We Need Justice for Magdalene Survivors Now

By James M. Smith

Two years ago this month Justice for Magdalenes (JFM), the survivor advocacy group, began a campaign to bring restorative justice — an apology, reparations and access to records — to survivors of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. This past Monday the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT), which examined Ireland for the first time on May 23 and 24 last, published an unequivocal recommendation:

The Committee recommends that the state party should institute prompt, independent and thorough investigations into all allegations of torture, and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment that were allegedly committed in the Magdalene Laundries, and, in appropriate cases, prosecute and punish the perpetrators with penalties commensurate with the gravity of the offences committed, and ensure that all victims obtain redress and have an enforceable right to compensation including the means for as full rehabilitation as possible.

The minister for justice announced on Tuesday in response to the UNCAT report that he has circulated a memorandum addressing this issue for consideration by his cabinet colleagues at the next appropriate government meeting, either on June 14 or the following week. We trust that Mr Shatter will deliver on his own oft-stated belief that these abuses ought to be investigated and thereby help to bring closure for all the women involved.

This campaign began as a response to the political debates after the Ryan Report’s publication (May 2009) — a Dáil motion to cherish all children equally passed unanimously; this was followed by assurances of legislative reform. There was also a guarantee of criminal convictions.  But, from JFM’s perspective, the report’s avoidance of the Magdalene Laundries exposed a compartmentalised response to institutional abuse.

The word “Magdalene” does not occur in the 2,600-page Ryan Report. Ireland’s Magdalene women were ignored, edited out in the present just as they were abandoned and disappeared in the past.

One chapter, entitled Residential Laundries, Novitiates, Hostels and other Out-of-Home Settings, includes testimony from women whose childhoods were spent in residential institutions but who were transferred to the laundries. These women were the only Magdalene survivors eligible to apply to the Residential Institutions Redress Board (RIRB), where their abuse was dealt with as if it occurred while the girls were in residential institution. The RIRB never acknowledged that children worked in Magdalene Laundries.

These young girls were children, some only 12 years old, and yet they toiled in commercial, for-profit laundries, in dangerous working conditions, and they were never paid. They describe prison-like conditions including locked doors and barred windows. Their identities were taken from them. If these conditions, documented by the state’s own commission of inquiry, constitute abuse for this one population of children, surely they constitute abuse for the other girls, indeed for all the women, in the laundries?

JFM’s campaign began when we circulated a draft Apology and Distinct Redress Scheme to all TDs and senators on July 3, 2009. More recently, and after a process of consultation with individual and groups of survivors in Ireland, the UK and the US, we submitted to the minister for justice a revised proposal on March 28, 2011, entitled Restorative Justice and Reparations Scheme.

In the meantime, JFM met with three government departments and corresponded with many others. We twice presented before an Oireachtas Ad Hoc Committee, arranged for over 30 parliamentary questions to be tabled in Dáil Éireann, made formal submissions to the Irish Human Rights Commission, the UN Universal Periodic Review, the UN Committee Against Torture and lobbied for support from organisations including the National Women’s Council of Ireland, Amnesty International-Ireland and Labour Women, among others.

We wrote to seek meetings with the religious congregations and the Irish hierarchy. We did meet with Cardinal Sean Brady, on June 26 2010, who characterized JFM’s presentation as “fair and balanced,” and who encouraged us to approach the Congregation of Religious of Ireland (CORI) in the hope of entering into dialog with the four orders of nuns — the Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity, Good Shepherd Sisters and Sisters of Our Lady of Charity — who operated the laundries. CORI refused our request for a meeting on 1 October 2010.

No one in Ireland has apologized to these women. There is no official acknowledgment of their abuse. As such, many survivors, now elderly and aging, live with the stigma and shame long associated with the Magdalene Laundries.  Even today, these institutions are inaccurately referred to as homes for “fallen women,” a label that causes hurt and pain to many women.

The young girls transferred from industrial and reformatory schools were raised in the nuns’ care. They were not “fallen.” Many girls were deemed “too pretty” or “in danger”; the nuns referred to them as the “preventative” cases. They were not “fallen.”  The victims of male sexual violence, punished again by family members and hidden away in the laundries, were not “fallen.” The women referred to the laundries by the courts may have been guilty of a crime. Does that make them “fallen”?

