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.