Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy Leader. As a lawyer she would like to see workers have rights with regard to what they tell employers. There are many case studies on the rights of part-time workers. I very much welcome the Deputy Leader's decision and I thank her.

With regard to the Magdalen laundries, a most interesting work by Eoin O'Sullivan and Ian O Donnell, Coercive Confinement in Ireland, records that at any one stage between the 1920s and the 1950s 30,000 people were locked up in this country. Former Senator McAleese's estimate is that on average approximately 200 of these were in laundries. The maximum number of children confined to institutions and held coercively was approximately 6,000. This has now been reduced to nothing and we all applaud this. In discussing this we must look at all the aspects of the coercive incarceration of people in which Irish society engaged, including locking up unwanted relatives in mental hospitals. Elizabeth Malcolm stated families, police, magistrates, clergy and doctors co-operated to take advantage of lax procedures so as to rid their communities of those deemed trouble or troublesome.

That happened to 30,000 people. We need to discuss the matter fully. It is a bit trivial to ask the Taoiseach to apologise. All of Irish society, in the past, liked locking up people and we should open up a debate on that horrible period in Irish history.