Justice for the Magdalenes may not be far off

[C. Flower]

There are two Sinn Fein events on Sunday March 4th that commemorate those "Magdalene women" who are no longer with us.

Mari Tatlow Steed
A reminder for anyone in the Dublin or Galway areas on Sunday: there will be two memorial services in honor of the Magdalenes and International Women's Day. Sinn Fein is sponsoring 'Flowers for Magdalens', a ceremony to be held at Glasnevin Cemetery at the High Park, Gloucester/Sean MacDermott and Mecklenburgh Street Magdalene graves. Susan Lohan will be representing JFM at this event and making a presentation. Meet at the main entrance to Glasnevin at 2 p.m. Also, in Galway: our own Professor James Smith, along with Rachel Doyle (National-Womens Council-of Ireland), playwright/poet Patricia Burke Brogan and others, will hold a ceremony at the Bohermore Cemetery, also starting at 2 p.m. at the main cemetery entrance. These two solemn ceremonies will recognise all women who suffered in Magdalene Laundries, but most especially those who passed, largely unremembered by the public/history. If you have a few moments on Sunday and are in either area, take some time and help us keep their memory alive.

I'm pleased that someone has organised this and hope it is well supported.

[C. Flower]

A group of women who had worked in the laundries, with children and supporters, went to the Dail last week to make representations to their elected representatives. These women should not have to be asking.

Compensation should be paid quickly because of the age and needs of the people concerned, and an apology, which should be given immediately.

What can be done to help move things along?

[Andrew49]

A group of women who had worked in the laundries, with children and supporters, went to the Dail last week to make representations to their elected representatives. These women should not have to be asking.

Compensation should be paid quickly because of the age and needs of the people concerned, and an apology, which should be given immediately.

What can be done to help move things along?

I don't think the State wants to move things along. The UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) called for an independent investigation - instead of that an inter-departmental committee is 'looking into things'!

It's delay and obfuscation that the State wants.

[disability student]

I don't think the State wants to move things along. The UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) called for an independent investigation - instead of that an inter-departmental committee is 'looking into things'!

It's delay and obfuscation that the State wants.

It's very clear from the start re state's intentions as you keep a fighting battle. It's laughable that Martin Mc Aleese was asked to investigate and report back. What was his expertise? Accountancy & Dentistry... Also his wife's family didn't report to the authorities at that time re their child. I would have preferred an outsider with no connections.

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

Martin McAleese, who is a qualified dentist, a Senator and leading the internal inquiry which as other posters have pointed out is hardly that requested by the UNCAT Committee of the UN.

Not to mention of course that McAleese is married to a member of the Irish establishment and a papal dame.

You can see which way that forensic look at the Magdalene issue will go. Minimal establishment foot-dragging by the Irish state again. Have these women not had enough trouble in life already without having to wade through the usual Irish state shyte-pool towards justice?

[C. Flower]

Report by the end of the year. Still taking information, if anyone has any.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/magdalene-r...123556434.html

[Andrew49]

Justice for Magdalenes (JFM), the survivor advocacy group, is shocked and disappointed by today’s announcement that the final report of the “Inter-Departmental Committee investigating State Involvement with the Magdalene Laundries” may now not appear until the end of the year and is calling on the government to act immediately.

JFM is gravely concerned for the welfare of survivors, who are mostly aging and elderly women, many of them vulnerable. They have already waited too long for an apology, for redress, and for restorative justice. Further delay is unacceptable. JFM is calling on the Irish State to issue an immediate apology and implement a reparation scheme for women incarcerated in Ireland's Magdalene Laundries.

Today’s announcement further delays survivors’ access to justice. Over the past year, Minister Alan Shatter has repeatedly refused to discuss an apology, redress or restorative justice until after the publication of the Inter-Departmental Committee’s final report. JFM has asked Mr. Shatter to establish a threshold for State involvement short of the final report so that provisions can be put in place immediately that address survivor’s entitlements, e.g., statutory pensions that reflect years of unpaid work in the Laundries. JFM’s recent submission surely satisfies any such threshold. And, the women need this help now. Survivors’ entitlements can no longer be held hostage to the vagaries of the political system’s inability to deliver on its promises. Australia and the UK have both recently moved forward with official apologies to victims of forced, illegal adoptions and the migrant
child scheme. Will Ireland ever do the same? Will the all too familiar policy of ‘deny til they die’, become ‘delay til they die’? Three years into this campaign, 22 months after the IHRC recommendation, 15 months after the United Nation’s Committee Against Torture recommendation, by refusing to apologise and provide redress, Ireland’s government is failing some of the most vulnerable in our society. For this we should all feel shame

Full Statement

It's delay, delay, obfuscation and heartlessness from the State. But heartlessness was the very thing that kept these obscene institutions running for over a century.

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

I think this needs to be raised again with members of the UNCAT Committee in New York. I suspect and hope that the JFM will do precisely that. It is the old 'delay till they die' policy procedure from the Irish Government again.

