THE Labour Party is to seek legal advice on whether the state can be held accountable for the judiciary system’s former practice of sending women to Magdalene laundries on probation and on remand.Its former leader and Dublin East deputy Ruairí Quinn has also called for a national museum telling the story of the tens of thousands of children and young adults who were abused in industrial schools and Magdalene laundries.
"I’d like to see a place where survivors and their children’s stories could be told. In Ireland, we are very good at being victims when the perpetrators are outside the country but we did those awful things to one another" he said.
To date, the state has fought hard against attempts by Magdalene laundry survivors to seek redress by arguing that the state didn’t send them to the laundries.
However, it emerged before Christmas that from the 1960s onwards, women were sent to these centres by a judiciary who didn’t like the concept of sending women to prison.
In the Dáil this week, it emerged the Department of Justice also made payments to institutions which took women "on remand" and "on probation". The department also said that Our Lady’s Home on Henrietta Street in Dublin was inspected by a state inspector when the religious order sought financial support.
In a response to a parliamentary question from Mr Quinn, Justice Minister Dermot Ahern said the decision to send women to religious institutions was done without reference to the state and the women would have known when their probation was over.
Many of the 30,000 women who were in laundries say they were all but imprisoned.
"The orders/ arrangements were made by the courts without reference to any department of state. The requirements of a probation order, including its duration, would be made known by the court to the offender. The records of such orders are court records," Mr Ahern said.
Yesterday, Mr Quinn said the whole issue of the Magdalene laundries and their place in Irish society needs to resolved as it is "part of a bigger story of abuse in Irish institutions".
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