Oct
2
Friday, October 2, 2009
Madam,
Having listened over the past few days to Liveline on RTÉ Radio 1 dealing with the dreadful conditions those “fallen” women endured under these nuns, I am almost in tears.
You see, I was one of those babies. When I hear how my mother, may she rest in peace, and others were treated, I feel very angry with the type of society I was born and reared in.
Today this Government perpetuates this misery on these women by forcing them to seek documentation to prove they were slaves in these laundries. Changing the terminology from “employees” to “workers” makes very little difference.
One lady did admit she received remuneration in the form of a packet of mint drops and a holy picture. Does this absolve Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe and the Government of all financial and moral responsibilities?
Today, this Government can hand out billions to bail out banks and their developer friends. They pay out millions to individuals in handshakes and ministerial expenses, yet when it comes to these poor unfortunate women, who were made work for nothing in terrible conditions for decades, they turn their backs on them.
Is there any justice in this society of ours?
Incidentally, I met my mother for the first time when I was 35 years of age . . . although it was no thanks to the nuns of the Sacred Heart Convent in Bessborough, Blackrock, Co Cork.
Yours etc,
LEO ARMSTRONG,
Letters to the Editor, Irish Times.
Sep
29
State bullies weak yet it panders to the powerful
Filed Under MAGDALEN WOMEN - FORGOTTEN VOICES | 8 Comments
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
FINTAN O’TOOLE
I SOMETIMES wonder whether we are so passive about the way the Government behaves because we find some of that behaviour literally incredible.
The levels of hypocrisy or incompetence or injustice are so great that the mind cannot quite accept them as reality. They seep into that part of the brain we reserve for outlandish fictions and tall tales.
Instead of getting up to shake our fists, as we might do if we could accept that the story is true, we look on in open-mouthed wonder. We treat the scandal as a spectacle, and thus behave as spectators.
Take for instance, the ways in which the Government has dealt with the idea of compensation in the last fortnight.
To even begin to compare and contrast the treatment by the Government of women who were incarcerated in Magdalen homes on the one side and of the former director general of Fás, Rody Molloy, on the other, is to enter the territory of crude satiric exaggeration. As a story, it is entirely lacking in credibility, except for the minor detail that it is in fact true.
We know the State played a key role in the maintenance of the extraordinary system of Magdalen institutions in which Irish women were incarcerated and enslaved for the crimes of being in “moral danger”.
Many of the women were sent to the homes by the courts. The women slaved in laundries that were often fulfilling State contracts, for the Army or hospitals. The State also failed completely to protect the civil and human rights of these women.
Sep
28
Separate redress scheme urged for Magdalenes
Filed Under MAGDALEN WOMEN - FORGOTTEN VOICES | 3 Comments
Monday, September 28, 2009
PATSY McGARRY Religious Affairs Correspondent
A SEPARATE redress scheme for women detained in Magdalene laundries has been called for by an advocacy group for survivors.
Justice for Magdalenes wrote to Taoiseach Brian Cowen last week demanding that the State introduce legislation for a distinct redress scheme for survivors.
“We contend that the State is morally obliged to apologise for its role in facilitating and silently condoning the abuse of generations of Irish women and children in these institutions,” the group said.
In his letter to the Taoiseach on behalf of the group, Dr Jim Smith, associate professor at the English department and Irish studies programme at Boston College in the US, said he was doing so “to seek further explanation of the State’s rejection of calls for a distinct redress scheme for survivors of the Magdalene
laundries”.
Sep
27
Sunday, 27 September 2009 19:34
Former residents of Magdalene Laundries and their supporters held a march this afternoon in Carlow town, calling on the Government to compensate them for the abuse they suffered.
The march comes days after Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe confirmed that women who were resident in the country’s 13 Magdalene Laundries are not eligible for compensation from the Residential Institutions Redress Board.
Only around 200 women who passed through the Magdalene laundries are still alive, living in Ireland and the UK.
Campaigner Christine Buckley attended the march and said the women were not ‘employees’ and many had been sent to the laundries by the courts and other organs of the State.
