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.

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.

For anyone with a basic sense of justice, it is obvious that the State should compensate the surviving Magdalen women for their appalling treatment. Yet they were excluded from the workings of the Residential Institutions Redress Board.

And earlier this month, Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe wrote to Tom Kitt TD to say that the Government has no intention of taking any responsibility whatsoever for the treatment of the women and would not do anything to compensate them.

He also deliberately referred to the women as “employees” – a phrase which hints at what will happen if the women take action in the courts. The State will fight them all the way, even to the extent of denying that they were in fact subjected to forced and unpaid labour.

So the message to the surviving Magdalens, almost all of whom are elderly and many of whom are vulnerable and impoverished, is: see you in court.

The State will quite happily spend whatever money it takes to fight the Magdalens all the way to the Supreme Court and beyond.

And it will almost certainly threaten them as it threatened Louise O’Keeffe when she sued the State for the sexual abuse she suffered at national school in the 1970s.

O’Keeffe was warned that the State would pursue her for the entire cost of her case – up to €1 million.

The cruelty of the hard line taken against O’Keeffe and the Magdalens is unspeakable, but it has some logic.

The message it sends out is that the State will use all its considerable resources to intimidate anyone who comes looking for compensation and will relentlessly pursue those who take the risk of suing it in the courts.

Then along comes Molloy and the State is transmogrified from Clint Eastwood to Lady Bountiful. If ever there was a case for saying “so sue me”, it was Molloy’s. He presided over a period in which Fás executives used public money with exuberant indifference and in the process devalued the whole idea of public service.

Molloy should have been sacked and should have counted himself fortunate to be able to leave with his already generous entitlements intact.

Instead, he was rewarded with a pension worth €111,000 a year, a tax-free lump sum of €333,732, and a taxable ex-gratia payment of €111,243.

We were initially told that the decision to top up his pension package to €1 million was taken because he had threatened legal action. But, as the Taoiseach confirmed yesterday, this was not so. Molloy did not even have to threaten legal action to get his way. The State gave him a large wodge of public money just on the off-chance that he might sue.

As compensation for having to retire a few years early because he had failed to do his job properly, Molloy got a million euro. As compensation for being kidnapped and enslaved, the Magdalen women will get nothing.

Can the Government that squares up to the Magdalens, denies their suffering by calling them “employees” and effectively announces its willingness to see them in court, be the same timid creature that was so terrified of Molloy?

The answer of course is that it is not the same. There are two Governments, two States. There is one, stern-faced and implacable, for those to whom harm is done. And there is another, gentle and accommodating, for those who are powerful enough to do harm.

We don’t actually believe this, of course. It is far too outrageous to be true.

The Irish Times.

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”.

In proposing a separate redress scheme for such people, he said the group recognised “that the nature of the State’s relationship to the laundries was different from its relationship with residential institutions.” He noted that “the only Magdalene survivors covered by the Redress Act are those young girls transferred from a residential institution (eg industrial or reformatory school) while still in State care”.

“Many other Irish children, however, were abandoned to the Magdalene laundries, many of them abandoned by their families. We assert that the State did have an obligation to provide for and protect these children from institutional child abuse.

“They were always Irish citizens. They were forcibly engaged in unpaid child labour. The Constitution governed the State’s obligation to ensure that they receive a ‘certain minimum education’.” How a child ended up in one of the laundries was “immaterial as this did not obviate the State’s constitutional obligation to protect her”, Dr Smith concluded.

The Irish Times 28th September 2009

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

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.

I would urge Mr O’Keeffe and other elected representatives to examine their consciences and ask themselves if they found out in present day Ireland that women were being incarcerated against their will by the church and forced to work for no pay, would they still allow it to happen? No decent human being would stand idly by and do nothing, so why should the women incarcerated in the past be treated any differently?

In 2003 thousands of postcards were sent to the Fianna Fáil government asking for an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the exhumation and cremation of the bodies of 155 women from High Park laundry in Drumcondra, Dublin, in suspicious circumstances. Six years later it is as if the incident never occurred.

It took the Ryan report, which required 10 years and cost more than €100 million to produce, before institutional abuse survivors were believed.

Let us learn from that and give Magdalen survivors the recognition they deserve.

Yours, etc,

CLAIRE McGETTRICK,
Letters Page, Irish Times

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.)

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.

I would also question a phrase in the same article, to the effect that the Bethany Home was “privately” run. This is possibly true in only the narrowest sense. Between opening in 1922 and closure in 1972, the home held separate prayer days and annual meetings. On almost every occasion a Church of Ireland clergyman presided. The exception was during the 1960s when Methodist clergy occasionally performed these functions.

Bethany Home was an evangelistic organisation that was an outgrowth of the Proselytizing Irish Church Missions to Roman Catholics. It operated alongside the self-styled Mission to Jews. Both organisations reported annually to the Church of Ireland Synod. The Reverend TJ Hammond was involved in running the Lamplight Mission that amalgamated with the Midnight Mission to form the Bethany Home.

Besides being instrumental in setting up the home, he was Dublin Superintendent of the Irish Church Missions during the 1920s. The Revd Hammond was a favourite of those warning of Romanism within the church and was prominent in its “Orange section”. When alleged to be “the leader” at a Dublin synod in 1915 he responded, “I would be proud of the privilege if I were”.

