Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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When the matter was adjourned yesterday evening I was suggesting that we must give recognition to the women who are the survivors of the Magdalen laundries. They stayed with the subject and were not put off by the fact that they were not heard or that their issue was not addressed. We owe them a great debt of gratitude for remaining with the subject and seeing out their case and cause, and doing so in a dignified way despite the fact that it was a considerable burden for them to have to bear for many years. There was an ongoing feeling of a failure to recognise their plight and a failure on the part of the system to recognise the wrongs that took place, as well as a failure of society. I raise the failure of society in particular because there seems to have been more than one failure in our society in recent years. On the one hand, we should recognise the role played by women in our society. The way in which they were treated in some circumstances is not something we should be especially proud of. The fact that this particular situation prevailed for so long with little response is a clear indication that in future we should be more receptive to queries raised by people who may well be in a minority but who have a just cause and who have suffered distress and suffered by virtue of negligence on the part of the system to recognise their plight.

There is another lesson we should learn. This is something I referred to briefly yesterday evening. We do not know at what time in the future some other issue will turn up which may reflect poorly on our society now. One of the lessons we should learn from what has occurred in the case of the Magdalen laundries is that as time goes by we should become more alert to issues arising in our society which might fail the test of scrutiny at some stage in the future. I have no particular wish to go into the subject of child abuse, of which we have experience in recent years. However, there are times when one could be pardoned for coming to the conclusion that a certain amount of abuse of one kind or another seemed to have become acceptable. There seems to be a reluctance on the part of society and certain people, who should have known what was going on, to accept what was going on and to accept the veracity of the people who brought these matters to public attention. This includes children as well as adults. We have many lessons to learn in this regard and I hope we will learn them.

My view, which has been expressed by many others, is that it is best that restitution be entered into now, that arrangements be made and that agreement be reached in so far as it is possible. We must try to ensure that the neglect and lack of action over many years is replaced by a positive response as well as a recognition of the particular situation that we have come to recognise now.

Other speakers have mentioned the Bethany Home. While the Bethany Home was not included in this report, it behoves us to investigate all similar situations of discrimination and neglect, wilful or otherwise, and address the issues arising now rather than leave them to be resurrected by future generations. I hope future generations will not have to look back and ask whether we were really alert. We should learn from our experience by ensuring these issues do not arise again. Sadly, that has not been the experience of the past 50 or 60 years. I do not refer to a particular group when I say that society has repeated these mistakes. Bias and old fashioned ideas allowed this society to ignore what we should have readily recognised. I thank the women who persisted in bringing this matter to our attention and I hope those who were affected will be adequately accommodated.

Finian McGrath (Dublin North Central, Independent)
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I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on the Magdalen laundries report. I warmly welcome the apology that the Taoiseach made in the Dáil last week. It was considered, respectful and, above all, the right thing to do for the Magdalen women. I commend him on issuing an apology on behalf of all Members of the Oireachtas. When somebody in this House gets it right, it is important to acknowledge him or her. Now, however, we face the real test of acting on the apology by supporting these women in a practical way. Time is not on our side and I urge speed and efficiency in supporting women who suffered a grave injustice.

Deeper issues also arise on which Deputies and our wider society should reflect. We need to ensure this type of injustice does not happen again. Vigilance is key to this issue. Ireland has changed but that does not mean we can walk off the pitch thinking all is well for the protection of children and vulnerable people. The legacy of the Magdalen women should be constant vigilance on behalf of vulnerable and exploited people in modern society.

It is also important to tell the women that we believe them and commend them on their bravery and integrity. Now is the time to act on our belief by supporting them with proper compensation. I urge common sense. The women themselves should be our priority and we should not be distracted by those who take different angles on the compensation package. I hope the injustice will be redressed in a fair and comprehensive manner. There can be no fudge because compassion and support have to be at the top of our agenda.

There was no State payment for lone parents in the days of the Magdalen laundries. It was a shameful and dark time in Irish history. It is shocking to realise that the last laundry only closed in 1996, a mere 17 years ago. I recently received a letter from a lone parent who drew my attention to a number of issues that persist in modern Ireland. She wrote that she became a single mother nine years ago. She currently receive benefits and eventually her family came around to accepting her but she could have been sent to a mother and baby home or a Magdalen laundry had she lived in different times. If she had been unfortunate enough to lack an education and a supportive family, her life may have turned out very differently. She noted that there are many thousands of families in which one parent provides for children without the proper support of the other parent. It is often a challenging and lonely job but it is also rewarding. She pointed out that, unfortunately, media coverage and online commentary suggest that the stigma of being a lone parent persists below the surface. Whether they are parenting alone due to separation, divorce, death or imprisonment of another parent, relationship breakdown or crisis pregnancy, the idea persists in many sections of Irish society that lone parents are all women and they purposively become pregnant to abuse the welfare system or join in the gravy train with free houses and buggies. Despite the statistics, the stereotype of the fallen women continues to be believed. Ireland may no longer have Magdalen homes, but we still have consistent poverty. She noted that the report on child income supports proposes to cut supports for lower income families. I refer to this letter because I have also heard these comments in pubs and the wider community. We have to deal with these issues in an open and comprehensive manner.

The Magdalen women, who showed such bravery and integrity in visiting these Houses last week, also brought the message that we must not tolerate exploitation of men, women or children in any part of society. In developing a compensation package, these women should get our full support at all times. Our focus must be on treating them in a fair manner.

One woman is cited in the Magdalen report as having been subjected to sexual abuse by an auxiliary. A significant number suffered abuse in the family home or other institutions. We must reflect on these issues, which arise outside of the context of the Magdalen laundries. Societal issues remain to be addressed in regard to child abuse and dysfunctional families. Approximately 80% of abuse takes place within the extended family. I raise this issue because it was highlighted in the McAleese report. A small number of women reported physical punishment on at least one occasion. I quote the following extracts from the report:

“two ladies were standing there, not nuns but dressed in navy. I was left with those two”; and after being made to remove her clothing and stand on a stool, she described being “punched by one of them, one side to another. I was dizzy, I kept saying I’m dizzy”...


The overwhelming majority of the women who spoke to the Committee described verbal abuse and being the victim of unkind or hurtful taunting and belittling comments...


One woman spoke of receiving “cruel talk”...


A woman reported that, after running away from a Magdalen Laundry in the 1950s and being returned by the Gardaí, she was “put in isolation for two days”...


They described harsh and physically demanding work, in some cases for long hours. Some of them were only young girls while carrying out this heavy and difficult work.

These are the stories we have heard. The other side of the story is the broader issue of child abuse over the past 50 or 60 years, including abuse against children and adults with intellectual disabilities. These individuals do not have any voice. Many of us are concerned that their story has never been told because of a lack of communication skills or intellectual disabilities. I wonder at times how we can get to the nub of this issue.

As I know from experience as the parent of a daughter with an intellectual disability, the staff working in our modern day schools and care centres are highly trained and professional and do an excellent job. However, in the past 50 or 60 years I wonder how many young people with an intellectual disability were physically or sexually abused and whose stories have never come to light. I have no doubt the Magdalen women would be very supportive of that aspect of the wider debate.

