Trevor Ó Clochartaigh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I first heard about the Magdalen laundries 21 years ago this month when I saw a wonderful play, "Eclipsed", by Patricia Burke Brogan. In the aftermath of the production of her play, Ms Burke Brogan stated:

... there was some backlash and I really suffered with that play. I had someone cut my picture out of the paper and draw horns and different symbols on it and send it to me. I got up one morning and this had been thrown in the door, which was very upsetting and hard to handle. People thought I was being anti-Church but I wasn't. Everyone blamed the sisters, but the State did nothing to intervene.

Her words sum up what took place. To say the McAleese report on the Magdalen laundries makes for difficult reading would not even begin to cover its contents - it is upsetting and very traumatic. As Patricia Burke Brogan would agree, what she suffered was nothing compared to what the women in the laundries suffered. It was great that she brought these events to light in the manner in which she did.

It is said that a picture can paint a thousand words. For me, this saying was especially borne out by a photograph printed in the Irish Examiner some weeks ago showing gardaí surrounding Magdalen women during a Corpus Christi march several decades ago. The police cordon was not to protect the women but to hem them in.

These institutions were not the places of refuge or comfort which some would have led us to believe. They were effectively prisons, often holding women against their will and in many instances for many years. For those women, the State took away their youth, and their lives became a miserable drudgery, with many dying in the laundries alone and isolated. The State used these institutions as a place to deal with a multitude of social problems, including illegitimacy, poverty, disability and so on. The religious orders in turn used these girls and women as unpaid labour. These were ordinary women who did not deserve their fate. Crucially, many never got to hear the State apologise, which is a shame. Others had to wait far too long for the State to apologise.

The purpose of Dr. McAleese's report was explore the issue of State involvement, which the former Minister, Batt O'Keeffe, on behalf of the then Government, denied in 2009. His denial that the State referred individuals to the Magdalen laundries has been proven a falsehood. There was never any cause to doubt the women's account as there was already mountains of evidence in that regard.