THERE WAS no statutory basis for the incarceration of women in the Magdalene laundries, a seminar at UCD was told yesterday.
After 1960 some were women remanded by the courts to the Seán McDermott Street laundry in Dublin but detention “of the vast majority of the women amounted to unlawful incarceration”. This was so not least “as the majority of them were not placed in the laundries by the State”, said law lecturer Maeve O’Rourke.
She was speaking at the seminar in the university’s Humanities Institute of Ireland which was hosted by the Justice for Magdalene’s (JFM) group. Harvard University law school global human rights fellow Ms O’Rourke presented the JFM case before the recent UN Committee Against Torture meeting in Geneva.
She said the women’s detention amounted to “forced labour” under terms of a 1930 Forced Labour Convention, signed by Ireland in 1931. “This is not a question of applying today’s standards to the past; it was illegal at the time.” Nor was it an historical issue. Ireland’s failure to address the women’s circumstances today “amounted to continuing torture... degrading treatment.”