We need to ensure the Bethany Home survivors are included. Some 219 Bethany Home children lie in unmarked graves in nearby Mount Jerome cemetery, while another 17 may be buried elsewhere. Most died in the decade following the Maternity Act 1934 which mandated State inspections. Some 86 were buried in Mount Jerome cemetery during the years 1935 to 1939, while 132 died between 1935 and 1944. There is cross-party support for including the Bethany Home survivors and we must ensure they get their rights.

If we are serious about what we are saying and apologising, we must ensure all Magdalen survivors are treated with respect and dignity and receive a decent compensation package. The greatest honour we could pay the women concerned would be to ensure the abuse of children or young and vulnerable people in society never happens again.

Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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In 2010, speaking from the Opposition benches, I said the terrible ordeal of the women committed to the Magdalen laundries was one of the last unresolved issues of the hidden Ireland. I am glad to say the Government is now acting decisively to resolve the issue and that at long last what was hidden and covered up has been exposed and brought into the light. It has been revealed that the State had a significant role in sending women to the laundries, that for too long it overlooked the suffering and grief this caused and that it owed these brave and courageous women an apology. I say these women were brave and courageous not just because of the quiet fortitude with which they bore their plight in the laundries but also because of the unceasing efforts of the survivors who would not rest until justice was done, both for them and the women who did not live to hear the State say "Sorry."

I am particularly glad that the women of the laundry in Stanhope Street will be included in the Government's redress fund. I remember that laundry as it was attached to the school I attended. I remember visiting the women in the laundry on my First Holy Communion day with my mother who was very friendly with a number of the women there. I never forgot that visit, although I did not really understand the situation as I was only seven years old. I was terrified of the noise, the machines, the big calendars and washing tubs. I got to know some of the women through my mother. They were allowed out one night a week and a particular woman used to visit us for tea. She would arrive at about 6.30 p.m. but would have to leave by 8.30 p.m. to return because they could not stay out late. Some may believe this was what life was like then for peole in the middle to late 1950s, but the women in the laundries had their freedom removed and were incarcerated in them. However tough life was then, being without one's freedom was very difficult. If the women concerned had a tough time, they did not have parents to explain it to, nor did they have siblings or friends to talk to about it. One must be mindful of how hard, difficult and tragic the experiences of many of these women were, even if they were part of a society which was poor and very much ruled by an authoritarian church.

It is good that, as a state and a society, we are finally prepared to listen, talk and think about how and why this happened. Why, after the Famine, did society, the State, the church and the institutions rush to lock up and institutionalise people in various ways? Historians such as Diarmaid Ferriter and people like Bruce Arnold have written about this. Perhaps it was the product of Jansenism in the Irish church or of the Famine. Whatever the answer, it is an extraordinary feature of our society that so many ended up being sent away from their families and institutionalised in different ways.

It has been forgotten that there were many loud and clear signals or red flags. In 1970, over 40 years ago, District Justice Eileen Kennedy addressed the issue of how girls were admitted to convents and laundries. Her report stated it was a haphazard system, that its legal validity was doubtful and that the girls admitted in that irregular way, being unaware of their rights, could remain in the laundries for long periods and become, in the process, unfit for re-emergence into society. She used the words "irregular", "doubtful legal validity" and "unaware of their rights". It is difficult to know what more evidence the State needed this was wrong.

Decades later, the Ryan report captured some of the ordeals gone through by women in the various residential laundries. One of the women told how as a young girl she had been abused by her stepfather. Society then deemed the child, rather than the abuser, at fault and she was sent to a laundry. She told the Ryan commission that the nun had told her that it was best she did not talk about what had happened or her family would be disgraced. Some witnesses told how the regime at the laundries was like a prison regime, with locked doors and extremely hard working conditions. Others described physical abuse. Women could not laugh or talk in the laundries or they would be battered. One said her whole childhood was gone in that place. Witnesses spoke about the loss of freedom, the loneliness and the spirit-crushing desperation and distress. When we hear these stories and the talk of the hidden Ireland, we realise this is about more than just one institution or order or more than one set of circumstances or victims.

In the 1980s I was involved with Attic Press, a feminist publishing house. It published the autobiography of a remarkable woman, Hanna Greally, entitled, Bird's Nest Soup, which was republished by Cork University Press in recent years. This woman was wrongly incarcerated, although she came from quite a middle class and well-off family. She was incarcerated for the best part of 20 years in St. Loman's psychiatric hospital in Mullingar because of something she had done as a young adult of which her family disapproved. Following her mother's death, no relative was willing to claim her and as a result she could not be released, resulting in a two-decade ordeal for her which, remarkably, she survived. I met this extraordinary woman and it was extraordinary to talk to her and witness the strength of the human spirit.

Several other women have also told about their experiences, for example, in the Steve Humphries documentary "Sex in a Cold Climate". That documentary described how the women were called "penitents", their hair was cropped and they had to wear drab uniforms.

In the Victorian era a woman's hair was called her "crowning glory". Nowadays, we are used to women cutting their hair very short or shaving it all off. That is an individual or a fashion choice. In the era of the Magdalen laundries cutting a woman's hair was a way of dehumanising and punishing her. It was done in many other countries, as well as in Ireland. The "penitents" in these laundries worked for no pay; their labour was symbolic. It was thought they could purge their sin by washing dirty linen. However, they had committed no sins. The sin was putting them into these institutions in the first place.

I was privileged to know the late journalist Mary Raftery who fought long and hard for the Magdalen women. She described the exhumation of bodies at the convent at High Park in Drumcondra. She reported that a number of the bodies found had no identification.

Each of the congregations came out with an apology on the afternoon of the publication of Dr. McAleese's report. I hope they will step up to the plate by taking part in the scheme to provide redress and compensation for the women concerned. I know that their faith is personally important to many of the women, particularly those to whom the nuns were kind. The orders need to think about taking part in the redress scheme to compensate them. I hope they will step forward and do so. The Government is determined to do its part on behalf of the State and society at large and I hope the orders will respond in kind, as it would help the women concerned as they continue with their lives.

I have met Sally Mulready and some of the other women who have worked on this issue. I hope the arrangements and proposals made by Mr. Justice Quirke when he produces his report in a couple of months will be helpful and healing. When I was growing up in the Manor Street area of Dublin, the woman in question were always called "the ladies of the laundry". Most of them had lost one or both parents and were orphans. I hope this process will be helpful to them and healing for them, particularly as many of them are in the later decades of their lives. I hope it will help them to accept that Irish society has made a meaningful apology, in the form of last week's statement by the Taoiseach. I was delighted that he and the Tánaiste, the leader of the Labour Party, had an opportunity to meet many of them. Given that they had not previously had an opportunity to meet many of the women or know about this matter in detail, it was absolutely essential for them to hear their human stories personally. It is important that the Government's approach helps the women concerned as they make their journey through life.

