IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph
BY BRIAN HUTTON – 06 FEBRUARY 2014
The United Nations has openly challenged Pope Francis to launch an investigation into decades of abuse of girls and young women at Catholic-run workhouses in Ireland.
It has also demanded the religious orders involved or the Vatican itself pay compensation to survivors and families of victims of the notorious Magdalene Laundries.
In a blistering attack on Rome’s response to the laundries scandal – recalled in the recently Oscar-nominated film Philomena – the UN’s children’s rights watchdog said the church took no action to investigate the abuse.
Nor did church authorities compel nuns who ran the workhouses to co-operate with police inquiries into those who organised and knowingly profited from unpaid work by girls incarcerated in the laundries, the UN said.
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