A Ceann Comhairle,
I want to join with the Taoiseach, and with my fellow Ministers, in offering, on behalf of the State and the Irish people, a heartfelt apology to the survivors of the Magdalene Laundries.
I want to say to those women, some of whom are with us today, that
We have heard you
We believe you
And we are profoundly sorry for what was done to you.
That what happened to you, as children or as adults, should not have happened.
It was Ireland that was wrong, not you.
As a Government, we are determined to work with you in the weeks ahead, to give a concrete expression to our apology. To provide a tangible expression of our regret, and acknowledgement of the wrong that was done.
We want to work with you, and we ask you to work with us.
Today is not the end for the Magdalene survivors. No apology, no matter now sincere, can erase what happened. We cannot turn back the clock and undo what was done to so many. What we can do, is acknowledge the wrong, apologise, and work to translate that apology into a better future for those who remain.
There are moments in the history of our nation when we come face to face with our past.
When a door, long kept shut, by fear, or neglect, or design, is forced open, and a light shines on the country we think we have left behind. Today is such a moment.
The Magdalene Laundries are the product of a different Ireland. An Ireland so different, that many today find it hard to understand what this country once was, as a State and as a Society.
What the McAleese Report shows, is how the history of the Magdalene Laundries, lumbered in step with the history of independent Ireland. What was remarkable, was not how much changed when Ireland became independent, but how little. How the newly independent State lauded the notion of Republicanism, but was, in reality, a profoundly conservative, theocratic and unaccountable place. Where State bowed to Church, and where the rights of citizens could be trampled if they didn’t fit with the official line. A society where appearance was everything, and nothing, and no-one, could be allowed to challenge the conservative consensus.
A society, where incarceration in an institution was so normal, as to be banal: recorded in the Green Books of factory inspectors; unremarked by doctors on their rounds. An informal safety-valve in a State which despite, by 1961, having the highest levels of institutionalisation in the world, still struggled to contain the symptoms of its failure.
An Ireland where a citizen could be committed to an institution for being poor; for being an orphan; for being a bit different; for being pregnant; for being a woman. And an Ireland, where the State; the dominant Church; and society, colluded in making it so.
What is clear from Senator McAleese’s report is just how fluid that culture of collusion was.
That a probation officer could as easily be a volunteer from an organisation concerned with public morality, as an agent of the Justice system.
That the person who committed a woman to a laundry could as easily be a parent as a priest.
That teenagers could graduate from a reform school, to a Magdalene asylum, spending their entire childhood and early adulthood in the grey area between the civil and the Church authorities.
Nowhere in any of this, did the word or concept of citizenship appear. Of personal rights and personal freedoms.
And all the while, the high, windowless walls of the laundries existed alongside busy main streets, part of the local economy.
What happened to the thousands of women who walked through those doors, down the decades, happened in plain sight. But there is nothing so blind as the blindness imposed by a dominant ideology, and a subservient State. A blindness that can subvert what our human intuition knows to be right and wrong.
A blindness that saw tens of thousands of small children locked up in industrial schools.
A blindness, that punished the abused, not the perpetrator.
A blindness that would banish a young woman from her community, for the so-called crime of getting pregnant.
A blindness that did not question a long absence by a sister, or niece, or aunt.
A blindness that did not trouble itself about an industry built on unpaid, involuntary labour.
The most reliable litmus test of freedom, and of the separation of Church and State, is how that State treats its female citizens. By this standard, Ireland was, until recent decades, a virtual theocracy. A country where women were cast out for having sex outside of marriage; where they were denied contraception; denied work if they were married; and, as we have seen, committed to an institution, sometimes for little more than being an inconvenience.
This was an Ireland where justice and morality were conflated, so that there was much in the way of morality, but little in the way of justice.
And justice was not done for these women. Their moment has been a long time coming. And it began with rolling back the dominance of one Church, and one morality, in Irish society.
The battle to liberalise Irish laws, and to separate out – in practice – Church and State was, at its heart, about freedom.
It was about the individual. About personal dignity.
And it was about the kind of society we wanted for ourselves, and for our children. Not a society that forced women into giving up their babies. Not a society where poverty split families apart, or required unhappy ones to stay together. Not a society that survived on secrecy.
We look back on the Ireland Senator McAleese describes, and it is like foreign country. But the Ireland of today was forged in the face of profound opposition, at every step.
I am proud of the role my party – its members, its elected representatives – played in that transformation. It was not an easy task. Nor was it always a popular one. But the Ireland of the Magdalene laundries is a historical curiosity for a new generation of our citizens, because of that campaigning vision.
And I am proud too, of the refusal of my party to forget the victims of that repressive Ireland. Of the members of my party who would not go quietly, as long as this historic wrong was ignored.
I would like to pay particular tribute to my colleague and Minister of State, Kathleen Lynch, for her longstanding solidarity with, and commitment to justice for the women of the Magdalene laundries. It is no coincidence that the Government which established an investigation into State involvement in the Magdalene laundries; and the Government which will offer some recompense to the women of the Magdalene laundries, is one of which Kathleen is a member.
That path to justice has been a long and hard one. In the words of Sally Mulready of the Irish Women Survivors Network, the women of the Magdalene laundries endured "years and years of misery and rejection", and "as a consequence remained out in the wilderness for years trying to find a path to justice."
As a State, and as a people, we can never make sufficient restoration to the women of the Magdalene laundries for what they have experienced. We can never give them back their past; their youth; their opportunities; for some, the children they gave up.
But we can tell them that we believe them. We acknowledge that what happened to them was wrong. That the stigma they have been branded with was false. And that we are sorry.
The picture that emerged from Senator McAleese’s report was complex. It reflects an Ireland where the lines between personal morality, and civil authority, were blurred, sometimes beyond distinction.
To draw a straight line, and to distinguish between those women who were committed to the Magdalene laundries by the State, and those who entered by other routes, is to ignore how the very fabric of Irish public, civic and private life, supported those institutions. What is more, it is to ignore the role of the four religious orders which managed the laundries, and who controlled the entry, and the exit, of women from these institutions.
As a people, we cannot undo the past. But we can, and will, make a contribution to a more comfortable, secure future for the women of the Magdalene laundries.
There is a role, too, for the religious orders which ran the laundries, to make a fair contribution, along with the taxpayer. These laundries were private businesses, run by those orders, which benefited from the unpaid labour of the women committed to them.
The past does not belong to the State alone.
As a people, we have become better at looking back. At acknowledging the wrongs that were done, particularly to those who most deserved our care and protection.
But it is one thing to learn the bitter lessons of history. It is another to apply those lessons to Irish society today.
And what are those lessons?
That how it upholds human rights – and not any one version of morality – is a core barometer by which we should judge our State, its services, and our society.
That the principles of human rights; of personal freedom; and personal dignity; should not only underpin the State’s relationship with its citizens , but also the relationship between citizens, and powerful institutions, such as banks, and the media, and large corporations.
Indeed, all our relationships with each other.
They are the lessons which can only benefit us all. The lessons of a fairer, more compassionate Ireland.
But today is about the women of the Magdalene laundries. It is about standing by those women, whose futures were stolen from them. It is about doing the right thing by them.
It is about remembering how they suffered. It is about eradicating, once and for all, the stigma that blighted their reputations. It is about recognising their needs.
Most of all, it is about recommitting ourselves to the values that will ensure that what happened to them can never, ever happen again.
That never again, as a people, as a society, will we walk past a high wall, and fail to ask what lies behind it.