Human Rights in Ireland

We are delighted to welcome this guest post by Maeve O’Rourke. Maeve is the 2010-2011 Harvard Law School Global Human Rights Fellow and serves on the advisory committee of Justice for Magdalenes (JFM). You can read about Maeve and see links to her previous posts for HRinI on our guests page.

Magdalen Survivor Mary Smith is one of a number of guests who reflect on the themes of pain and forgiveness in Were You There?, a once-off programme presented by Joe Duffy and broadcast on Easter Monday on RTE Radio 1. Ms Smith’s testimony makes for heartbreaking listening and is essential for anyone seeking to understand the suffering that people incarcerated in religious and state-run institutions as children endured, and continue to endure.

In November 2009 Mary Smith, along with four other women who had been in Magdalen laundries, met senior officials at the Department of Justice. They told the officials that as the State funded some of the laundries after 1979, it had responsibility for women held in them. They also said they had written to religious congregations whom they hoped “would come on board” with compensation. (see the Irish Times report).

As guest blogger Maeve O’Rourke detailed so well in her blogs last year (here here and with Prof James Smith here), the State continues to deny responsibility for these women and has refused to apologise to the survivors. The State’s position is that the laundries were owned and operated and did not come within the State’s responsibility.

However, in recent months there has been an increased scrutiny of this absolutist stance.

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We are pleased to welcome this guest post responding to recent developments (post) from two HRinI alumni-James Smith and Maeve O’Rourke-on behalf of Justice for Magdalenes

Justice for Magdalenes (JFM), the survivor advocacy group, warmly welcomes the Irish Human Rights Commission’s assessment of the possible human rights violations arising from the treatment of women and young girls in Magdalene Laundries. The Commission’s recommendation that the government initiate a statutory inquiry into this issue represents an important milestone in JFM’s ongoing campaign for justice. The Magdalene Laundries were omitted from the Residential Institutions Redress Act (2002), and the subsequent redress scheme.  JFM initiated its campaign to bring about an apology and a distinct redress scheme in the wake of the Ryan Report’s publication. The government has steadfastly denied culpability for these abusive institutions: Batt O’Keeffe contends that the “state did not refer individuals to the Magdalen Laundries” (September 2009), Mr. Cowen asserts that the “position of women in [Magdalene] laundries was not analogous with that of children in residential institutions” (April 2010), and Dermot Ahern claims, repeatedly, that “the majority of females who entered or were placed in Magdalen Laundries … did so without any direct involvement of the State.”

The archival material submitted in support of JFM’s submission to the IHRC (also made available to the departments of Justice, Education and Health) reveals that the Irish courts routinely referred women to the Laundries. There was never a statutory basis for doing so. In 1960, the Minister for Justice approved the use of the Sean McDermott Street Magdalene Laundry as a remand institution. The Department of Finance approved capitation payments in such cases. Department of Health records expose a “special provision” whereby women giving birth to a second child outside marriage could be transferred to a Magdalene Laundry. Read Full Post »

Yesterday the Irish Human Rights Commission responded to a request for an enquiry from Justice for Magdalenes with a recommendation that the government would immediately establish a statutory enquiry to investigate the treatment experienced by women there, together with the state’s role in sending women to the Magdalene Laundries. Women who were abused in the Magdalene Laundries, including by being forced to engage in heavy labour, have been omitted from the statutory redress system since its establishment by the Residential Institutions Redress Act, 2002. The main findings of the IHRC were:

1.      That for those girls and women who entered ‘Magdalen Laundries’ following a Court process, there was clear State involvement in their entry to the Laundries; Read Full Post »

We are delighted to welcome back Maeve O’Rourke for her second guest post on HRinI. Maeve’s first post, on Slavery, Forced Labour and the Magdalene Laundries is available here. You can find out more about Maeve on our Guests page.

Last Wednesday in the Dáil, Dermot Ahern and Séan Haughey both repeated the government’s decision not to apologise or provide redress to the survivors of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries or Bethany Home. The reasons they gave are difficult to stomach. It is an increasing disgrace that the survivors of such terrible abuse in Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes are having to beg for recognition when we should be overwhelmingly grateful that they still have the will to tell us the real story of Ireland’s past. In the grand scheme of things, the cost of compensating the survivors of these institutions and of documenting their suffering would be small, while the benefit to Irish society and to future generations of examining what it was that allowed such abuse to take place to Irish women and their children would be priceless.

The government does not seem to understand, or care, that the child abuse in industrial and reformatory schools was not some blip in our nation’s history Read Full Post »

We are delighted to welcome this guest post from Maeve O’Rourke (left) who is a Harvard Law School Global Human Rights Fellow for 2010-2011 and a graduate of UCD and HLS.

It is now a year since the advocacy group, Justice for Magdalenes, provided the Dail with draft language for a redress scheme for survivors of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. Still, the government denies any state liability for the Magdalene Laundries abuse, maintaining that the laundries were private institutions, never regulated or inspected by the State. Flying in the face of the government’s argument is a series of international legal obligations upon the Irish state to prevent and suppress slavery and forced labour by non-state actors, beginning in 1930.

The very fact that the Magdalene laundries were not subject to regulation or inspection, when the State was aware of their nature and function, was a gross violation of the State’s duty to protect its citizens from such fundamental attacks on human freedom and dignity as slavery and forced labour. In the Ryan Report and the broadcast media, survivor accounts of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries tell of abuse that matches up with a definition of slavery given by the UN Secretary General in reference to the League of Nations 1926 Slavery Convention: absolute control over a person, their labour and the product of that labour. The accounts further conform to the definition of forced or compulsory labour under the 1930 International Labour Organisation Forced Labour Convention: all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily. Read Full Post »