Sandra McLellan (Cork East, Sinn Fein)
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I welcome the opportunity to speak again on this exceptionally disturbing issue, one of the most important to come before the House since the foundation of the State. I welcome the Taoiseach's official apology to survivors of the Magdalen laundries which he gave in the House on 19 February. It was moving to see so many of the surviving women and their supporters, friends and families in the Visitors Gallery on the evening in question. I also welcome Dr. McAleese's report which is an important piece of work and should be acknowledged as such. I welcome the appointment of the president of the Law Reform Commission, Mr. Justice Quirke, to oversee the issue of compensation. I also welcome the Taoiseach's comments that any scheme should be simple, non-adversarial and non-litigious. All of these developments deserve to be acknowledged as important milestones. The period between the State's apology and Mr. Justice Quirke's report which we should receive within three months gives us an opportunity to take stock of where we are.

While I have noted the importance of the McAleese report on various occasions, there are important deficiencies in its data analysis. The serious methodological problems with the report render it incomplete and, more importantly, raise serious questions about the accuracy of its findings. The authors of the report acknowledge this in the executive summary, under the heading of statistical analysis, when they accept there are "gaps in the data available". At best, the report gives us a partial sense of the numbers of women and girls who were incarcerated, the factors that led to their incarceration and the reasons that determined their continued detention or release. A detailed analysis of the role of the various State agencies such as the Garda, the courts, local authorities and health agencies in the procurement of girls and women for the various laundries is also lacking in the report. There is no indepth discussion of the relationship between the laundries, mother and baby homes and orphanages run by the religious orders named in the report. More fundamentally, the voices and testimonies of the women incarcerated in these institutions are notable by their absence from the report.

There is also an eerie silence when it comes to the various religious orders. We get no sense of the warped power, the superiority, the class elitism and hatred for the poor which underpinned this system. A sense of the violence and terror which were omnipresent in the laundries and crucial to the maintenance of the entire system is entirely missing from the report. There is no blood in the report, no sense of the pain and human despair the incarcerated women experienced on a daily basis. There is no attempt to engage with the long-term effects of this trauma on the surviving women. We are no closer to knowing exactly how many women and girls died in these institutions. More importantly, we know virtually nothing about the factors and circumstances which led to their deaths. The report leaves us totally in the dark on the issue of the sexual abuse and rape of the incarcerated women. Taken together, these omissions and errors render the McAleese report an incomplete piece of work. It sheds the faintest of light on what was, by any standard, an appalling litany of abuse and exploitation.

The State was not some innocent bystander in all of this. It was centrally and actively involved in the creation and reproduction of the system that Dr. McAleese sought to investigate. The idea of the State investigating itself was always going to be fraught with problems in practice. At best, it was a highly questionable exercise. What happened in the Magdalen laundries needs to exposed and excavated for all to see. The appalling litany of abuse and the system underpinned by that abuse is an important part of the story of Irish society. By using the important mirror into this world that we have been given, we can learn much about who we were and are as a people. The story of the Magdalen laundries and the institutional framework that supported them give us important clues and information on how the State operates and tell us in whose interests it functions. We have learned that behind the cold, passive and bureaucratic language of State rhetoric lies an entire State apparatus that is based on violence and consent. We have learned that someone's class position, status, gender and access to power ultimately determines which side of the seesaw will shape his or her life experience.

The lives of the women and girls who lived in the Magdalen laundries, who died in them or who survived are characterised by a form of social death. These women were banished from so-called normal society. Their physical incarceration and the real ideological stigma that surrounded it mean that, to all intents and purposes, they were sentenced to a form of social death. Most, if not all, will never recover.

Having acknowledged its central role in this very Irish trauma, the State must now act accordingly. It should pay careful attention to and accept in the main the recommendations of the Justice for Magdalenes group, as outlined in its document with proposals for a restorative justice and reparations scheme. It is also imperative that the various religious orders that ran and profited from the Magdalen system are called to account without delay.

Thus far, their silence has been deafening. More importantly, I remind the Government and the House that, on 1 June 2011, the UN Committee Against Torture recommended that the State should institute prompt, independent and thorough investigations and, in appropriate cases, prosecutions. To some extent, the State has complied with the first part of this recommendation, despite the flaws and significant gaps in the McAleese report. However, that latter part of the recommendation remains just that - a recommendation that has yet to be acted upon. I call on the Government to demand that the religious orders meet without further delay with the various stakeholders to agree a generous and appropriate package of compensation and reparation.

It is now clear that, even within the confines of the patriarchal, myopic and claustrophobic Ireland of the 1930s through to the late 1980s, there existed a sub-group of women who were even more constrained and oppressed than women in the general society. We now owe it, as a Parliament, to all the women and girls who were incarcerated in the Magdalen laundries to finally right a terrible wrong.

Ciara Conway (Waterford, Labour)
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I am very honoured to be in the position to be able to speak on this issue and to have been here for what was a long overdue apology - a heartfelt apology that has given great comfort and solace to the women who found themselves incarcerated in the Magdalen laundries for many years.

As the youngest female Member of this House, I think it incumbent on me to say that, thankfully, in this day and age it is hard for me to imagine that these kinds of conditions existed for women. On the basis of my reading of the report and listening to the stories of some women, including some of my constituents, who have shared their very painful stories with me in recent weeks and months, it comes down to one very common factor for all of these women - the crime or sin they were supposed to have committed was often that they were poor. Ireland of that day treated its poor by hiding them away. It did not want to see them and saw them as a blemish in the community. It was women, in particular, who were targeted because of our biology, because we are different. To my mind, that is one of the most significant issues that faced us as a country. One can still find instances in Ireland today where women are treated differently because of our biology.

As an elected Member for the constituency of Waterford, I would like to focus on the experience of some of those women. The Good Shepherd Magdalen laundry in Waterford was open from 1922 to 1996, when I was 16 years of age and living and attending school in Waterford city. Thousands of women were incarcerated in this laundry, which operated from a premises which now has a much happier purpose as the location of WIT's College Street campus. It was one of four laundries operated by the Good Shepherd Sisters, with others at New Ross, Cork and Limerick. The report also gives an account of St. Dominic's at Mayfield and Gracepark industrial schools, which were located at College Street at the time and had capacity for 200 children, who were also often incarcerated because they were poor.

The Waterford laundry was the last Magdalen institution to cease operating as a commercial laundry when it closed on 25 October 1996. It is sad to think such an institution was still running not that long ago. The financial records for the Waterford and New Ross laundries somehow did not survive. In the 1960s, there was an average of about 60 women in the Magdalen laundry in Waterford, and there was still an average of 40 women incarcerated in the 1980s. The average stay in the Good Shepherd laundry was from 46 weeks to 4.5 years, though some women stayed and, if we can call it that, lived there for 15 years.

There was no doubt but that the State was complicit in the incarceration of these women. The report catalogues how, in 1926, a convicted woman was sentenced to the Good Shepherd laundry, Waterford, for 12 months. In the 1950s, a 21 year old convicted woman was sent there to keep the peace and for good behaviour for 12 months. The records of the religious congregation confirm her entry into the Magdalen laundry from "the Court, Dublin". After the required one year's residence, she left the Magdalen laundry and "went to her mother". In another instance in Waterford, a girl was given an adjourned sentence for a set period on the condition she entered the laundry. The report notes that this was a trend in Waterford, again showing how complicit the State was in the incarceration of these women.

