Magdalene girls have already been betrayed – now the State seeks to deny them justice
SINNED against rather than sinners – that’s the State’s formal position regarding women forced into Magdalene Laundries and obliged to work there. Elaborate public breastbeating has taken place: never again would we stigmatise, and financial compensation would be offered as proof of good faith.
What, then, are we to make of an arm of the State’s refusal to allow access to restitution in the case of girls who were exploited as cheap labour in the laundries? Forced to work without pay alongside the so-called Magdalenes?
It was “manifestly unfair” of the Department of Justice and Equality to treat them differently, Ombudsman Peter Tyndall told us this week. He finds that a number of women, put to work as girls in the laundries while registered to connected children’s educational institutions, were unjustly excluded from claiming restitution.
Instead of accepting his criticism, the Justice Department is disagreeing. In a bullish fashion, too. No doubt, it is wary of unintended consequences – floodgates opening. But justice delayed is justice denied. It is a betrayal twice over. Seeking to limit liability in the case of these misused girls is weasel behaviour.
If someone has been injured by the State, it is an additional wrong to obstruct access to a restorative justice scheme set up to try to make some amends. The decision to deny them was taken by an organ of our State in our name.
We are not talking about a level of expenditure that would beggar the Exchequer. The proposed new National Children’s Hospital in Dublin has a price tag of more than €1bn. Luas cross-city is estimated to cost €368m. As for the new Central Bank headquarters, it comes in at around €140m. Under the circumstances, the sums of money to compensate Magdalene Laundry workers are modest.
To date, restorative justice has led to payments of almost €26m to 684 Magdalene survivors. The figure is well shy of original Government estimates whereby between €34.5m and €58m would be due to roughly 1,000 women. Many of the Magdalene women are dead, of course – and the survivors tend to be elderly. The women denied compensation in this case are younger – placed in institutions as recently as the 1970s.
The Ombudsman’s report is called Opportunity Lost, a pointed title. It resulted from an investigation after 27 women complained they were unfairly denied redress. As girls, these women often worked in the laundries after school and on Saturdays, alongside women deemed eligible for payment under the 2013 Magdalene Restorative Justice Scheme.
The girls were registered with industrial schools or training centres, but lived in the same buildings or convents as older women listed as resident in the laundries. In refusing their applications, the Justice Department said they had not lived in one of the 12 institutions covered by the scheme.
“These women have waited long enough for justice,” Mr Tyndall said, adding that it was “impossible to understand” why younger women were refused access to the same redress as older Magdalene workers.
The department would have been well aware of links between the units where the women lived, according to his report. Instead, it ignored practical realities where they all lived on the same site, under the control of the same order of nuns. He found nine women were wrongly refused payments altogether.
These girls – children, in fact – had no choice about working in the laundries. Presumably, they were earning their keep. But the State infringed on their human rights by using them as cheap labour.
They may have been in trouble with the law for relatively minor offences, they may have had no parental supervision or slack oversight. When they were sent to institutions, they found themselves sorting through soiled sheets after school instead of playing. Instead of being allowed to have a childhood.
The restorative justice scheme was intended to promote healing. Senior staff in the Justice Department seem to struggle with the concept. Saving money apparently matters more than justice, let alone reconciliation.
The “real problem” was the department’s narrow interpretation of the rules and its “refusal” to move away from that, says Mr Tyndall. Despite discussions between the department and his office, “it has not been possible to resolve the complaints”, a distinctly unsatisfactory state of affairs.
FOLLOWING Martin McAleese’s 2013 report on the State’s role in the laundries, then-Taoiseach Enda Kenny made a fulsome apology to the Magdalene women and their families. He spoke on behalf of the Irish people. Let’s pause here to remember his stirring words. “As a society, for many years we failed you,” he said. “This is a national shame.”
Mr Kenny referenced the need for
social justice in his speech. Where is the social justice in denying compensation, on a technicality, to girls obliged to work alongside the Magdalenes?
He told the Dáil – he assured the Irish people – that political leaders were trying to ensure we “quarantine such abject behaviour in our past and eradicate it from Ireland’s present and Ireland’s future”.
How decision-makers in the department must have laughed heartily at that undertaking. Our homegrown Sir Humphreys must have rolled their eyes and thought ‘not on our watch’. But those civil servants do not act on our behalf, and are out of step with citizens’ wishes.
Amnesty International Ireland’s Colm O’Gorman expresses a more representative view when he says their exclusion has “reinforced feelings of marginalisation and hurt”.
“The government’s failure to recognise these women exploited as children is a re-victimisation by the state,” he adds.
Meanwhile, the UN is on the Government’s case. It wants the Government to ensure that any woman put in a Catholic workhouse has the right to sue, even if granted redress already. It accuses the Government of multiple failures: ignoring its call to investigate allegations of ill-treatment, prosecute abusers or ensure compensation for victims.
Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan, at least, has the grace to say he will give “full and careful consideration” to the Ombudsman’s report. Elsewhere, his department is having a spectacularly bad week, not only in relation to the laundries but to Garda whistleblowers.
From the outset, its handling of information about Sergeant Maurice McCabe has led to multiple resignations and a second major inquiry. And still the damage rolls on. Clearly, we are looking at a Government department that stands in urgent need of reform.