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

This tragic part of our history would not have happened if we were talking about anybody other than women. It is a reflection of how Irish society treated women as second-class citizens, in particular working-class women who were doubly exploited and treated with contempt by this State. That was brought home very graphically in the testimony of one young woman who was in a laundry because she had been raped by her brother. She had to go out to attend the hearing when that young man was brought to court and was very excited about the prospect of meeting her family, getting out of the laundry and going home to join them. The tragic outcome of that court case was that her brother got six years in prison but her family did not want to know her and she was sent back with no time limit on her experience in the laundry. She was an embarrassment to the family and had to remain incarcerated. That is a very graphic example of how women were treated.

We can look back and say that was then, we have learned our lesson and they were different days. However, it is not so long ago that the Minister for Justice, Defence and Equality acknowledged that women continue to be second-class citizens in terms of provision for health care, the lack of right to their own bodily integrity and similar issues in respect of the lack of provision of abortion. While we can look back and think we have learned many lessons from the past, there is no room for complacency.

Last Tuesday was an incredibly important day and a very special one for anybody who was here and certainly for the women themselves. One could not help but be moved by witnessing that moment. It does not undo in any way the damage that was done or reverse the crimes but for the Taoiseach to come out and unreservedly acknowledge full square the wrong done to and crimes committed against those women was hugely significant and very welcome. If that is to mean anything, what happens next will be the adjudicator of that. That apology cannot be the end of the struggle for justice but the start of what should be a short, sharp process to get redress.

As many of the advocacy groups have said, the type of process we need is one that is transparent, open, quick, non-adversarial and just. The jury is out on whether we will succeed in that. I hope the process under way fulfils all those criteria and delivers some justice for those women. We should not be complacent. We certainly have not been hasty in our adjudications. The United Nations Committee Against Torture recommended redress over 20 months ago, which is almost two years, so we have been grappling with these issues. There should be no need or excuse for further delay. The information is out there and has been well articulated and documented. It really is not that complicated. If somebody was present in a laundry, that very presence should be enough. There does not need to be any analysis of the potential damage that was done to them as being there and being exploited was damage enough. We cannot undo that damage. Robbing those young women of their youth, their children in some circumstances and their right to an education cannot be undone.

It was even worse than that because what went on was theft, fraud and forced and unpaid labour so this is not about someone getting compensation because of a wrong done to them. This is about people getting their just deserts - their unpaid wages, their right to a pension and their right to compensation if they were damaged by industrial machinery or other work practices. These are simple workplace, trade union issues which we would appropriately be up in arms about if the laws were broken now. This money rightfully belongs to those women and should be restored to them. These laundries traded commercially. The State was aware because it engaged the services of the laundries in many instances, knew that women and girls were there and chose to do nothing about it. It is ironic that some of us on this side of the House are often accused of breaking the law in some of the campaigns in which we engage to fight unjust laws when the Irish State has been culpable not just for human rights abuses and wrongdoing but for actual unlawful activities. Even in the 1920s and 1930s, there were laws on the Statute Book outlawing forced labour, torture and degrading and inhumane treatment, as well as laws enshrining and giving people the right to an education. All of these fundamental rights and laws were breached. It is a case of these women getting their just deserts and getting back what was rightfully theirs. The acknowledgement is a really important first step and I am not in any way diminishing its importance but what happens next is the crucial issue on which we must concentrate in the limited time available to us.

Many points have been made about the incomplete nature of the report, the fact that the numbers interviewed were not very big and that the length of stay was under-represented and under-reflected in the report given the number of people who were surveyed on that issue and the fact that the length of stay was likely to be far longer than the report reflected. Obviously, the remit of the report was incredibly narrow. It focused solely on the State's involvement and how women got in and got out. It was not designed to deal with the conditions that were there. While it acknowledged that it was not dealing with that, what I found unhelpful was the fact that it attempted to draw some conclusions about some of the conditions and activities that went on. It comes across that an attempt was made to minimise the abuse that went on in those institutions. We cannot have that and those points need to be explored further.

We have pages and pages of testimony painfully collected in the Justice for Magdalenes submission outlining countless instances of physical abuse meted out to people. I will not go on too much about it but there many different examples. According to one respondent, "if there was a tiny bit of a crease [in the ironing] it

would be thrown into my face and I would get a belt of the keys if you didn’t do a thing right". Another respondent said that "they would hit you and belt you ... because there would be no-one there to see them". An external eyewitness recounted an incident in Galway where she remembers a nun using a strap to beat a woman who was depressed and could not work until she was hysterical. According to the witness, "she was marked, she was hysterical that she almost collapsed into my arms." There is a litany of other evidence of direct physical abuse so it is completely wrong to minimise that. As has been said here, changing somebody's name, robbing them of their identity, incarcerating them, denying them proper nutrition and food, not allowing them to have a bath or not giving them a toothbrush and all the other instances are cruel, inhumane and degrading treatments which most definitely constitute physical abuse.

I will not attempt to minimise it. The good aspect is that it has brought into the open the very great human rights abuses which took place under the State's watch. I include not just the people who were sent to the laundries by the State but also all of the others whom society allowed to be forgotten, to fester and, in some instances, die there. Nobody exercised the role of public accountability to prevent these abuses from taking place. This goes to the heart of the type of Ireland in which we lived and which the Tánaiste articulated very well. He spoke about our history being warped because of the particular relationship between the Church and the State. He referred to the Catholic Church as being the dominant ideology in a subservient state. That is the truth which goes to the heart of the need to separate Church and State. It was very convenient for the State to inadequately support people such as single women. It was very handy for it to offload and throw them behind closed doors into Magdalene laundries or other religious institutions. This is the same attitude which, on the one hand, took children from young, vulnerable single parents and, in some cases, had them illegally adopted in America, while, on the other, the State permitted religious order interference in some of the hospitals in which other women had to undergo a painful symphysiotomy in order that they could produce multiple children. There was a lack of scrutiny by the State in that regard. If we are to get to the heart of these issues, we need to look at the roles of the Church and the State. The religious orders will have to take responsibility in any compensation package provided and have to make their apologies. I do not buy that they did not benefit financially from the laundries. Recompense must come from their coffers also.

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