IRELAND
Wall Street Journal
By JEANNE WHALEN
Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny apologized for the harsh conditions suffered by generations of women forced to work in so-called Magdalen Laundries, after a report found that the state helped finance the church-run workhouses and steered women into them.
Roughly 10,000 women spent time in the laundries between 1922 and the closing of the last one in 1996, working in “harsh and physically demanding” conditions for no pay, the report said. State institutions, including courts, hospitals and social services, were involved in referring about a quarter of these women to the laundries, the report found.
“To those residents who went into the Magdalen Laundries through a variety of ways—26% of them from state involvement—I am sorry for those people that they lived in that kind of environment,” Mr. Kenny told Ireland’s parliament on Tuesday. “I admire their courage for speaking out” to the committee that compiled the report, he said.
The report challenged some long-held beliefs about the laundries, which were first established in Ireland in the 18th century, largely by Catholic religious orders such as the Sisters of Mercy, though the report notes that some were Protestant.
Despite widespread beliefs that the laundries mostly housed women who bore children out of wedlock or who worked as prostitutes, young women entered the institutions by a variety of paths, the report found. Some were referred by the courts after being convicted of crimes—largely petty crimes such as vagrancy and larceny, but on occasion, manslaughter or murder. Some had been kicked out of their homes, had been orphaned or were suffering abuse at home. Others were simply poor or homeless “and either voluntarily sought shelter” at the laundries or were referred by social services, Sen. Martin McAleese, chairman of the committee that compiled the report, wrote in an introduction to the document.
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