Cases of this kind were identified in Waterford in particular. Examples included a 17 year old girl who was in 1942 convicted and required by the court to remain in High Park convent on her own bail of £5 until sentencing 12 months later. The records of the religious congregation confirm she entered the laundry on that date - "time: 3 months" - and that, after that time, she was "sent home to her grandmother".

To me, some of the more harrowing parts of the report relate to the verbal abuse the women suffered, and I again focus on the reality that was experienced by the women in Waterford. Overwhelmingly, the majority of women who contributed to the report in Waterford described verbal abuse and being the victim of unkind, hurtful, taunting and belittling comments. A very poignant example was recounted by Olivia O'Leary on RTE Radio 1 a number of weeks ago, when she told a story of one elderly woman who stumbled going down a hallway. A nun remarked, "That's not the first time you've fallen".

Some 42 women died in the Waterford laundry between 1922 and 1982. The committee was unable to identify with certainty that nine of those deaths had been officially registered. That is the contempt in which this State dealt with those women. With regard to the routes of entry for the Waterford laundries, just under 10% were admitted by the clergy and 10% were sent by families, although I am under no illusion as to the kinds of social pressure they were under in terms of trying to conform with the social norms of the time. Some 14% of the women in the Waterford laundries were sent there by industrial schools. For me, this is one the saddest parts of the report. These girls and women had no family contact at all. They were sent from one arm of the State to another - from the industrial schools to a life of torment and abuse at the hands of the State in the laundries.

Ms Claire McGettrick of Justice for Magdalenes noted the case of a woman who was sent to Magdalen Laundry following her labour in the maternity hospital in which I myself was born. She had not recovered from the birth at the time and she ran away, as her baby was taken from her. She was returned by gardaí to the laundry and she was unable to leave after she was put out on a job. Her baby did not survive. In another example, a lady who had spent time in Waterford was sent to various laundries. She was subjected to awful emotional and psychological torture. When she finally got out and left Ireland, she held down a full-time job, something she had been made to believe she would never be able to do.

It was not just the religious and the State who were complicit in the incarceration of these woman. The report speaks of a Waterford GP, a Dr. Malachy Coleman, who worked with the Magdalen laundries from 1984 to 2000. He states in the McAleese report that he did not at any stage get the impression of coercion or fear in the relationship between ladies and nuns, although he felt the women had become institutionalised.

This was a case of blaming the women for how they were. A nun from the Good Shepherd Magdalen Laundry would stay with the women for the entire duration of his consultations. They were not even afforded the dignity of being able to attend a physician on their own. He did not feel they were prevented from talking to him about any subject but if one is the victim of institutionalised cruelty and that same person is the room with one, how is one supposed to disclose what is going on? How could one stand over this kind of practice? He felt women were fed well and cared for and went on holidays every year and on trips with the Lions Club and that this would somehow recompense for the lack of freedom these women suffered at the hands of the State. He felt the nuns were caring but the ladies were institutionalised.

We will never be able to do anything to take back the years we took away from these women but we can ensure they get access to the money they so deserve and the services they badly require.

Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party)
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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.

Dan Neville (Limerick, Fine Gael)
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I welcome the opportunity to speak on this very delicate and important issue, the abuse of women for decades in the Magdalen laundries. I wish to be associated with the apology of the Taoiseach who expressed deep regret and apologised unreservedly to all the women concerned for the hurt done to them and any stigma they had suffered as a result of their time spent in the Magdalen laundries.

I welcome the McAleese report which has permitted us to see in great detail the wrongs done to innocent women and the merciless cruelty inflicted on them. It describes a judgmental society and those who ran the institutions. It showed how uncharitable they were and how degrading were their actions towards decent human beings whom they denied their human rights. We know that such cruelty deeply affects and creates psychological difficulties. The women concerned were not allowed to communicate with each other and it is obvious that they suffered from having no or low self-esteem and self-value which can seriously affect the human psyche. It was a time of high religious influence and dominance. The women believed they were worthless and sinful and were humiliated. The terrible unchristian label of "fallen women" was applied to them. Human contact was prevented, even though we all need interaction with fellow human beings. We want to feel valued for our personality, talents and potential contribution to fellow human beings. We want to be loved and have a future, but this was not permitted under fear of physical, psychological and spiritual punishment. Post-traumatic stress disorder is described as a severe anxiety disorder that can develop after any event which has caused psychological trauma. This trauma over a period of time must have caused severe traumatic distress disorder without an understanding of it.

For decades and centuries society used institutions such as the Magdalene laundries and industrial schools to deal with perceived problems. I also remind the House of how patients in mental institutions were treated. Many were incarcerated as a remedy for social problems rather than because of mental ill-health. The institutions were the solution to problems of homelessness and intellectual disability and to deal with those who did not conform to the strict norms dictated by society of acceptable behaviour. They were regarded as dangerous people, to be locked away behind high walls.

In the 1940s my mother was a psychiatric nurse. She told me about the inhuman conditions she encountered. She also told me about the many people - perhaps the majority - who had no illness but who had been sent there for social reasons. She became very close friends with many normal women and men who had been incarcerated in these places. They worked for no payment, the women in laundries and kitchens and the men on the farm which provided the food. Some lived for decades in these places where they died.

I shared a platform with Professor Ivor Browne at a seminar organised last November by the Viktor Frankl Institute of Ireland which was chaired by Gay Mitchell, MEP, entitled, Sense and Suicide. Professor Browne visited St. Brendan's Hospital, Grangegorman, in the 1950s when he observed there was no meaningful relationship between the doctors and patients in the overcrowded and insanitary conditions. He recalled visiting the women's section:

Many of the wards had more than 100 people in them, with crowds of patients jostling each other. Some of the women had their dresses pulled over their heads. Here and there, a nurse was struggling among the chaos. There was a cacophony of sound. I felt as though I was lost in some type of hell. I remember passing a little old lady who was quite sane and conscious, sitting in bed shaking with terror. This was the 1950s.

Persons of unsound mind could be detained indefinitely. Many were there for social reasons as a matter of convenience. In fact, a person could be committed for life with the signatures of two peace commissioners. Many families perceived that problems were solved by a committal for life. It was a sentence of incarceration behind high walls. The pejorative term "simpleton" referred to people who were regarded as not having their full faculties. Of course, they had them, but in their own way. They were decent, honest, hard-working people when given the opportunity to work. They were locked in behind high walls because they were regarded as dangerous people. It was a life sentence, out of sight, in order to solve society's problem. It was a life sentence of unpaid labour. Perhaps at some time in the future the cruelty inflicted on this most vulnerable group will be documented, but most of them are dead now.

St. Brendan's Hospital is officially due to close tomorrow and the patients who remain there will be moved to a new unit. In the 1960s there were 2,700 patients in the hospital. The new unit will only be required to house 54 patients. What were 2,700 people doing in St. Brendan's in the 1960s? I appreciate that there would have been a need for more than 54 places at that time because methods of psychiatric treatment were not as developed as they are now. I do not know why, however, 2,700 people were kept in this facility in the 1960s. During that period there were 20,000 patients in all our mental hospitals. At present, there are fewer than 3,000.

