For years it was Ireland's hidden scandal: an estimated 30,000 women
were sent to church-run laundries, where they were abused and worked for
years with no pay.
Their offence, in the eyes of society, was to break the
strict sexual rules of Catholic Ireland, having children outside
wedlock.
Although it has been more than a decade since their story came to light, the women are still waiting for an apology.
Now an advocacy group, Justice for Magdalenes, which has
spent the past two years lobbying the Irish government to investigate
the laundries, is taking the case to the United Nations, alleging the
abuse amounted to human rights violations and hoping that an official
rebuke will shame the government into action.
''We don't take any pleasure in embarrassing the
government in this way but we have worked the domestic structure as far
as we can and still the government has done nothing,'' said James Smith,
a spokesman for Justice for Magdalenes.
The UN is examining Ireland's human rights record this
week as part of its review of the human rights records of all 192 member
states.
The UN Committee Against Torture has invited Justice for
Magdalenes to make a statement in Geneva.
Maeve O'Rourke, a Harvard Law School human rights fellow,
presented the Magdalenes' case last Friday.
She told the committee that
the Irish government's failure to deal with the abuse was a violation
of the Convention Against Torture and the state had failed to
investigate promptly. .
The story of the laundries was uncovered in 1993 when a religious order sold a part of its land.
The bodies of 155 women who had died in the laundry were exhumed and the media began to ask questions.
Until recently, the shame of giving birth to an
illegitimate child in Ireland was so great that many unmarried mothers
were rejected.
They were put into Magdalene laundries by members of the
clergy, government institutions and their families.
The laundries were profit-making workhouses run by four
religious communities - the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Charity,
the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity,
initially for prostitutes.
By the 1940s the laundry's residents were
young women who had sex outside of marriage (or were raped), unmarried
mothers, women deemed flirtatious and women with mental disabilities.
Many died behind convent walls until the last laundry closed in 1996.