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

If I may be unorthodox and overrule the Acting Chairman, I will say to the people in the Public Gallery to work away.

This is not the stuff of history. We would be fooling ourselves but no one else in the course of this debate if we believed for a second that this approach to vulnerable women and children was a thing of the past. It is not. It lives with us yet in society.

Deliberate cruelty was visited on young, vulnerable women for decades with the active connivance of the State. All the while, society looked the other way. It might be convenient for us at this distance to claim we did not know, but it would be more honest to say we did not want to know. The truth came out slowly, but forcefully. The work of courageous journalism, most notably that of the late Mary Raftery, the inquiries into industrial schools, the diligence of human rights activists and advocacy groups and, above all, the immense bravery of Magdalen women and their families put the truth on the record.

We have known of the trauma endured by women and girls for some time. The 2009 Ryan report made an explicit reference to the abuse suffered in the Magdalen laundries. Archival material and the women's testimonies painstakingly gathered by Justice for Magdalenes had long established a history of abuse and State involvement in same, yet it took the UN Committee against Torture to force the State's hand to address the issue. In 2011, just 20 months ago, the instinct of the State was still to look the other way and to deny its part in the Magdalen laundries.

The McAleese review was set the task of establishing the extent of State involvement in the laundries. The report published two weeks ago confirmed again State complicity in the detention of women and in breaches of their constitutional and human rights. The report is to be commended for reiterating these facts. However, it needs to be said that the report is not a full nor final account of the laundries and the women's experiences therein. The information and records examined by the committee was incomplete and the report acknowledges that statistics on routes of admission and lengths of stay are substantially incomplete. The route of entry for almost half of the women and girls is not recorded. In the case of length of stay, there are no data for 58% of admissions. The lack of information relating to the laundry in Dún Laoghaire and the partial records for Galway are noted in the report. The exclusion of the Stanhope Street and Summerhill laundries from consideration by the committee and from the report represents another large gap in the story.

The committee heard from just 119 surviving women from the laundries. It was a disappointment that the written submissions of survivors were not fully reflected in the report. The finding that there was no physical abuse gave rise to most commentary because it does not tally with the available evidence. Not only does survivor testimony flatly contradict this finding, but the report itself instances occasions of solitary confinement and deprivation, which are by any definition physical abuse. However, the McAleese report confirms State collusion with the Magdalen laundries. This is its central achievement and it is to be commended.

I noted with interest the Government's announcement this evening of the appointment of Mr. Justice John Quirke to report within a period of three months. That is a rather lengthy period for deliberation and I ask the Government to reconsider it.

I welcome the Government's commitment to a non-adversarial redress process. This is how it must be. However, I wish to sound a note of caution. It cannot be left to one individual, no matter how honourable or eminent, to adjudicate on these matters. It is essential that the redress process accord with rules of natural justice and fair procedure and be fully transparent. For this reason, any redress scheme must be put on a statutory footing, have adequate oversight and have a right of appeal. I am concerned, as the indications are that this rigour, clarity and transparency might not apply to what the Government has in mind. I ask it to revisit this approach.

No one wants the redress procedure to be a bonanza for the legal profession. The survivors certainly do not. However, I would be equally concerned if the Government ruled out the spending of any money on the legal advice the survivors might require. It would be ill-judged and could prove detrimental to the process and unfair to the women. We will revert to these issues another day.

For all of the women, there is no way in which we can fully compensate them. We cannot give them back the years spent in slavery in the institutions.

We cannot give them back their youth, innocence or optimism.

I am also conscious that for many of the women there can be no redress because they are no longer around. The most traumatic part for me of what is a deeply traumatic story is the manner in which some of the women died and were buried. They had lived without the dignity of their name and they died without it also.

The Magdalen women have done this State a great service. Their testimony and stories have sharply confronted the historic ambivalence of the State about physical abuse of women and children. That ambivalence still exists. The Magdalen women put it up to all of us to confront and rectify abuses in the system both historic and current. I instance the Bethany Home. It is disgraceful that yet again those victims and survivors are excluded from yet another redress mechanism. That is not good enough and it cannot continue. I instance the enforced illegal adoption of Irish babies in this country and abroad. It is a scandal simmering just beneath the surface with which we must deal. I instance the victims of symphysiotomy – all 1,500 women - who were butchered in State and State-funded voluntary hospitals and who have yet to have any acknowledgement. The Magdalen women have made it very clear that when women are wronged that women will demand justice. They have led the way and we owe them a very great debt.

Today, the full vindication of the Magdalen women begins. Their truth, their stories, their lives, above all their courage and dignity, have brought us to this moment of apology. Girls and women were held against their will, enslaved, belittled and damaged, yet today they triumph. Today, the responsibility of the State - its neglect, collusion and complicity - in the abuses of the laundries is acknowledged fully and finally.

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