Greg DalyMore than twice as many women died in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries than the McAleese Report revealed, according to a draft report by campaign group Justice For Magdalene Research (JFMR).
The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalene Laundries, better known as the McAleese Report, found in February 2013 that 879 women were known to have died in the laundries during the period under investigation.
The JFMR study, however, challenges this figure, accusing it of having omitted some 565 women who died in the laundries before 1922 and more than 220 women who died when in the care of religious orders after the laundries closed.
Claire McGettrick, co-founder of JFMR and coordinator of the Magdalene Names Project, claims that: “In the case of deaths in the Magdalene Laundries, the Inter-Departmental Committee on the laundries (IDC) made sure we only knew the half of it.”
“The McAleese Report,” she continued, “acknowledges just over half of the 1,663 women (that we are aware of) who died in these institutions.”
One might contest whether this is a fair criticism. The Government set up the committee in 2011 with the explicit aim of establishing “the facts of State involvement with the Magdalene Laundries”, clarifying the nature of any State interaction, and “to produce a narrative detailing such interaction”.
Deaths
As such, deaths in the laundries before the foundation of the State would clearly have been outside the committee’s remit, as would deaths of women when there were no laundries with which the State could interact.
More serious criticisms concern the report’s failure to offer breakdowns of burial sites in public and convent cemeteries, and its failure to address the issue of unmarked graves, but it seems unfair to accuse the committee, as Ms McGettrick does, of having engaged in “evasive” data presentation and gone to “extraordinary lengths to minimise the full extent of deaths”.
Attention
The McAleese committee frequently drew attention to the fragmentary and incomplete nature of the records upon which it was working, and the Department of Justice rejects McGettrick’s claim the committee “ignored” research submitted by the Magdalene Names Project.
Instead, it holds that the research was taken into consideration at the time, and that many of the JFM’s allegations were “not supported by the facts uncovered by the McAleese Committee”.
This is not to say that JFMR’s concerns are wholly misplaced, however. In June 2011, the UN Committee on Torture called for an independent statutory investigation into allegations of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment in the laundries.
Alan Shatter, then Minister for Justice, informed the Dáil that he was committed to ensuring “as a first step”, the investigation both of events involving those who lived and worked in the laundries and of the extent of state involvement in the laundries.
When the McAleese committee was announced the following month, however, its remit was explicitly restricted to the question of State involvement.
The treatment of the laundries’ residents, although briefly addressed in the McAleese Report, remains to be formally investigated.