Irish PM to meet UK Magdalene women

Written By Unknown on Sabtu, 16 Februari 2013 | 19.21

16 February 2013 Last updated at 06:46 ET
Young women working in a Magdalene laundry

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Around 10,000 women and girls were sent to the laundries

Irish prime minister Enda Kenny is in London to meet around a dozen UK-based women who spent time in the Republic of Ireland's Magdalene laundries.

About 10,000 women passed through laundries - run by Roman Catholic nuns - between 1922 and 1996.

Earlier this month a report found the Irish Republic government was involved in running the laundries, where women and girls worked without pay.

Mr Kenny has so far stopped short of a formal apology.

The taoiseach has admitted the laundries operated in a "harsh and uncompromising Ireland" but has resisted calls from the opposition Fianna Fail party to make a formal apology from the Irish state.

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• Originally termed Magdalene Asylums the first in Ireland was opened in Dublin in 1765, for Protestant girls

• First Catholic home was founded in Cork in 1809

• Envisaged as short-term refuges for 'fallen women' they became long-term institutions and penitents were required to work, mostly in laundries on the premises

• They extended to take in unmarried mothers, women with learning difficulties and girls who had been abused

• The facilities were self-supporting and the money generated by the laundries paid for them

• Between 1922 and 1996 there were 10 such laundries in the Republic of Ireland

• Many Irish institutions, such as the army, government departments, hotels and even Guinness had contracts with Magdalene laundries

• The women toiled behind locked doors unable to leave after being admitted and while the laundries were paid, they received no wages

• The congregations which ran them were the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, the Religious Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd

BBC correspondent Nick Higham said: "The inmates included unmarried mothers, women guilty of petty crimes, or simply girls from broken homes. The last laundry - in a Dublin convent - closed as late as 1996."

The inquiry chaired by Senator Martin McAleese found 2,124 of those detained in the institutions were sent by the authorities.

Whole lives

Mr Kenny has offered an expression of regret for the stigma attached to former inmates.

Earlier this week he met the Magdalene Survivors Together group, who have said they are confident they will receive an apology.

Our correspondent said Mr Kenny was coming to London to talk to more than a dozen former inmates living in the UK.

Our correspondent said: "Some women spent their whole lives in the laundries and died there, but most stayed only a few months, and many fled Ireland after their release... never to return."

Women were forced into Magdalene laundries for a crime as minor as not paying for a train ticket, the McAleese report found.

The report also confirmed that a police officer could arrest a girl or a woman without warrant if she was being recalled to the laundry or if she had run away.

Fianna Fail has called for the establishment of a dedicated unit within the Department of Justice to co-ordinate the Irish Republic's response to the McAleese report, including all forms of redress for the survivors.

The system was the subject of a 2002 film, The Magdalene Sisters, which starred Geradline McEwan and Anne-Marie Duff, whose director said at the time he believed the former inmates should have received an apology.


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