Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

From the foundation of the Irish State in 1922, 10,000 girls and women passed through the institutions known as the Magdalen laundries. The report of a group chaired by the former Senator Dr. McAleese, which was released a few weeks ago, shows how the State was directly responsible for approximately one quarter of admissions to those institutions. In many cases those involved were sent to the institutions by the courts on remand or after conviction, usually for petty offences, or they were referred by social services in situations, for example, in which children needed accommodation away from abusive homes or neglectful backgrounds.

The report states that many others finished up in the Magdalen institutions because they were poor and homeless or had psychiatric illnesses and been referred from psychiatric hospitals.

It is quite clear that the Magdalen institutions which were initiated and thrived in the Victorian era of the 19th century essentially became social institutions for a dysfunctional new Irish state. The brave new Ireland, led by the petty bourgeoisieand the gombeen men of the day, was a crisis-ridden, backward and capitalist state unable to meet the basic needs of its people and dominated by a weak economic and political establishment. Critical to the survival of that weak economic and political establishment was the support of the Catholic Church. Cosgrave's, de Valera's and John A. Costello's Ireland was a state which leaned on the Catholic Church as a crutch to prop it up and for legitimacy. In turn, the Catholic Church and its hierarchy were given control over whole pillars of society, for example, health matters and hospitals, primary and secondary schools and institutions such as the Magdalen laundries. The Ireland of the 1920s to 1960s groaned under the weight of oppressive moral strictures and the suffocating power of the Catholic Church, but we now know from the revelations of institutional abuse, including that of the Magdalen women, there was no morality at the rotten heart of the establishment of this Ireland. Right-wing politicians, the religious and the media all colluded in maintaining the obscurantist dark age that helped to secure their control over a property ridden state unable to meet the needs of its people. Some1 million of its people were pushed into enforced emigration and there was enormous suffering as a result of poverty and deprivation. In order to prevent people from rising in revolt, the establishment of the day leaned primarily on the Catholic Church which used its authority to legitimise a failed state.

Today's political establishment finds it safe to criticise its predecessors for the cruelty they imposed on those who were poor and powerless in the Ireland of the 1920s to the 1960s. The apologies, the contrition and the alleged identification with the suffering of the victims of the institutions of the Church and the State ring hollow in my ears. There is a total moral paradox in the attitude of the political establishment of today to the past and the cruelty of the past which it criticises and in its promotion of the cruel austerity policies it pushed through in response to the crisis of the present day. The choreographed apologies and the carefully crafted speeches with cues as to where the speaker should pause for effect and perhaps even an instruction to shed a tear amount to a false, an artificial and a manufactured contrition to meet the demands of the majority of decent people in our society today who are genuinely moved by the suffering of the victims of a cruel Irish state. However, the paradox is that the same harsh morality that deemed thousands of women should slave in the Magdalen laundries and that thousands of the poor, homeless and powerless should be incarcerated in other institutions and cruelly abused is today event in a different way. A few months ago people with severe disabilities had to bring themselves to Government Buildings to fight cruel cuts to their facilities. This very morning the Government of the Magdalen women apology of last week cruelly announced savage cuts to disabled people's mobility assistance. The austerity agenda which the Government of the apology to Magdalen women is pushing through relentlessly is slashing living standards, driving hundreds of thousands out of the country, attacking people with special needs, doing enormous damage to our society and being carried out at the diktat of the financial markets, the bankers and the bondholders. We have the same capitalist system and the same crisis manifested in a different way than in the 1920s to the 1950s, but we have Deputies and Ministers marching into the Dáil to apologise for the cruelty of that day while imposing cruelty today, as demanded by the system to which they bend the knee.

Apart from recognising the hypocrisy of what is afoot, one of the lessons is that the separation of Church and State is critical and a task which has still not been carried out. Schools must be under the total democratic control of parents, community and pupils, where appropriate. In Tyrelstown in west Dublin, probably the most ethically and religiously diverse area in Irish society, the Department of Education and Skills is insisting that a new secondary school yet to be built be a Catholic-led school, which is utterly inappropriate. Have the lessons been learned in reality or is it simply a matter of paying lip-service for political expediency to satisfy the demand for justice and recompense, which is the view of a huge majority of the people? What lessons have really been learned by the Government?

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