IRELAND
Irish News
Ed Carty
25 August, 2017
SURVIVORS of Magdalene laundries, and their relatives, have relived the horrors of rape, abuse and lost lives as they renewed calls for a memorial and full redress.
A rally was held off Sean McDermott Street in Dublin, the site of the last Catholic workhouse to be shut, a fortnight after a damning United Nations report criticising the Irish government for failing to live up to commitments to the women.
It is four years since former taoiseach Enda Kenny apologised to those incarcerated in the laundries and their families.
Angela Downey, who was born in Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home after her mother Mary had been raped and was sent to a laundry, called for the name of every woman who toiled in the institutions to be immortalised in stone.
Pressing her hand against the crumbling back wall of the workhouse run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, she said: “My mother spent 15 years in the laundries.
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