Dáil debates

Wednesday, 13 February 2013

Magdalen Laundries: Motion (Resumed) [Private Members]

 

6:35 pm

Photo of Clare DalyClare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputies Seamus Healy, Catherine Murphy, Finian McGrath and Luke 'Ming' Flanagan. We only have two minutes each but even if one had two days one could not begin to scratch the surface of the decades of tyranny and abuse inflicted on women incarcerated in the Magdalen laundries.

One of our key functions as a Parliament is to give a voice to those women and I want to say, as many others have said, that I believe the women. The fact that hundreds of pages of testimony have been omitted from this report is not good enough because in their youth these women were ostracised, taken from society, arbitrarily detained and outcast. They now demand justice, and we should be to the forefront in allowing their voices to be heard.

I spoke to a woman who rang me from the south of England the other day and told her story about being in a Good Shepherd convent. She said that she did not get any wages. She said she did not get any clothes. She said she did not get somewhere to live when she left the convent. She said she was punched in the head by a nun, and when she hit her back she was threatened and told she would never see her family again. She said she ran away once but gardaí brought her back. These stories have been repeated time and again.

We can try to sanitise the language and dress it up any way we wish but abuse is someone getting the hair ripped off their head and butchered without their permission. Abuse is being starved of food and denied one's freedom. These are physical abuses, in my opinion, and the idea that no physical or sexual abuse took place does not stand up and needs further examination next week.

It is not credible to say that no profits were made off the backs of the forced labour of these women. Those issues must be addressed. There is no question about that. It is convenient to say they happened in the past but it is in the present for these people, and we must address it.

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