The fact that no one has apologized for the Magdalene Laundries abuse enables this hurtful stereotype to continue unchecked.  Until church and state stand up and apologise, stand up and tell these women that “we were wrong” and that “you were wronged,” most survivors will choose to maintain what they perceive as the shameful secret of their past.

JFM’s campaign also focused on documenting state complicity in the operation of the Magdalene Laundries. Invariably, our efforts met with state denials of responsibility. Then-minister for education Mr Batt O’Keeffe claimed that “the state did not refer individuals to Magdalen Laundries, nor was it complicit in referring individuals to them.” Former taoiseach Brian Cowen asserted that the laundries “were not analogous” to state residential institutions. Former minister for justice Dermot Ahern insisted they were “privately run institutions” in which the state had no function.

JFM’s campaign disproves these assertions. We can demonstrate numerous incidences of state complicity in referring women to the laundries: the courts referred women long before there was a statutory basis for doing so. The Department of Justice knew, as early as 1934, that there was no statutory basis and yet stood by as the courts continued this “informal practice” into the 1960s.

The Department of Education knew in 1970 that there were at least 75 girls in the laundries between 13 and 19 years of age. Department officials never intervened. Neither can the department demonstrate what became of these children.

It was Department of Health policy after 1932 to refer unmarried mothers of more than one child to the laundries. Later, after 1960, the same department paid capitation grants to religious convents, including Magdalene Laundries, to confine “problem girls.”  What became of these women? And what happened to their children?

After 1941, the Department of Defence contracted Army laundry to the Magdalene institutions, and it did so in the knowledge that there was no “fair wage clause” in such contacts, as there was in contracts with commercial laundries. The department met the religious congregations to discuss the insertion of a fair-wage clause as late as 1982.

Survivor testimony recounts that members of the Garda Síochána delivered women to the laundries and returned women there who escaped. There was no statutory basis for doing so.

Confronted with government denials of complicity, JFM submitted an inquiry application to the Irish Human Rights Commission (IHRC) in June 2010.  The submission, augmented with over 100 pages of archival documentation, focused on the state’s obligation to protect the women’s constitutional and human rights despite the fact that the abuse took place in “private institutions.”

The IHRC assessment, published in November last year, affirmed JFM’s arguments, concluding that the State failed to protect women and young girls in the laundries from “arbitrary detention,” “forced and compulsory labour” and “servitude.” It recommends “that a statutory mechanism be established to investigate the matters advanced by JFM and in appropriate cases to grant redress where warranted.”

Then-taoiseach Brian Cowen referred the assessment for review to the Office of the Attorney General last November. We are still waiting for the government’s official response.

Faced with additional delays, JFM made formal submissions to the UN Universal Periodic Review and the UNCAT in the hope that external pressure might leverage the state into action. Four women participated in these submissions by providing JFM and the UN with their testimonies. Maeve O’Rourke, who wrote both submissions, represented JFM at the UNCAT examination of Ireland in Geneva.

UNCAT Committee members questioned the Irish delegation regarding its stated position on the Magdalene Laundries. They reiterated serious reservations following the delegation’s response. The committee insists that the state has an obligation to conduct an independent investigation into abuses in the laundries as stipulated by Articles 12 and 13 of the Convention, and to help survivors obtain redress in accordance with Article 14.

Moreover, Felice Gaer, UNCAT’s acting chairperson, rejected the state’s assertion that the laundries’ abuse is from a different era. She rebutted the state’s logic that the “vast majority” of women entered the laundries “voluntarily.” And she underscored the fact that the state’s own definition of torture includes the crime of omission with respect to ensuring due diligence to prevent torture, and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

JFM welcomes UNCAT’s “concluding observations” following the examination. In particular, we appreciate the recommendation that the state establish an independent investigation into the Magdalene Laundries abuse and provide redress for the women who suffered.

In conclusion, JFM calls on the Irish state to act immediately on foot of UNCAT’s recommendations and issue an official apology to all survivors of the Magdalene Laundries and establish a statutory inquiry into these abuses. The apology must come first, because only by first apologising can we as a society ever hope to seek the women’s forgiveness. And only with their forgiveness can we ever hope to approach understanding and reconciliation with and for the past.

James M. Smith is an associate professor in the English Department and Irish Studies Program at Boston College. He is the author of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (2008) and serves on JFM’s Advisory Committee.