Madam, – I refer to Fintan O’Toole’s piece on the Government’s continuing denial of responsibility for the Magdalene laundries abuse (Opinion, June 15th).
I would argue that the abuse suffered by women and girls in the Magdalene laundries amounted to slavery and/or forced labour under international law, judging by the evidence in the Ryan Report (Volume III, Chapter 18) and other survivor accounts in the media. Essentially, the religious orders exercised absolute control over the women and girls, their labour, and the product of that labour. Ireland has had international legal obligations to prevent and suppress slavery and forced labour at the hands of private individuals since the 1930s.
It is no excuse for the Government to state, as Batt O’Keeffe told the Dáil in February, that the laundries were not subject to State regulation or inspection (and were therefore fundamentally different to industrial schools). The very fact that the Magdalene laundries were not subject to regulation or inspection, when the State was aware of their nature and function, was a gross violation of the State’s duty to protect its citizens from such fundamental attacks on human freedom and dignity as slavery and/or forced labour.
Every woman and girl in a Magdalene laundry, whether she was placed there privately or by the State, was owed a duty of protection. It is time the Government acknowledged the abuse suffered for what it really was. – Yours, etc,