She said most were children at the time, and they should be compensated in the same way as survivors of institutional abuse have been.
The Magdalene women were excluded from both the Residential Institutions Redress Board and the Ryan report.
Story from RTÉ News:
http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0927/abuse.html
Sep
23
Madam,
I would challenge Batt O’Keeffe’s use of the word “employee” in relation to women who were incarcerated in Magdalen laundries (Home News, September 18th).
During the course of my years of volunteering with the Justice for Magdalenes group I have had the honour of speaking to many Magdalen survivors about their time in the laundries and none of them would describe themselves as “employees”. I have yet to meet a Magdalen survivor who said she was paid for her hard work or who said she entered a laundry on a voluntary basis.
The State’s abdication of responsibility in relation to the Magdalen laundries is nothing less than shameful. Mr O’Keeffe claims that the State was not complicit in referring women to Magdalene laundries. Yet he acknowledges himself in his letter to Tom Kitt that children were transferred from State-run institutions to Magdalen laundries.
Sep
23
Wednesday September 23 2009
Minister for Education and Science Batt O’Keeffe officially responded to Tom Kitt’s questions regarding state complicity in remanding women and children to Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries in ‘Minister rules out redress for Magdalene victims’ (Irish Independent, September 19).
Among other atrocious comments, the minister referred to Magdalene survivors as “employees”.
One wonders what Mr O’Keeffe’s definition of an ‘employee’ is.
I am sure that in the 10 years my mother Josephine spent at Sunday’s Well embroidering elaborate tablecloths and other linens sold at exorbitant prices to the tourism crowd (and not a penny received by her), instead of receiving a proper education, that she never considered herself an “employee” of the Good Shepherd Sisters.
Likewise, when she was sent to the mother-baby home at Bessboro, Cork, to have and ultimately relinquish me to adoption, all the while doing more sewing (for profit to the home), she did not consider herself an “employee”.
I have seen the scars that she bears from years spent as something less than a true citizen. The pain left her unable to even speak of her past and family history — including acknowledging a long-lost brother whom I found while searching for her — until recently.
I’ve seen the daily regimen she puts her frail, 77-year-old body through to this day, a relic of her institutional life. My heart breaks each time I read a painstakingly written letter from her, scrawled as a six-year-old child would, barely legible and misspelled, yet clearly heartfelt.
Mr O’Keeffe’s callous denial of state complicity is disrespectful and disingenuous at best. At worst, it is an outright lie and insult to my mother and to me, and to the thousands of women like her who slaved under the eye of the Church and State.
I remain unconvinced that no governing body, inspector or other authority knew what these women were subjected to and I have strong evidence to prove quite the opposite.
Give these women their day in court and let them tell their stories. They are owed redress and justice.
Shame on Mr O’Keeffe and the prevailing attitudes of the Church and State.
Mari Steed
Philadelphia, PA
(Published – Letters Page, Irish Independent.)
Sep
22
Madam,
Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe’s suggestion that the inmates of the Roman Catholic Magdalen laundries were “employees” is grotesque.
They were slaves to religious and social prejudice.
Patsy McGarry noted in, “No redress for residents of Magdalen laundries” (September 18th), that there is a “dispute” as to whether the “Protestant-run” Bethany House was a “Magdalen Asylum”. Who disputes it? Jim Smith noted in his excellent Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (2007) that women convicted of birth concealment and infanticide were referred there by the courts during the 1920s. The Irish Times and Irish Independent reported in 1931 that a court sent Mary Elizabeth Walker to Bethany after conviction for obtaining goods by deception. In the 1960s The Irish Times reported the matron as stating that prisoners on remand were kept there.
As a former resident I spoke later to some who attempted to escape from this notional mothers’ and babies’ home.
Sep
19
O’Keeffe criticised for referring to Magdalen women as ‘employees’
Filed Under MAGDALEN WOMEN - FORGOTTEN VOICES | 16 Comments
Saturday, September 19, 2009
PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent
MINISTER FOR Education Batt O’Keeffe has been strongly criticised for his description of women committed to Magdalen laundries as “employees” of those institutions, and for his rejection of their eligibility for State compensation.
