IRELAND
Canberra Times
February 8
John Walsh
It takes an age to squeeze much remorse out of the Irish government, it appears.
In 1999, after decades of child abuse in Catholic-run organisations, the government finally issued “a sincere and long-overdue apology” to the victims and set up a Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, which took nine years to present its findings.
Now the government has been told – by a report prompted two years ago by the United Nations Committee Against Torture – that the Irish state colluded in sending 30,000 women to the infamous Magdalene Laundries between 1922 and 1996.
The Prime Minister, Enda Kenny, did not apologise to the families of the women who had been incarcerated in these hellish institutions despite committing no crime.
He said: “The stigma [of] the branding together of all the residents … in the Magdalene Laundries needs to be removed.” No, it doesn’t.
The stigma of the Magdalene Laundries will survive as a reminder of how inhumanly innocent people can be treated by supposedly charitable institutions.
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