[Andrew49]

Dirty laundry:

The 145 pages of Justice for Magdalene’s submission to the inter-departmental committee investigating State involvement in the Magdalene Laundries makes you ashamed to be Irish. Reading it, you can’t help but feel repulsed, sickened and deeply ashamed — disgusted that any human being, let alone religious organisation, could treat another human being in such a way and that the Irish State could stand idly by and let it happen. JFM describes from testimony how the women suffered abuse of various kinds — their hair was forcibly cut, they were beaten with belts until they bled and once the door to the outside world was shut on them, they were referred to by number not by name. Over the course of the submission, JFM hold religious orders and the State directly and indirectly responsible for systematically humiliating, imprisoning and enslaving thousands of young Irish girls.

The submission made to Senator Martin McAleese’s committee is 145 pages long but includes a 30-page index explaining the 3,707 pages of archival evidence, legislation, and other materials including 795 pages of survivor testimony. According to the submission, the State sent women and girls to the laundries and ensured

"they remained there — in most cases, without any statutory basis for doing so".

JFM argue that the State used the laundries as a way of dealing with births outside marriage, poverty, homelessness, promiscuity, domestic and sexual abuse as well as youth crime and infanticide. It chose to enslave women with the nuns rather than develop a female borstal.

"It repeatedly sought to funnel diverse populations of women and girls to the Magdalene Laundries and in return, the religious orders obtained an entirely unpaid and literally captive workforce for their commercial laundry enterprises," they wrote.

Survivors and witnesses told JFM how the women washed, ironed and sewed from dawn to dusk, were regularly beaten, not allowed to talk to one another and punished if they laughed. There was no regard whatsoever for their health or medical needs. If they stepped out of line, they were

"put down the hole". "This was a four by four room… There was nothing in it, only a bench — no windows. You were put in there; your hair was cut, more or less off completely. Your hair was cut, and you were there all day without anything to eat," one woman recalled.

Even for the "good" girls and women upstairs, food was scarce. Mary C recalled

"they were out rooting in the bins — they were rooting in the bins... They were hungry."

The women and girls in the laundries were also denied contact with girls in other convent complexes. In Limerick, the nuns kept women separate from children in the industrial school, often their own children. One witness described how a

"lady in particular didn’t know that after she gave birth, her daughter was brought up in the same complex and remained there until she was 16 years old". "My worst memory goes back to that lady and her daughter... the daughter at one end of the church and the mother at the other end of the church and neither of the two of them knowing each was there. There is something wrong with a society that permitted that sort of thing to go on. There is something wrong."

Meanwhile, Ciaran C, the laundry manager in Limerick, said the laundry was designed so the women could not see out or be seen inside. He recounted to JFM how the nuns split two sisters, sending one to New Ross and the other to Limerick

"and that they did not tell M that her sister had died for a year — and then only to punish her"

. When being castigated for some misdemeanour they told her:

"Oh by the way, your sister died last year’, just like that. So M had a nervous breakdown, and her nerves were never 100% afterwards."

Another woman, Sara W, said that during her time in Donnybrook the nuns did not tell her her mother had died, so

"I was writing to my mother, that was dead... I wrote to my mother every week but got no reply".

In return for taking these women, the nuns got direct capitation grants from the State and also valuable state contracts for cleaning laundry and commercial laundry work from various Government departments and agencies. Such was their faith in the religious orders, the State chose not to supervise the religious orders’ operation of the Magdalene Laundries.

THE State also failed to enforce its own health and safety legislation in the laundries and turned a blind eye to the fact these school-age girls weren’t receiving an education, weren’t being paid for working 12-hour days and had been cut off from family, friends and the outside world. JFM also demonstrate how the State never ensured that social welfare contributions were being paid for this secret workforce and never questioned why women who were sent in on probation never again exited. In the words of the report’s authors:

"If [as the survivors unanimously say] they were not free to leave, the committee needs then to determine on what basis the State allowed [and indeed helped] one group of Irish citizens [the nuns] to imprison another group [the women and girls] without lawful authority." *

The final report of the inter-departmental committee investigating State involvement with the Magdalene Laundries is due to be published at the end of the year. JFM were instrumental in bringing about the investigation, which is chaired by Senator Martin McAleese.

Analysis by Claire O’Sullivan, Tuesday, September 18, 2012

[Andrew49]

Justice for Magdalenes endorses the 22 September Sinn Féin Private Members Motion on the Magdalene Laundries as reasonable and driven by survivors’ pressing needs. JFM will issue a full press release on Tuesday, 25 September, and we will be available for comment at that time.

LINK

[Dr. FIVE]

Orders made millions selling on land containing mass graves says O'Caolain.
Labour TDs having their opposition speeches read back to them by SF

Full motion and gov amendments > http://www.oireachtas.ie/documents/o...e/sp250912.pdf

[Dr. FIVE]

feck all present btw, one from gov benches

[Dr. FIVE]

two now. Lynch reading a speech

[ang]

Update - RTE News

Sinn Féin motion calling on Govt to provide redress for survivors of the Magdelene laundries has been defeated by 75 votes to 43

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

Why would 75 members of the Oireachtas feel so moved as to vote against this motion? Do they see it as a money saver? Or were they simply voting against Sinn Fein?