Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I join the Taoiseach, my fellow Ministers in Government and, I believe, every Member of this House in offering, on behalf of the State and the Irish people, a heartfelt apology to the survivors of the Magdelen laundries. I say to all of those women, some of whom are with us today: We have heard you, we believe you and we are profoundly sorry for what was done to you, and that what happened to you, as children or as adults, should not have happened. It was Ireland that was wrong, not you. As a Government, we are determined to work with you in the weeks ahead to give a concrete expression to our apology and to provide a tangible expression of our regret and acknowledgement of the wrong that was done. We want to work with you, and we ask you to work with us.

Today is not the end for the Magdalen survivors. No apology, no matter now sincere, can ever erase what happened. We cannot turn back the clock and undo what was done to so many. What we can do is acknowledge the wrong, apologise and work to translate that apology into a better future for those who remain.

There are moments in the history of our nation when we come face to face with our past, when a door, long kept shut by fear, neglect or design, is forced open and a light shines on the country we think we have left behind. Today is such a moment. The Magdalen laundries are the product of a different Ireland, an Ireland so different that many today find it hard to understand what this country once was, as a State and as a society.

I join the Taoiseach in thanking former Senator McAleese for the work that he has done and thank the team that worked with him. The McAleese report shows how the history of the Magdalen laundries lumbered in step with the history of independent Ireland. What was remarkable was not how much changed when Ireland became independent, but how little - how the newly independent State lauded the notion of republicanism but was, in reality, a profoundly conservative, theocratic and unaccountable place where state bowed to church and where the rights of citizens could be trampled if they did not fit in with the official line. It was a society where appearance was everything and nothing and no-one could be allowed to challenge the conservative consensus, a society where incarceration in an institution was so normal as to be banal - recorded in the green books of factory inspectors, unremarked by doctors on their rounds - an informal safety-valve in a state which, despite, by 1961, having the highest levels of institutionalisation in the world, still struggled to contain the symptoms of its failure. It was an Ireland where a citizen could be committed to an institution for being poor, for being an orphan, for being a bit different, for being pregnant and for being a woman, and an Ireland where the State, the dominant church and society colluded in making it so.

It is clear from former Senator McAleese's report just how fluid was that culture of collusion - a probation officer could as easily be a volunteer from an organisation concerned with public morality as an agent of the justice system, the person who committed a woman to a laundry could as easily be a parent as a priest and teenagers could graduate from a reform school to a Magdalen asylum spending their entire childhood and early adulthood in the grey area between the civil and the church authorities. Nowhere in any of this did the word or concept of citizenship, personal rights and personal freedoms appear, and all the while the high, windowless walls of the laundries stood alongside busy main streets, part of the local economy.

What happened to the thousands of women who walked through those doors, down the decades, happened in plain sight, but there is nothing so blind as the blindness imposed by a dominant ideology and a subservient State, a blindness that can subvert what our human intuition knows to be right and wrong, that saw tens of thousands of small children locked up in industrial schools, that often punished the abused rather than the perpetrator, that would banish a young woman from her community for the so-called crime of getting pregnant, that did not question a long absence by a sister, niece or aunt and that did not trouble itself about an industry built on unpaid, involuntary labour.

The most reliable litmus test of freedom, and of the separation of church and state, is how that state treats its female citizens. By this standard, Ireland was, until recent decades, a virtual theocracy. It was a country where women were cast out for having sex outside of marriage, where they were denied contraception, denied work if they were married and, as we have seen, committed to an institution, sometimes for little more than being an inconvenience.

This was an Ireland where justice and morality were conflated so that there was much in the way of morality but little in the way of justice, and justice was not done for these women. Their moment has been a long time coming, and it began with rolling back the dominance of one church and one morality in Irish society.

The battle to liberalise Irish laws, to separate out in practice church and State was, at its heart, about freedom. It was about the individual and about personal dignity. It was about the kind of society we wanted for ourselves and for our children, not a society that forced women into giving up their babies, not a society where poverty split families apart or required unhappy ones to stay together, not a society that survived on secrecy.

We look back on the Ireland former Senator McAleese describes and it is like a foreign country, but the Ireland of today was forged in the face of profound opposition at every step. I am proud of the role my party, its members and its elected representatives played in that transformation. It was not an easy task, nor was it always a popular one but the Ireland of the Magdalen laundries is now a historical curiosity for a new generation of our citizens because of that campaigning vision.

I am proud, too, of the refusal to forget the victims of that repressive Ireland, of the members of my party who would not go quietly as long as this historic wrong was ignored. I pay particular tribute to my colleague, the Minster of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, for her long-standing solidarity with and commitment to justice for the women of the Magdalen laundries. It is no coincidence that the Government which established an investigation into State involvement in the Magdalen laundries and the Government which will offer some recompense to the women of the Magdalen laundries, is one of which Deputy Lynch is a member.

That path to justice has been a long and hard one. In the words of Councillor Sally Mulready of the Irish Women Survivors Network, the women of the Magdalen laundries endured "years and years of misery and rejection", and "as a consequence remained out in the wilderness for years trying to find a path to justice".

As a State and as a people, we can never make sufficient restoration to the women of the Magdalen laundries for what they have experienced. We can never give them back their past, their youth, their opportunities or, for some, the children they gave up.

However, we can tell them that we believe them. We acknowledge that what happened to them was wrong, that the stigma they have been branded with was false and that we are sorry.

The picture that emerged from former Senator McAleese's report was complex. It reflects an Ireland where the lines between personal morality and civil authority were blurred, sometimes beyond distinction. To draw a straight line, and to distinguish between those women who were committed to the Magdalen laundries by the State and those who entered by other routes is to ignore how the very fabric of Irish public, civic and private life supported those institutions. What is more it is to ignore the role of the four religious orders which managed the laundries, and which controlled the entry and exit of women into and from these institutions.

As a people, we cannot undo the past, but we can and will make a contribution to a more comfortable, secure future for the women of the Magdalen laundries. There is also a role for the religious orders, which ran the laundries, to make a fair contribution along with the taxpayer. These laundries were private businesses run by those orders, which benefited from the unpaid labour of the women committed to them.

The past does not belong to the State alone. As a people, we have become better at looking back and at acknowledging the wrongs that were done, particularly to those who most deserved our care and protection. However, it is one thing to learn the bitter lessons of history; it is another to apply those lessons to Irish society today. What are those lessons? How it upholds human rights, and not any one version of morality, is a core barometer by which we should judge our State, its services and our society. The principles of human rights, personal freedom and personal dignity should not only underpin the State's relationship with its citizens, but also the relationship between citizens and powerful institutions, such as banks, the media and large corporations - indeed, all our relationships with each other. They are the lessons which can only benefit us all - the lessons of a fairer, more compassionate Ireland.

Today is about the women of the Magdalen laundries. It is about standing by those women, whose futures were stolen from them. It is about doing the right thing by them. It is about remembering how they suffered. It is about eradicating once and for all the stigma that blighted their reputations. It is about recognising their needs. Most of all, it is about recommitting ourselves to the values that will ensure that what happened to them can never happen again. Never again, as a people, as a society, will we walk past a high wall and fail to ask what lies behind it.

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