Human Rights in Ireland

On this day in 1901, the House of Commons debated the Factory and Workshop Bill. Many of the Irish MPs argued that the Magdalene laundries should be excluded from its remit, and from the regime of inspection which was designed to improve working conditions throughout Britain and Ireland. At the time there were 912 inmates in 10 Catholic Magdalene Laundries in Ireland (see the 1901 census return for High Park in Drumcondra here). Earlier that summer, the Leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond (pictured left), had argued as follows for the exemption of Magdalene laundries  from the provisions of the Factory and Workshop Acts on June 11:

The claim we make is confined to those institutions, reformatory in their character, in which the labour employed is the labour of fallen women who have been taken by these charitable ladies, who have brought them into these institutions and provided them with work and with means of salvation from continuing in their evil courses [...] I am sure that it is quite unnecessary for me to emphasise the fact that the kind of charity which is exercised by the ladies in these institutions is probably the noblest charity which anybody could possibly engage in. I do not think it is necessary for me to go another step further and say that this particular charity is not only the noblest that the wit of man can conceive, but it is also the most difficult of all charities to conduct. The great object of these ladies is to keep these girls in those institutions. The organisations I refer to are great societies like the Society of the Good Shepherd, which exists in every country in the world, has been employed for years and generations, and perhaps centuries, in carrying on this work, and it has, therefore, the most experience in the carrying on of this work. The members of this Society of the Good Shepherd are unanimously of opinion that the introduction into their institutions of an outside authority in the shape of Government inspectors would completely destroy the discipline of their institutions, and make their already almost impossible task absolutely impossible. When that is remembered, I think the House ought to hesitate before it forces upon these institutions provisions which, however necessary they may be in ordinary factories, are not suitable for, and ought not to be forced upon institutions of this kind. It is not as if any case had ever been made out in support of the inspection of these institutions. No one urges that they are insanitary, or that an improper number of hours is imposed upon the inmates. We all know that in these institutions there is inspection, although not Government inspection. There is an inspection by the superiors of the religious orders to which they belong, which makes it impossible either for insanitary arrangements to exist or improper hours of labour to be enforced.

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As several newspapers have noted today,  the UN Committee against Torture has released its Concluding Observations for Ireland (all documents are available here). This is the Committee’s response to Ireland’s first periodic report. Fiona detailed the core issues on which the Committee was expected to focus here. We hope to have fuller posts on some of these issues in due course, and of course, welcome guest commentary from others researching in relevant areas.

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This is a busy time of year for human rights reporting. In addition to those we have already highlighted, a number of important reports of interest to the wider Irish human rights community have been published recently:

• The Irish Report of the independent expert on the question of human rights and extreme poverty was published on May 17. It strongly criticises the government’s ‘deep cuts, low tax’ approach to the financial crisis.
• The Fourth Report of the Special Rapporteur on Child Protection has been published. See media coverage here.
• Ireland has been examined by the UNCAT and government representatives have been subjected to rigorous questioning on the asylum system, the Magdalene Laundries and the state’s response to the Ryan Report. See media coverage here.

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 »

The Irish Times reports that the government will consider new evidence detailing State involvement in the referral of women to Magdalene laundries in the 1960s before it decides whether to provide redress to former inmates.

The decision yesterday by Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe follows an admission by Department of Justice officials this week that women were transferred following court appearances to a church-run asylum on Sean McDermott Street, Dublin, during the 1960s.

According to a Spokesman for the Minister, “the information now being referred to by the group wasn’t available when the Minister for Education and Science issued his letter on September 4th, 2009,”

Significantly, a Department of Justice spokesman confirmed yesterday they now knew and accepted that a number of women charged with criminal offences were remanded in one Magdalene laundry under arrangements made by the Department of Justice. The spokesman also asserted that a number of women convicted of criminal offences were also given the alternative of going to prison or a Magdalene laundry by the courts.

These revelations are consistent with claims made by Justice for Magdalenes, a group representing survivors, which have previously been discussed on this blog.

Bearing in mind the acknowledgement by the Deparment of Justice that the state did in fact play a role in relation to the referral of women to Magdalene laundries, it seems incumbent on the Minister to revisit his conclusion that former residents are not eligible for compensation from the Residential Institutions Redress Board due to the fact that the state was ‘not complicit’ in referring women to the laundries.