My mother informed me about the difficulties experienced at the time to which I refer. We must compliment the female nurses and male attendants who worked in institutions such as St. Brendan's and who were kind and generous to and understood the people for whom they were caring. It must be remembered that the training of nurses for psychiatry was only introduced by regulation in 1935. Prior to that date, one did not have to be trained in order to work as a psychiatric nurse but many were. My mother informed me about the horrors of electroconvulsive treatment and indicated that this was regularly used to deal with difficult patients. She told me that straitjackets were often used to contain people. The institutions, which were enormous, became overcrowded and the system was obliged to concentrate on their day to day management rather than on treating patients. There was no one to represent the individuals to whom I refer. When people are not wanted by society, their voice is not heard. No one listens to them and no one speaks on their behalf. The approach during the period in question was to lock people up behind high walls. I hope that fact will one day be recognised.

Michael Colreavy (Sligo-North Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
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This month I witnessed the best and the worst aspects of the operations of Dáil Éireann. The worst came two weeks ago in the form of the Taoiseach's initial response to the Magdalen report in the aftermath of its publication. The Taoiseach gave a lecture on statistics instead of dealing with the crimes perpetrated against the girls and women who were put in Magdalen laundries. In the same week there was unseemly behaviour during the debate on the promissory note deal, when those of us with a contrary point of view were shouted down in the most ignorant fashion by members of the Government parties. The best came when the Taoiseach made a fulsome apology on behalf of the people of the Irish nation to the survivors of the Magdalen laundries and when every Deputy stood and applauded that apology and those women who so courageously to have their hurt acknowledged by the State and its citizens.

This country has an extremely poor record in respect of its treatment of women. Next week, women here and throughout the world will celebrate International Women's Day. For too long, women in this country have been subjected to abuse, treated as second-class citizens and ignored by those in the male-dominated corridors of power. There is probably no greater example of this than the incarceration of women in the Magdalen laundries. The latter were established over 200 years ago and over time the State increasingly used them as a place to deal with a multitude of social problems, such as so-called illegitimacy, immoral behaviour, poverty, disability, domestic and sexual abuse, youth crime and infanticide. The final laundry to close its doors was that located in Seán MacDermott Street. It did so in 1996, when there were still 40 women - the oldest of whom was 79 and the youngest in her 40s - in residence there. This is comparatively recent history. To rub salt into their wounds, the Magdalen women were excluded by the State from the 2002 residential institutions redress scheme. The State argued that the laundries were privately run and that it, therefore, had no involvement with them. Justice delayed was justice denied and the major hurt continued.

The Taoiseach's fulsome apology on behalf of the Irish people was both welcome and the right thing to do. The redress scheme is a good start towards making some restitution for the wrongs done. However, the redress mechanism must be open, transparent, accountable and non-adversarial. It must be placed on a statutory footing, involve adequate oversight and include a right of appeal. In addition, the surviving women must receive wages that were unpaid and full pension entitlements. Health and education services must also be provided. Sinn Féin welcomes the Government's commitment to a non-adversarial redress process. However, it cannot be left to one individual - regardless of how honourable, well-intentioned or eminent he or she may be - to adjudicate on these matters. It is essential that the redress process should accord fully with the rules of natural justice and fair procedure and be completely transparent.

The courage of the Magdalen survivors has forced the State to confront and rectify abuses in the system, both historic and current. There are others who still await redress. These include the Bethany Home survivors, the victims of symphysiotomy and those who were the subject of forced legal adoptions. I completely agree with Deputy Neville to the effect that we must address the needs of those women and men who are survivors of our psychiatric institutions or lunatic asylums, as they were previously known.

We cannot allow the struggle and pain of the Magdalen women to be in vain. The sexism and inequality that still pervades Irish society must be stamped out. Legislators have often failed the women of this country and there is a danger that we will repeat the mistakes of the past if we do not afford women their equal say. As International Women's Day approaches, Deputies from all parties should make a commitment to do at least one thing to rectify the wrongs that were and continue to be committed against Irish women. Let the redress process for the Magdalen women be the beginning of a process of change in Irish society. I hope our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters will never be obliged to go through the injustice endured by the women who were incarcerated in the Magdalen laundries. We can do something about this matter and let us ensure that we do so.

Jerry Buttimer (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Government for holding this debate. It is extraordinary that we are engaging in such a debate in the modern, 21st century Ireland. I had the benefit of spending time in a seminary and I lived in a world where pastoral care and people's needs are paramount. I am glad, therefore, that the cruelty and inhumanity of Irish society in the past has thankfully been laid bare, not just before this House but also before the nation. An entire generation can now witness what the threat of being sent to institutions such as the Magdalen laundries meant to their forebears. The information that has emerged shows what society used to be like, what we were prepared to put up with and what we allowed to take place.

This debate relates to the Magdalen women and their need to tell their stories and have them heard. It also relates to their need for redress and the inhumanity displayed towards them.

It is about the way the people, as a nation, reflect upon this report, listen to the stories of the Magdalen women, and put a value on the type of country we want. The State must recognise these women, as we saw in the Taoiseach’s apology, but must recognise also that we need to learn from what happened and never return to those harsh, penal days when no value was put on humanity and there was a perception of how we should look, the way people should behave, and how they should be tolerated. It goes back to the old saying that people should be seen and not heard in many cases.

This is an extraordinary debate. It follows on from a litany of reports published which highlighted a shameful legacy in the way our society, State, churches, religious orders and institutions behaved. I hope that the ignominy placed upon these women will be cast away and that the painful memory and the physicality of what they endured will ease for them. Before and following the publication of this report one could not but be struck by the language used, the emotion and the sheer pain expressed by the women, be it on radio or television. I was struck also by the words of the Minister for Justice and Equality in his reply to this debate when he spoke about the State accepting its moral duty to the women. I hope that will happen. I will return to that point.

There is a bigger debate to be had about social issues, an area Deputy Colreavy touched upon earlier. In preparing to speak on the Private Members’ motion some weeks ago and having sat in the Chamber for almost all of the debate on the first night and the night of the Taoiseach’s apology, and in reading the McAleese report - I was unable to read all of it because it was so upsetting - I wondered, as someone who will be 46 this year, how I would feel if I was living in a society that allowed this to happen. I wondered how I would feel if I was a brother of one of the Magdalen women or if I were one of the Magdalen women. Those thoughts were deeply disconcerting and they sent a cold shiver through me, because the report painted a picture of a society that was uncaring and unkind and that did not want, in the words of de Valera, comely maidens dancing at the crossroads.

I was struck by the sense of humanity of the women in the public Gallery on the night of the debate. There was no rancour or bitterness on their part. There was unbridled joy at the remarks of the Taoiseach and the applause from Members in this Chamber.

