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

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this exceptionally important and pressing issue. This is perhaps one of the most important, if not the most important, issues to come before the House since the foundation of the State. I say this because the Magdalen laundries, the way in which they were run and the total denial of the rights and well-being of the incarcerated women shed an important light on the dysfunctional nature of the State's apparatus.

I have spoken before in this House of the State's historical disregard for women and the institutionalisation of their secondary status in virtually every area of life. It is clear, however, 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 that were even more constrained and oppressed than women in the general society. These are the Irish women who were incarcerated and detained in the Magdalen laundries. They are in essence the super-exploited in that their treatment, while mirroring certain aspects of the ways in which women were treated in general, was nevertheless special and strikingly different. It was special in terms of the State's central role in their banishment. It was strikingly different in terms of the levels of violence, terror and brutality which the incarcerated women had to endure.

Terror and the threat or fear of violence was central to the running and reproduction of the entire Magdalen system. This was in every sense of the word a system that was maintained by terror. Put another way, terror was central to it functioning. However, terror has no purpose in and of itself. At the root of this system was the ever pressing need to maintain a constant supply of unfree or slave labour. Irish women and girls were the raw material that was fed into a corrupt, cruel and inhumane system. This system was overseen by the various religious orders and sanctioned by the State through its institutions, including the courts, the Garda and local government officials.

In this sense the State was actively and consciously involved in maintaining and reproducing a system of slave labour in so-called modern Ireland. Thus, while I welcome Senator McAleese's report, it nonetheless must be stated that rather than being some aberration on the periphery of Irish society, the Magdalen laundries were in fact deeply embedded in the dysfunctional and deadly web that bound church and State together for so long. It is time for the State to come clean, acknowledge its central role in this system and apologise unreservedly to all the women, dead or alive, who passed through or lived lives of painful desperation in this arch of terror. Sinn Féin supports the Fianna Fáil motion and I would urge all other Deputies to support it in the interests of justice and because it is the right and ethical thing to do. This Parliament owes it to all the Magdalen women to finally right a terrible wrong.

See this speech in context