Head of the Women’s Studies Department at UCD Dr Katherine O’Donnell said yesterday that, where news of spending cuts in sensitive areas is concerned, it was increasingly the case that “Batt O’Keeffe is turning out to be the big thug of this Government it’s a role he seems to relish”.
A spokesman for the Minister said he did not wish to comment on what he described as a personalised attack.
Dr O’Donnell was speaking in advance of a celebration of women who had been in the laundries, as well as psychiatric hospitals, and institutions investigated by the Ryan commission, which takes place at the Student Centre in UCD from 1pm this afternoon.
She pointed out that “an employee voluntarily gives his/her labour; is properly rewarded; and has a right to represesentation /free association with a union.” None of these were available to women in the Magdalen laundries, she said.
Sep
18
No redress for residents Magdalen laundries
Filed Under MAGDALEN WOMEN - FORGOTTEN VOICES | 23 Comments
Friday, September 18, 2009
PATSY McGARRY Religious Affairs Correspondent
FORMER RESIDENTS of Magdalen laundries are not eligible for compensation from the Residential Institutions Redress Board, Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe has said.
“The Magdalen laundries were privately-owned and operated establishments which did not come within the responsibility of the State. The State did not refer individuals to the Magdalen laundries nor was it complicit in referring individuals to them,” he said.
He also pointed out that the laundries were not subject to State regulation or supervision and so had not been listed in the schedule to the Residential Institutions Redress Act, 2002.
Mr O’Keeffe was replying in a letter to Tom Kitt TD, who had made representations to the Minister concerning former residents of the laundries.
He did so on behalf of James Smith, associate professor at the English department and Irish studies programme in Boston College and author of Irelands Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment , (2008, Manchester University Press). In his letter, Mr O’Keeffe made the point that “in terms of establishing a distinct scheme for former employees of the Magdalen laundries, the situation in relation to children who were taken into the laundries privately or who entered the laundries as adults is quite different to persons who were resident in State-run institutions.”
An exception to this, he said,would be children who were transferred from a State-regulated institution to a Magdalen laundry and suffered abuse while resident there.
Jul
6
Call for apology to survivors of laundries
Filed Under MAGDALEN WOMEN - FORGOTTEN VOICES | Leave a Comment
PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent
THE STATE has been called on to apologise to former residents of Magdalen laundries and to set up a new redress scheme, distinct from that available at the Residential Institutions Redress Board, for former residents of the laundries.
James Smith, associate professor at the English department in Boston College and author of the recently published book Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, and Mari Steed, of the Justice for Magdalenes group, said the State must “recognise, and thus apologize for, its failure to protect the legal rights of women who always remained citizens of the State”.
They said that, while recognising “the key difference in the nature of the State’s relationship to the Magdalen laundries” they “challenge the current terminology that characterises women as ‘voluntary’ committals to Magdalen laundries. We assert that the State was an active agent in ‘referring’ many of these so-called ‘voluntary’ committals, and as such the State is complicit in and culpable for the abuses therein.”
Read more
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Links
A Consultation Proposal - Statutory Fund
A PROPOSAL FOR A MEMORIAL TO PEOPLE WHO WERE ABUSED?
ABUSE: Minutes of meeting with Taoiseach 15/04/2010
Archdiocese of Dublin Report
Child Abuse Links
- 'ANOTHER REPORT ON ANOTHER SHELF'
- Child Abuse Commission – Implementation Plan 28th July 2009
- Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse
- Ferns Report
- Lord Mayor’s Statement on abuse suffered by Children in Residential Institutions
- STATUTORY FUND: MINISTERS RESPONSE
- SURVIVORS AT LOGGERHEADS OVER DENIAL OF SEX ABUSE.
- SURVIVORS SPLIT AFTER MEETING.
- The Hypocrites: Der Spiegel on the Catholic Church and Sex
- VICTIMS IN DANGER OF LOSING SUPPORT
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Dr Michael Corry
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