As the Minister for Justice and Equality has come into the Chamber, I want to record my thanks to him, the Minister of State, Deputy Lynch, and the Taoiseach for their commitment in the publication of the report and also for commissioning the report. In his moving and profoundly eloquent address, the Taoiseach spoke about living in a different Ireland. He said that we now have a different consciousness and awareness and that the Ireland we live in today is more compassionate and empathetic. I sincerely hope that is the case, because we will have other tests as a nation in the way we value all of our people and our children in terms of social issues and matters of importance to people in our society.

I hope that active citizens who are involved in civic society, whether through advocacy, politics, the community or religious or non-governmental organisations, will pause and reflect upon the language the Taoiseach used and the stories of the Magdalen women, because if we profess to be a more tolerant, gentle and compassionate society, the Magdalen report, the Cloyne report and the Murphy report must be a new beginning, a watershed moment. We cannot afford to have other watershed moments, because the test of our nation and our people will be the way we respond, not just in terms of redress but in the words we use and our aspiration to strive to have a better society arising from these reports and particularly from the experiences of the Magdalen women. Terms such as “fallen women” are the wrong type of language and should never be used again to describe anybody in society. We should never allow any person to be second-class because of his or her marital status, sexuality, race or religion.

Those who criticise the Taoiseach for his initial response are being unfair. He is the Head of Government, and he has a moral duty to respond. I genuinely like Deputy Colreavy but I disagree with his remarks about the response in the Dáil. This Government's response will be measured, and we should consider what the Taoiseach did. He met with women quietly in England and in Ireland. He spoke with them and he listened to them. He sang with them; he engaged. While it is welcome that we had a debate and published the report, the night of the debate was a humbling and emotional experience. I return to the point I made earlier. This debate is about the way these women were let down and how we can bring a rebalancing to their lives. I agree with Deputy Colreavy that the redress scheme in the hands of Mr. Justice Quirke will find appropriately in favour of these women.

Our younger generation have a different view of Ireland. They see us as progressive in so many ways. The McAleese report, while not perfect, has shone a light on the Ireland of the past in terms of the way we treated women and degraded them, and we can now make amends. The burden falls to a new generation of Irish people to ensure we have an Ireland in which all our citizens are treated equally. I commend the Government for publishing this report. I congratulate the Taoiseach and the Minister for Justice and Equality on their response and I look forward to the publication of the report of Mr. Justice Quirke.

Never again can we allow the following to happen:

There was never a reason given for anything. We never thought we would see the outside world again. While you were in Ireland they knew exactly what you were doing. You had to leave Ireland to escape them.

That is a quote from one of the women. We are a better country. I look forward to a brighter, more tolerant Ireland.

Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)
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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?

Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal North East, Sinn Fein)
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As I have outlined before, Sinn Féin welcomed the apology from the Taoiseach on behalf of the State to the women incarcerated in the Magdalen laundries. While we commend those involved in putting together the McAleese report, it really only scratches the surface of what went on in Ireland during that time. This should be seen as a starting point in the healing process of the wounds inflicted on the women of Ireland, particularly poor women, by the apparatus of the State. The women who were the victims of barbaric symphysiotomy practices are still waiting for their apology. The apparatus of the State actively facilitated the injuries inflicted on them. Women's bodies were seen as things that needed to be contained and fixed. Poorer women were held in contempt in Ireland. We still have a constitutional provision that refers to women's duties as being within the home and are still living with the effects of these attitudes.

Too many people on this island are due apologies from the State. Considering what happens now within the care system, and going by previous Governments' form on these issues, there will be an apology owed to them too.

However, it is not only the State that is required to say it is sorry. The religious orders are glaringly absent from this. Too many sets of financial records from the laundries have gone missing. There must be further investigations into this, and prosecutions must be initiated where appropriate. Slave labour was tolerated in these laundries and women suffered unspeakable injuries as a result. Many of them never recovered. Some of them never got out and were buried in unmarked graves because their lives were not worth as much as an individual headstone to the nuns or the State. The burying of those poor women in unmarked graves is the aspect that has really struck a nerve. The State and religious orders had such contempt for these women that there were girls who did not even have names. I have heard of women who merely had numbers allocated to them. There were no birth certificates and by virtue of accidents of birth, class and gender they were consigned to laundries. Women who should not have been in the laundries and tried to escape were promptly rounded up by the Garda and returned to their lives of slave labour.

There was a bizarre culture of deference in Ireland whereby the people - the State - allowed clerics to dictate what should or should not be social norms in society. It was a society that allowed women to be locked up because they happened to be too pretty. It is actually mind-boggling. Religious orders facilitated the incarceration of people they disapproved of in institutions built on systematic cruelty and torment. They were violent, as attested to by the pages of testimony from women that were not included in the McAleese report.

When I think of Christ, I think of the Christ of love, compassion, understanding, empathy and courage, who was not afraid to speak up to the powerful and reached out to the dispossessed and those on the margins of society. He was a true inspiration through the ages, spiritually and in every way. What in the name of God had the message of Christ to do with the institutions run in his name or that of the Virgin Mary? What in the name of God would have led anybody involved with those institutions to believe they were acting in God's name or following the path and message of Jesus Christ? Their actions, attitudes and control over our people in that period was everything that is opposite to the message of Jesus Christ. What they must closely reflect on is the damage they did to the good name of Christianity and to acting in the name of Christ and that of the Virgin Mary over the years. Shame on every one of them. Shame on them for claiming that mantle as theirs.

There must be an apology for this. However, these institutions were not just about the social or moral policing of women in Ireland. Let us make no mistake - the Magdalen slaves were financial assets to the laundries. The laundries were businesses. Any business that was given access by the State to almost unlimited free labour would have done very well; one need not be an economist to know that. Plenty of people did very well indeed out of the unmerciful cruelty that was inflicted on these women, just as there were well-to-do people in Ireland at the time who did well from not having to pay children from industrial schools who were sent to do unpaid domestic and agricultural work. Ireland has seen plenty of forced labour over the years. The religious orders did not run the laundries out of the goodness of their hearts. These women are owed compensation and their unpaid wages and pensions. They are owed proper redress, and to hear word "sorry" from the religious orders.

There are huge questions about how the redress scheme will operate. Experience in these matters indicates that the Irish State is not one that makes these structures victim-centred. Some who went to the residential institutions redress board found the experience horrific and felt it was only another opportunity for legal practitioners to make money. The religious orders pleaded that they had no money. The State has failed to deal with this quickly. The terms of reference must be published immediately. The fact that there will be an ex gratiascheme that does not accept liability on behalf of the State is disappointing. The State was culpable, so it is liable. The redress mechanism must be put on a statutory footing and it must have an independent appeals process. Women who emigrated to get away from the trauma of their experience in Ireland must also be included. The matter of those who were incarcerated in Bethany Home must be addressed. The Taoiseach has said that Mr. Justice Quirke will report back in three months. That is unacceptable. We owe it to the women of the laundries to expedite this as a matter of urgency.

