THERE WAS no statutory basis for the incarceration of women in the Magdalene laundries, a seminar at UCD was told Tuesday.
After
1960 some were women remanded by the courts to the Seán McDermott
Street laundry in Dublin but detention “of the vast majority of the
women amounted to unlawful incarceration”.
This was so not least “as the
majority of them were not placed in the laundries by the State”, said
law lecturer Maeve O’Rourke.
She was speaking at the seminar in
the university’s Humanities Institute of Ireland which was hosted by the
Justice for Magdalene’s (JFM) group.
Harvard University law school
global human rights fellow Ms O’Rourke presented the JFM case before the
recent UN Committee Against Torture meeting in Geneva.
She said
the women’s detention amounted to “forced labour” under terms of a 1930
Forced Labour Convention, signed by Ireland in 1931.
“This is not a
question of applying today’s standards to the past; it was illegal at
the time.”
Nor was it an historical issue. Ireland’s failure to address
the women’s circumstances today “amounted to continuing torture...
degrading treatment.”