Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

"We all kind of had to stick together in case we got a beating. We all stuck together. Another died and the girl that ran away, she got a beating. We never saw her again. She was the same age as ourselves. She wanted to get out and they beat her. We used to hear her screaming but we did not know where to go, like, because when you are in the dormitory at night you were locked in. The nun had her own room there and she used to open this thing – it was like a little hatch – and look out to see you were in bed. How could you get out?"

That is the testimony of Kate, a survivor from a Good Shepherd laundry. I believe Kate’s story as well as all those of the Kates, the Marys and the other women who were incarcerated and brutalised in Magdalen laundries. I also know the State was complicit in this barbarity. This was illegal and not just wrong, awful and heart-breaking. It broke the 1926 League of Nations slavery convention, the 1930 International Labour Organization forced labour convention and the European Convention on Human Rights, ratified by this State in 1953.

It breached Article 40 of the Constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, and the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery. It was, therefore, illegal in its time. It would be wrong for anyone in the Chamber or any member of the Government to try to pretend that the difficulty we have with what happened in the Magdalen laundries derives from looking at the issue through a contemporary prism. The law was breached and the women concerned were brutalised. The activity of holding women against their will was as illegal then as it is now. The State's complicity is writ large but not only since the McAleese report because we knew the story of the Magdalen laundries before the report was published. It was spelled out in the Ryan report in 2009.

The Minister of State said when introducing the Government amendment that she was driven by sensitivity and complexity. I put it to her that in the days since the McAleese report was published the Government has effected a strategy of minimisation which we have seen again this evening. The Minister of State referred to the various routes of entry of the women concerned and the differing lengths of time spent by them in the laundries. These are all factors and facts, but they miss the essential truth, that is, that they were brutalised and had their rights denied and that the law was broken with the active connivance of the State. That is not at all complex; in fact, it is very simple. It is simple to understand the terror Kate must have felt as a woman held in one of these institutions.

When the apology comes - I realise it will come - we need to be clear that we are not looking for some maudlin, sentimental "Sorry" from the Government benches. We need an apology that openly and fully recognises the failure and culpability of the State and the consequent suffering of the women concerned. We need such an apology and then we need redress. I understand consideration must be given to the precise mechanism of redress. However, it must be inclusive of every woman and girl who spent any time in a Magdalen laundry. I include the institutions in Stanhope Street and Summerhill, two Magdalen laundries in all but name that were excluded from the McAleese report's terms of reference.

I have no interest whatsoever in this issue as a political football. However, I put it to the Minister of State that I am not impartial; I am partial because the women concerned and any Minister, in all honesty and truthfulness, would recognise that much. I put it to the Minister of State that it would be a profound tragedy if the Government were to succumb to the wishes of bureaucracy or the Civil Service which will, on its terms, move to try to protect the State. This story is not really about the past, although it happened in the years between 1922 and 1996. The real story of the Magdalen women is in the present, about who we are now, how we view women now and how we recognise and make some amends for the women who were failed comprehensively by the State.

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