OPINION: Damning information on State’s links to the laundries pops up in surprising places.
Last
week, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter became the first representative
of the State to recognise officially that Irish society may have a duty
to the thousands of women (most of them no longer with us) who toiled
behind the locked doors of the Magdalene laundries.
However, his
new committee of civil servants examining the State’s connections with
laundries will need to deploy formidable skills in lateral thinking.
Official
information on these institutions can be tricky to find, and may pop up
in unexpected places. For instance, a search in military records might
be instructive.
In the early 1940s, for example, it appeared that
some State bodies, most particularly the Army, were transferring their
laundry contracts from commercial laundries to what were euphemistically
called “institutional laundries”.
These of course were the large
Magdalene operations, centred in Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Limerick,
Galway and New Ross.
In 1941, minister for defence Oscar Traynor
claimed in the Dáil that the contracts with Magdalene laundries “contain
a fair wages clause”.
This is a startling statement, as we know now
(and indeed it would have been known at the time) that the women
penitents locked up in these laundries did not receive wages for their
work.
The matter had arisen in the Dáil at a time of concern that
workers in commercial laundries were losing their jobs directly as a
result of State contracts going to the nuns running the Magdalene
laundries.
The latter could outbid anyone, given their non-existent
labour costs.
According to Mary Jones’s history of the Irish Women Workers’ Union,
These Obstreperous Lassies , at least one laundry was forced to
close in 1941 with the loss of 25 jobs.
It had just lost an Army
contract to the Sisters of Charity Magdalene laundry in Donnybrook.
The
union wrote to the nuns running the laundries, begging them not to put
workers out of a job by underbidding for State contracts. Their pleas
fell on deaf ears.
This was the background to Traynor’s extraordinary statement.
There
is, though, something perplexing about it. The full sentence in the
Dáil record reads as follows: “As, however, these contracts contain a
fair wages clause, I am having the matter reconsidered and will
communicate further with the deputy as soon as practicable.”
No
further communication can be found, and the mystery of why Traynor
should have felt it necessary to reconsider the contracts going to
Magdalene laundries remains unsolved.
It is, however, undeniable that
the State was perfectly content to save itself a few bob by using the
cheaper Magdalene laundries – cheaper of course because of the slave
labour of their inmates.
Shatter’s committee should also search
the records of the Department of Enterprise, Jobs and Innovation –
incorporating the old department of industry and commerce. A focus on
files from the 1950s and 1960s on foot of the Factories Act 1955 would
be productive.
This specified detailed health and safety regulations for
a range of establishments, among which the Magdalene laundries are
clearly included.
What makes this so important is the requirement
for all commercial operations covered by the Act to keep registers of
their workers, especially listing all women and young people with their
ages and specific occupations.
Further, they were obliged to send these details to the department regularly.
Consequently,
the department’s inspectors had a legal duty to ensure that the names
of all Magdalene workers were recorded in these registers and lodged
with the State.
Given that one of the rigorously applied rules of
Magdalene laundries was that the names of all inmates were changed on
entry, it would be interesting to see just how these laundries
registered their workers. In the eventuality that no such details are
discovered in departmental archives, the question then arises of State
negligence in ensuring compliance with the law.
The Factories Act
1955 certainly gives the lie to former minister for education Batt
O’Keeffe when he claimed that the State had no duty to inspect or
regulate Magdalene laundries.
While the State did not fund these
institutions, it is unarguable that the legal duty to inspect and
regulate them as factories did exist.
Section 84 of the Act was
headed “Institutions”, and clearly laid out that all such entities were
covered by the legislation once “any manual labour is exercised in or
incidental to the making, altering, repairing, ornamenting, finishing,
washing, cleaning, or adapting for sale, of articles not intended for
the use of the institution”.
Speaking in the Dáil in May 1955, the
then minister for industry and commerce William Norton stated that
“once you wash clothes in the institution, not for the institution, then
that is a factory.
In other words, you have a right to wash clothes for
the institution, but if you start to wash other people’s clothes it is a
factory, for the purpose of section 84.”
The Justice for Magdalenes
group has highlighted other connections between the State and the
laundries, particularly in the way they were used for women on probation
and remand, and indeed for children (up to 70 in 1970) transferred
directly from the industrial schools.
However, there are also
other factors to be considered by Government when deliberating on the
issue of an apology to and redress for the survivors of the laundries.
Any wider examination of the social dynamics surrounding these
institutions will show many women were put in by their families who
refused to take them back.
Many others used them as a threat to keep
young women under control.
Society now clearly recognises that
what happened to the victims of this system was wrong.
The only way this
can be formally expressed is through a State apology.
Any Government
with the courage to act on this will receive nothing but praise.