IRELAND
Irish Independent
There’s a big disconnect between committee’s findings and personal accounts of hardship, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
24 February 2013
It would have been welcome had Martin McAleese stuck around afterwards to answer questions and provide clarification on his final report as chair of the inter-departmental committee to establish the facts of State involvement in the Magdalene Laundries, but none of the authors of the last four reports did either, so it wasn’t as if the former first husband was breaking with tradition. Nor is it the outgoing senator’s fault that the Government initially dropped the baby he handed to them.
But it is his responsibility if the report issued under his name turns out not to be as insightful a document as it seemed on first glance.
Of course, it’s easy to pick holes. Whatever failings the McAleese Report may have, it still deserves credit for nailing the myth that the laundries were wholly private institutions over which the State had no power, and the equally poisonous lie, told by the previous government to the UN, that the “vast majority” of inmates went there voluntarily.
Many of its details have also added hugely to the historical picture, including cases of disabled and psychiatrically-ill girls sent to laundries for no other reason than that it was more cost-effective than providing them with proper treatment.
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