Many victims are elderly and need a response now – even if a redress scheme takes longer
IT BEGAN with a phone call. “Are you the man who wrote the Magdalene book?” A voice, hesitant and frail, asked from the other end of my office phone. She called to share her story. She wanted someone to listen. She needed me to understand.
Her mother died when she was seven. Initially, she and a younger sister were cared for within the extended family. The farm required her father’s attention. At 14, he deposited her with the Good Shepherd nuns in New Ross. Her sister was sent to the congregation’s Limerick convent.
The Good Shepherd Sisters managed industrial schools at both these locations. They also operated a reformatory school for girls in Limerick. But the two teenage sisters were put to work with the adult women in the Magdalene laundry. They remained enslaved, unpaid for their labour, for almost five years.
Until recently, she lived near Boston. Last year, a volunteer from advocacy group Justice for Magdalenes helped her to apply for a statutory old-age pension. After delays and misplaced paperwork, she was told the years working in the laundries do not count towards her pension, which amounts to €12.40 a week. After the banking and currency conversion fees kick in (an Irish bank), she is left with $7.50 a week. $7.50 for years of forced and compulsory labour. $7.50 for a lost childhood. $7.50 for a life lived with misplaced shame.
Like other women in the Magdalene institutions, she worked cleaning dirty laundry as part of a for-profit commercial enterprise. They were locked in at night, prison-like with bars on windows. They were denied their given names.
Society refers to them pejoratively as “fallen women”. But, they ended up at the laundries for many reasons (signed in by families, brought there by the local Garda, transferred from an industrial school or a mother-and-baby home, referred via the courts, banished for being the victims of sexual violence, etc). They had to be signed out by a family member or have a place of employment to go to. Many remained to live, work, and ultimately die behind convent walls – Justice for Magdalenes counts over 600 human remains at cemeteries attached to just four of the 10 laundries.
The group’s campaign is seeking restorative justice – an apology, reparations, and access to records – from the State. This past week, the UN Committee Against Torture, in response to our submission, recommended that the Government institute a “prompt, independent, and thorough investigation”, and “prosecute and punish perpetrators”, and “ensure that all victims obtain redress”.
The State has one year to demonstrate the measures taken to give effect to this unequivocal recommendation.
In one year’s time the woman who contacted me will be 77. She needs help today. She wants an apology now. She is entitled to compensation before she dies – money that in her case is earmarked to secure a “decent, respectable funeral”. And, she is in no way exceptional. Justice for Magdalenes speaks to many women asking for the same things. Their needs form the basis for the restorative justice and reparations scheme that we submitted to the Minister for Justice at the end of March.
No one in the group questions that many members of the current Government are sympathetic to the women’s plight. Alan Shatter’s record is well known and respected, as is that of Kathleen Lynch, Ruairí Quinn and Joan Burton, among others. We appreciate that the new Government might still need time to respond appropriately to both the Irish Human Rights Commission and UN Committee Against Torture recommendations.
The group recognises that no one benefits from a rushed and/or flawed reparations’ scheme – lessons must be learned from the Residential Institutions Redress Board. Better to take an extra three months and get it right. And yet, there is little time to waste.
Consequently, it is calling on the Government to issue an apology now to the women who suffered this horrendous abuse. It is possible to offer a meaningful apology first, and then put in place the Government’s response to the standing recommendations. After all, in 1999 the apology came first, before the legislation, before the Redress Board, and before the Ryan Commission. It was the right thing to do then. It is the right thing to do now.
On behalf of Justice for Magdalenes and on behalf of a 76-year-old woman who retains her Irish citizenship, I am asking our Government to apologise to all the women who spent time in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries.
Doing so signals that our leaders care about fairness, not political expediency. It tells the world that ours is a moral society, no longer the moralistic society of old. It gives dignity to the most vulnerable among us, and in doing so dignifies us all.
James 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 Justice for Magdalenes’ advisory committee