Madam, – I would challenge Batt O’Keeffe’s use of the word “employee” in relation to women who were incarcerated in Magdalen laundries (Home News, September 18th).
During the course of my years of volunteering with the Justice for Magdalenes group I have had the honour of speaking to many Magdalen survivors about their time in the laundries and none of them would describe themselves as “employees”. I have yet to meet a Magdalen survivor who said she was paid for her hard work or who said she entered a laundry on a voluntary basis.
The State’s abdication of responsibility in relation to the Magdalen laundries is nothing less than shameful. Mr O’Keeffe claims that the State was not complicit in referring women to Magdalene laundries. Yet he acknowledges himself in his letter to Tom Kitt that children were transferred from State-run institutions to Magdalen laundries.
I would urge Mr O’Keeffe and other elected representatives to examine their consciences and ask themselves if they found out in present day Ireland that women were being incarcerated against their will by the church and forced to work for no pay, would they still allow it to happen? No decent human being would stand idly by and do nothing, so why should the women incarcerated in the past be treated any differently?
In 2003 thousands of postcards were sent to the Fianna Fáil government asking for an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the exhumation and cremation of the bodies of 155 women from High Park laundry in Drumcondra, Dublin, in suspicious circumstances. Six years later it is as if the incident never occurred.
It took the Ryan report, which required 10 years and cost more than €100 million to produce, before institutional abuse survivors were believed.
Let us learn from that and give Magdalen survivors the recognition they deserve. – Yours, etc,