I wish to return to the issue of faith and to the abuse of the privilege that comes with being a leader who has the huge honour of being a vehicle for the message of Christ and a pathway to God. That is how these people presented themselves. I have had the privilege of knowing many fine people of faith from when I was a young lad and throughout my life. There were some fantastic priests. Fr. Jimmy Doherty, RIP, who died of multiple sclerosis, was a wonderful man who worked with young people in my home town of Buncrana. I think of the people who, to me, represented the message of Christ throughout my life, such as the priests and nuns who served as missionaries, fought against oppressive regimes and stood side by side with the people in Africa, Latin America and Asia. They are inspirational; they follow the path of Christ. However, far too many in the institution of the Catholic Church and other Christian institutions have walked away from that path, have besmirched the name of Jesus Christ by acting maliciously and cruelly, and have left this legacy.

I pose a challenge to the Catholic Church, as the conclave of cardinals gathers shortly to select a new Pope. The church must drive away cruelty, malice, protection of the powerful and greedy and the refusal to stand up against an unjust and unequal system in which people are starving and dying while others live in incredible wealth in this country and across Europe, the United States and the developed world. The world we live in is a shameful insult to the message of Christ, and the church is not doing enough about that. When a house assigned to Travellers was burned down recently in Ballyshannon, where was the church? Where were the voices of Christ to challenge that bigotry and indifference? Even in 2013 there are too many in the church who are failing in their responsibilities. There are also wonderful and courageous voices in the church who truly follow the path of Christ. Rather than have all this debate in the Vatican about protecting the orthodox and so-called tradition, it is time to knock it down and rebuild it. It is time to start from scratch. There is no better place to start than with the message of Christ that it is better to live in poverty than to live in opulence and wealth. Consider the Vatican, St. Peter's Square and St. Peter's Basilica. Are they modest structures? Do they reflect the modesty of Christ? I believe the missionaries living in modest accommodation in Africa and Latin America are the vehicles of Christ. If people are looking for the centre of faith, they should not go to the Vatican or to any of the big cathedrals in the world, but to the missions, where people are delivering love, empathy and support.

The issue of the Magdalen laundries, other institutions and all the challenges we see throughout the world show it is time to revisit the issue of faith. It is time for modesty and humility. It is time to start again. It is also time to talk to the people who genuinely follow the path of Christ in our missions, who work with the poor and stand up against oppression, and who say the capitalist system in place across the world is in defiance of his message. It is time for real courage. If the church goes there, it will then win the hearts and minds of people across the world and will truly follow in the path of Christ again.

Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry South, Independent)
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I thank the Technical Group for allocating some of its time to me to speak on this very important subject. It is a serious matter and a dark period in the history of Ireland. I acknowledge the presence of the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Alan Shatter.

I thank former Senator Martin McAleese and the people who worked with him for their report and for the cost-effective way in which they brought it to Government. He will always be remembered for that. A number of questions have been posed by Justice for Magdalenes on the three-month process to be undertaken by Mr. Justice John Quirke. They are as follows. Will Mr. Justice Quirke be commissioned to implement the process he recommends after three months? Will the process be on a statutory footing with independent statutory powers? Will the process be transparent and will there be an appeals process? Will there be independent monitoring of the process? Will the process be carried out in a fair, fast, accessible, non-adversarial and transparent manner? Will the Government make available to survivors and their families free, independent advice and advocacy assistance in relation to the scheme? Will the Government meet with Justice for Magdalenes to discuss the latter's restorative justice and reparations scheme submitted in October 2011 as requested by the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Alan Shatter?

I turn to the need for services and supports for survivors. Justice for Magdalenes has seen a significant rise in the number of queries by phone and e-mail to its volunteer-run information service. As an unfunded, all-volunteer organisation, Justice for Magdalenes is not equipped to adequately serve the needs of this vulnerable population. Queries mostly concern the need for support and the registration process. Justice for Magdalenes has been calling for the establishment of a helpline and dedicated unit in the Department of Justice and Equality since last September to no avail. Survivors need a point of contact so that they can be referred to the appropriate services. What measures are being put in place to help this vulnerable group of institutionalised women to engage with the registration and reparations process? Will guardians ad litemor independent advocates be provided for those who need them? What plans are in place to ensure permanent advocacy for survivors in their places of residence? Will the Department of Justice and Equality put in place measures to assist family members of deceased Magdalen women to engage with the process? What steps are being taken to ensure that the sons and daughters of Magdalen survivors or other relatives and victims who were adopted have access to theirs and their relatives' records? With regard to deceased women, what steps are being taken to ensure that Magdalen grave records are accurate and up-to-date? What steps are being taken to ensure that there is access to Magdalen graves and what steps are being taken to ensure their upkeep? Are there mechanisms in place to reach out to all of the women who have emigrated to the United Kingdom, United States of America, Canada and elsewhere? Will redress and reparations have an effect on current benefits being received by Magdalen survivors? What measures are being put in place to ensure that they are not penalised? Will the process ensure that the making of an ex gratiapayment to a person resident outside Ireland and the United Kingdom is structured so as not to adversely affect her existing entitlement to benefits and supports? Will the Department ensure that copies of Dr. Martin McAleese's report are provided to survivors who may not have Internet access, including survivors who provided evidence to the interdepartmental committee and have yet to receive the report?

Over the last number of months and weeks, we have heard horror stories of the personal hurt and heartache survivors have had to endure. While it was great to be in the Chamber to see the people who came to hear the Taoiseach's apology on behalf of the State, one must remember in a heartfelt way those who are deceased and were not here to see justice being served for them. They were not here to hear the leader of the country apologise on behalf of the State. It is sad to think that those people went to their graves without hearing that. It is sad to think of the mass grave containing the bodies of many unnamed people which was uncovered when a property was being sold to a developer. The report and the Government's action must be commended and acknowledged. The Minister for Justice and Equality, officials, Dr. Martin McAleese, the Taoiseach and everyone else who joined in the effort to bring about redress must be thanked and complimented. While it might be said that it is late, I am the first to say that it is better late than never. I am the first person to acknowledge good work when it is done. While there was upset when the Taoiseach did not apologise immediately on publication of the report, there was a reason for that. The Taoiseach used the intervening time to travel to England to meet many of the survivors. There was an orderly reaction to the report and I see now and appreciate why the Taoiseach did not come to the House the following day to give the apology. I am sure all of the survivors recognise that fact.

I would never want to see people being wronged. There are thousands of priests and nuns who have served our people very well over the years. They were kind and generous and they devoted their lives to God and others. I do not like to see in the media, whose members are the people who run the country now, the impression being given that any person who puts on a priest's collar or a nun's habit is evil or has something wrong with him or her. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, there were horrible people who did unspeakable things to beautiful children who should have been protected and nurtured by everybody. Unfortunately, there will be evil people in all walks of life. I want to ensure that good priests and nuns will always be respected and highly thought of. I have the utmost respect for them. They devote their lives to what they believe in and to God. They believe in their church and do untold good service in their communities. I acknowledge and recognise that. I was a person who benefited from the teaching of nuns when I was a young boy with severe learning difficulties. I would never shy away from the fact that I had that difficulty and that it was the nuns who helped me. I would always admit that and say I appreciated the help. I will never forget the people who helped me when I needed it.

I am sorry to throw in this point, but I ask the Government to deal with the important issue of the 32 survivors of thalidomide who need to have their cases heard. While it is only 32 people, they must be assisted and acknowledged. I would appreciate the Government dealing with that in the same workmanlike way it dealt with the Magdalen ladies.

Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)
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I would like to thank those on all sides of the House who have contributed to this important discussion since it commenced.

Last Tuesday, 19 February 2013, was a very important day for former residents of the Magdalen laundries. It was the day when the Taoiseach, on behalf of the State, acknowledged their hurt and apologised for their suffering as a result of their being admitted to and working in Magdalen laundries and the stigma many of them have felt throughout their lives. It was the day when the State acknowledged the extent to which time spent in the laundries tragically blighted the lives of so many. It was the day when the State finally opened its heart and accepted its moral duty to those who felt abandoned and lost and believed they had no future. It was a day of extraordinary events in this Chamber, when many of the women who had resided in the Magdalen laundries sat and listened and finally understood that what they had to say was believed and that the State acknowledged that what they had been saying for so many years was true. It was a day when the State stopped ignoring their plight, as it had done for far too many years. It was a day on which this House responded appropriately to the report published by the former Senator Dr. Martin McAleese. It was also an extraordinary day because it is one of the only times I can recollect when Members on all sides of this House stood to applaud those in the Visitors' Gallery. It was, in brief, a day of genuine and high emotion.

It is important to remind ourselves again of the long journey taken by these women and to thank them for having the courage, determination, tenacity and persistence over so many years to ensure their stories were told, heard and ultimately believed. Despite the many obstacles in their way and all the difficulties they faced, they did not allow themselves to be dissuaded from their pursuit of truth and justice. Most importantly, the veil of secrecy surrounding the laundries has at long last been fully lifted and can never again be replaced.

From the outset, the Government, commencing with the appointment of Dr. McAleese to chair an interdepartmental committee, was determined to address this issue, which had been ignored for so many years. Upon taking up office as Minister for Justice and Equality I was determined that this issue would be addressed and within three months of our entering government the decision was made that a committee such as this would be formed and the work required would be undertaken. I again thank Dr. McAleese for his report, which chronicled the reality and harshness of life in the laundries and the extent to which not only the State but Irish society was involved, and which shed light on what happened within those walls and how so many of our people - citizens of this State - came to be admitted to and work in the laundries. I am grateful to Dr. McAleese and the interdepartmental committee which he chaired so capably. I also thank those who assisted him - most importantly, the women who experienced life in the laundries; the various Departments and State agencies which co-operated fully and trawled extensively through records going back over the decades that provided so much new information; and the representative and advocacy groups. We must also thank the religious congregations who co-operated fully with the committee and who made their records available. I realise these are difficult times for them too and it is important to recognise their co-operation and their contribution to this process. On all sides records were made available that had not for decades seen the light, which have helped to fill out the full and comprehensive story of the decades of the Magdalen laundries.

As Dr. McAleese pointed out at the start of his report, there is no single or simple story of the Magdalen laundries. More than 10,000 women are known to have entered the laundries from the foundation of the State in 1922 until the closure of the last laundry in 1996. We must now address the needs of those who are still with us, arising from the hurt they experienced during and due to their time in the laundries. That is the intention of this Government and that is what we are doing.

Since publication of the McAleese report, the Taoiseach has met with as many of the women who experienced life in the laundries as possible. The Taoiseach, the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, and I recently travelled to the UK to meet with the Irish Women Survivors' Support Network, which represents the largest grouping. Here in Ireland, the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste met with women represented by Magdalene Survivors Together and the Taoiseach met also with women living in nursing homes or sheltered accommodation under the care of the religious congregations. The Minister of State and I also met with representative groups since the debate in this House on Tuesday of last week.

As announced last week, the Government has decided to establish a fund for the benefit of those who were admitted to and worked in Magdalen laundries, and also those who worked without pay in the residential laundry at Stanhope Street. The Government has appointed the retired High Court Judge and current President of the Law Reform Commission, Mr. Justice Quirke, to examine how, in view of the McAleese report, the Government might best provide supports, including health services such as medical cards, psychological and counselling services and other welfare needs, for the women who need such supports as a result of their experiences.

It is important not only to acknowledge the experiences of many of the women in the laundries, but also to consider how to address their future needs. It is especially important to pursue measures that will promote healing and reconciliation and will, as far as possible, provide closure to them. Mr. Justice Quirke has been asked to advise on the establishment of a scheme under the fund including identifying the criteria and factors to be taken into account, such as work undertaken in the laundries for no remuneration. He will advise on the operation of the fund and, in particular, the nature and amount of payments to be made out of the fund. He will report back to the Government in three months when a decision will be made on the detailed operation of the fund. I know the work Mr. Justice Quirke has been asked to undertake is already under way. He will also set the procedure for the determination of applications in a manner that ensures the moneys in the fund are directed only to the benefit of eligible applicants and are not used for legal fees and expenses. Let me make it very clear that women who have already received payments under the residential institutions redress scheme are not being excluded. There is one small area of possible overlap. I understand that under the redress scheme a woman who went straight from an industrial school to a Magdalen laundry may have received a redress payment for the period spent in the Magdalen laundry up to the age of 18. Mr. Justice Quirke has been asked to take this into account and to address how we might deal with this aspect of the matter.

On Tuesday, 19 February, contact details for the Magdalen laundry fund were made available to enable people to register their interest in being considered for receipt of benefits or supports from the fund when it enters into operation. These contact details are as follows: Magdalene Laundry Fund, Department of Justice and Equality, Montague Court, Montague Street, Dublin 2. The telephone number is 01 4768649. An e-mail address and website are also available. To date, more than 700 women have made contact. This registration process will allow people time to gather the necessary basic documentation that will be required to verify their identities and their stays in the relevant institutions. It may also give some indication of the numbers who have an interest in such a fund or in receiving assistance.

As announced last week, the Government has decided in principle to pay out of the fund an initial sum to the proposed UK Step by Step centre for Irish survivors of industrial schools and laundries. This payment will be made as soon as the legal technicalities have been clarified, and work is under way on this.

The Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, and I have again, since last week's debate, been in touch with the representative groups. One of the issues under consideration is the establishment of some form of memorial for the story of the Magdalen laundries as we now know it. The women who spent time in the laundries have been asked to consider the nature and location of a memorial they would deem suitable. The Minister of State and I will shortly meet with the four religious congregations to discuss matters arising out of the McAleese report, including the need to access the records of the laundries again in the context of the operation of the scheme that is being established.

This Government commenced the process of addressing the issue of the Magdalen laundries and is determined to see it through. We will try to do this as quickly, effectively and compassionately as possible. That is the least we can do for the women who were admitted to and worked in the laundries.

That is what they deserve and that is what the State must do. I, as Minister for Justice and Equality, along with the Government, am committed to this. I thank Members for their earnest and considered contributions to this debate. Some questions were raised during the debate as to how the proposed redress scheme will operate. These are all questions that will be answered when Mr. Justice Quirke has concluded his work on the matter which he has already commenced. I look forward to bringing those answers to the House when the work is concluded and we receive a report from Mr. Justice Quirke as to how we best deal with these matters in the interests of the women concerned.