My own relatives were members of the Orange Order in Monaghan. The organisation collected for the home both in the Republic and in Northern Ireland. My cousin cried when I told him in the 1990s what had happened to me in the place he helped support through the Order.

The governance of the Bethany Home was of a form taken by religious organisations or individuals in or closely associated with the Church of Ireland who carried out social service activity in its name.

Possibly, contemporary embarrassment has led the Church of Ireland to attempt to distance itself from a home it once promoted. The Roman Catholic Church attempted a distancing manoeuvre when first confronted with evidence of abuse carried out by those acting in its name. That church now accepts responsibility. The Church of Ireland should do likewise and so also should the Irish State. I join with my suffering sisters in the Roman Catholic Magdalen homes in demanding redress. – Yours, etc,

DEREK LEINSTER,

Letters Page The Irish Times 22nd September 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.

The State had “a responsibility to all of its citizens”, she said, including the many referred by its courts to the laundries. Of added relevance in the context was that for much of the 20th century “the special position” of the Catholic Church was recognised in the Irish Constitution (1937 to 1973).

She said that, anecdotally, indications were that the survival rate of women who had been in the laundries was “extremely low,” while their suicide rate was high. There was, she said “an obligation on the part of the citizens of this State” to look after such people.

Following representations by Tom Kitt TD, acting on behalf of Dr James Smith of Boston College, Mr O’Keeffe responded by letter that “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 referred to the women as “former employees of the Magdalen laundries”.

Dr Smith has since pointed out that “the Irish courts routinely referred women to various Magdalen laundries upon receiving suspended sentences for a variety of crimes”. He can support this with documentary evidence, he said.

He also took grave exception to the use by the Minister of the word “employees” in the context.

The Irish Times

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.

“The justification for this [latter] provision is that the State was still responsible for the welfare and protection of children transferred to a Magdalen laundry from a State-regulated institution provided they had not been officially discharged from the scheduled institution,” he said.

Expressing gratitude to Mr Kitt for his efforts in the case on behalf of the Justice for Magdalens group, Dr Smith challenged the Minister’s use of the word “employees” when referring to women in the laundries.

“They were never ‘employees . . . if they were they would have received payment surely,” he said.

He continued: “If the Minister insists that they were ‘employees’ then surely the State holds some responsibility to ensure that the laundries complied with the Factories Acts in terms of safe work practices, fair pay, regular work days, etc.”

He also insisted that the State was complicit in referring women to the laundries.

“The Irish courts routinely referred women to various Magdalen laundries upon receiving suspended sentences for a variety of crimes, and I have archival documents detailing communication between judges and mothers superior of a number of convents arranging such referrals,” he said.

“Likewise I can document that these women were escorted by the States probation officers upon entry to the laundries. There is no record of the probation officers checking to ensure such women were released upon the end of their suggested period of confinement,” he said.

Magdelen laundries: a brief history of the institutions

THE FIRST Magdalen laundry opened on Dublin’s Leeson Street in 1767. After the Famine, four female Catholic religious congregations came to dominate the running of the laundries.

These were the Sisters of Mercy (SM), Sisters of Charity (SC), Sisters of our Lady of Charity of Refuge (SCR), and the Good Shepherd Sisters (GSS).

The latter congregation operated a Magdalen laundry in Belfast until 1977.

Altogether there were 10 Catholic Magdalen laundries in the Republic following independence. These were at Waterford (GSS), New Ross (SC), two in Cork (GSS and SC), Limerick (GSS), Galway (SM), and four in Dublin at Dún Laoghaire (SM), Donnybrook (SC), Drumcondra (SCR) and Gloucester/Seán MacDermott Street (SCR).

The last one in Ireland ceased operation at Gloucester/Seán MacDermott Street 13 years ago, in October 1996.

There was one Protestant-run “Magdalen Asylum” at Leeson Street in Dublin, which ceased to function as such in 1918/19 (though continuing as a baby home) and one in Belfast which operated until the 1960s.

Although there is dispute as to whether the (privately) Protestant-run Bethany House in Dublin’s Rathgar was a “Magdalen Asylum”, there are records of women being referred there by the courts.

It is not known how many women passed through these laundries, but as many as 10,000 passed through them in the 19th century, some of whom may have re-entered the laundries on a number of occasions.

Figures for the 20th century are unknown.

The religious congregations have not released any records for women entering the laundries after 1900.

However, hundreds of Magdalen women were interred in mass-burial plots at Glasnevin (115), St Laurences in Limerick (265), Bohermore in Galway (118), with a further 72 “consecrated Magdalen’s” buried at Forster Street there.

Many more are believed buried at the convent sites of other former laundries.

The Irish Times

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.”

They have sent a proposed draft of a new redress Bill for Magdalen women to Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore and members of the party’s front bench, to coincide with the private members’ Bill which the Labour Party will propose in the Dáil from tomorrow. The draft Bill proposes a distinct redress scheme for survivors of the laundries, to which girls were frequently transferred from residential institutions. It proposes an apology by the State to these women, and that the State maintains Magdalen burial plots.

The laundries were run by the Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, Sisters of Charity, and the Good Shepherd Sisters.
The Irish Times 6th July 2009