report, especially when one considers that the committee must review such institutions over a 90-year period and also that submissions by relevant representative groups were being made up to mid-August. I endorse the Government's position on the report. Senator McAleese and his colleagues on the interdepartmental committee must be afforded the necessary time to properly conduct the investigation and compile the results into a narrative that details the experience of the women.

I note Deputy McDonald's statement that the women involved are ageing and are anxious to achieve closure on the issue, but to pre-empt the publication of such a report by making a decision in advance of its circulation would be wrong. These forgotten women of Irish history, many of whom disappeared behind the high walls of those institutions for decades, deserve to have their stories told in a proper fashion and to have the matter explored properly in a way that respects their dignity while at the same time giving proper consideration to this important issue.

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