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

I welcome the fact that the report admits the State's involvement but after that I am rather disappointed with it. Given the short time available to me I will read from one of the testimonies, that of a woman named Josephine Meade. She said she was in several different Magdalen laundries in Cork, Galway and Dublin. She said the worst was the Mercy convent in Galway. I lived on the site of that convent many years after it was knocked down. She said the nuns in that convent were lethal and that they beat, punched and tortured her in such a way that she has never been able to recover fully since. She said her time in the laundry was spent doing laundry. She got no education in the convent. She tried to escape once but was brought back by gardaí.

There is more than justice needed here. We must make sure that we never forget what happened to these women because if we forget, humanity has proven time and again that it is capable of the most horrible cruelties. One of the ways of making sure these things do not happen again is to make sure they are never forgotten.

When I lived in Germany some years ago I visited the museum of Dachau concentration camp. I found it strange that it was left open as a museum.

I visited the camp with my friends and when we left, we realised why it was left as it had been, namely, because it reminded us, as much as was humanly possible, of the atrocities that occurred. I am not comparing what occurred in the camp and in the laundries; my point is that, in the case of the laundries, we need to do something similar so future generations will know what occurred. If we do not forget what happened, there is some hope it will not be repeated.

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