President Michael D. Higgins President Michael D. Higgins has described the treatment of women and children in state-controlled institutions managed by the Church as a “deep stain on Ireland’s past”.
During an historic ceremony hosted by Mr Higgins and his wife Sabina on Tuesday to honour former residents of Magdalene laundries, the president said that “all of you and all the other women who cannot be with us today were failed by these institutions, the experience of which you share, and the religious orders that ran them.
“You were profoundly failed by the State which, in its relationship to these institutions, should have had your welfare at its core. You were failed by governments that knowingly relied on the existence and practices of these institutions rather than addressing your particular needs in other, more sympathetic ways”.
The president told the women that “you were also failed by a society that actively colluded in your incarceration and treatment or chose to look the other way, averted their gaze, as vulnerable girls and women were subjected, in so many cases, to further abuse and degradation”.
Mr Higgins was speaking at the reception attended by 230 women who were former residents in the laundries. It is the first time that they have been honoured by the State. President Higgins highlighted that since independence over 11,000 women spent time in the laundries, “but their experiences were too often never shared”.
“A combination of stigma, shame and an unreceptive society condemned so many women to concealing their experiences, their trauma, their hurt.
“In recent years the silence has been broken and you all have helped to let the light into some very dark corners of our shared past. You have presented us with what makes a very harrowing and deeply uncomfortable reflection of an Ireland some would prefer not to be able to recognise, but which has to be acknowledged, transacted and to which a response must be made,” the president said at the reception at his official residence on the outskirts of Dublin.
He said “the treatment of vulnerable citizens in our industrial and reformatory schools, in the Magdalene Laundries and in Mother and Baby Homes represents a deep stain on Ireland’s past”.
“Today, here in Aras an Uachtaráin as President of Ireland, I apologise to you – survivors of the Magdalene regime,” Mr Higgins said.
The women – many of them in their 80s – have travelled from the United States, Britain, Australia as well as Ireland. They were also be honoured at a banquet hosted at Dublin’s Mansion House. It is part of a two-day commemoration and consultation on how their ordeals should be remembered. Bringing the women together fulfils a key element in a Restorative Justice Scheme which was devised by the Government in 2013.