- 10,000 young Irish girls were sent to the laundries between 1922 and 1996
- Taoiseach Enda Kenny expresses sympathy for survivors and their families
- Survivors reject apology and demand full admission from state and church
- It follows a 10 year campaign for an apology and compensation scheme


Women who had their childhoods ‘stolen away’, locked up in Catholic-run workhouses received a qualified apology from the Irish government yesterday.

Over a period of 70 years, an estimated 10,000 were sent to the ‘Magdalene laundries’ to carry out unpaid manual labour under the supervision of nuns.

Some were sent because they were the children of unmarried mothers, others for crimes as minor as not paying a train ticket.


Slaved: An estimated 10,000 were sent to work for no remuneration in 'Magdalene laundries' over a period of 70 years



Anger: Magdalene survivors Marina Gambold, left, and Mary Smyth, were sent to the laundries where they were were forced to work without pay. At a press conference in the Handel Hotel, Dublin, they rejected the Irish government's apology

Incredibly the last of the ten laundries, which washed clothes and linen for major hotel groups, the Irish armed forces and even the brewer Guinness, was in operation until 1996. They were established in 1922.

Irish prime minister Enda Kenny apologised for the stigma and conditions saying they were a product of a ‘harsh and uncompromising Ireland’.

The taoiseach expressed his sympathies with survivors and the families of those who died but stopped short of a formal apology.
His words drew scorn from victims’ groups, who insisted the institutions were worse than prison and demanded a much stronger statement.

The move follows an 18-month inquiry chaired by senator Martin McAleese which found one in four of the women sent to the laundries had been sent by the state.

Mr Kenny said: ‘To those residents who went into the Magdalene laundries from a variety of ways, 26 per cent from state involvement, I’m sorry for those people that they lived in that kind of environment.



Pain: Mary Smyth (left) and Maureen Sullivan (right) are overcome during the press conference held by Magdalene Survivors Together

But he added the report found no evidence of sexual abuse in the laundries, that 10 per cent of inmates were sent by their families, and that 19 per cent entered of their own volition.

Survivors quickly rejected his apology, and demanded a fuller and more frank admission from government and the religious orders involved.

Maureen Sullivan, 60, of Magdalene Survivors Together, and the youngest known victim, said: ‘He is the taoiseach of the Irish people, and that is not a proper apology.’

She was 12 when taken from her school and put in the Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry in New Ross, County Wexford, because her father had died and mother remarried.

Miss Sullivan said she was told it would further her education, but she never saw her schoolbooks again.


Chilling: The interior of the now derelict Sisters of Our Lady of Charity Magdalene Laundry on Sean McDermott St in Dublin's north inner city


An estimated 10,000 young Irish girls were sent to the laundries where they were were forced to work without pay and were subjected to a strict regime at the hands of the nuns who ran the institutions


At the weekends, she was forced to clean the floors of the local church instead of having time off to play.

‘How come all this was taken from me?’ she said. ‘The nuns have destroyed my life and they never allowed me to develop as a young girl.’


Another survivor, Mary Smyth, also 60, said she was forced to follow in the steps of her mother who had also been one of the Magdalene women when she became pregnant.

She said she was treated like a slave and had her dignity, identity and life taken from her.

‘My name was changed, my hair was chopped off, all my possessions were taken from me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t eat for three weeks. I wanted to die.’

Miss Smyth has described her time in the Good Shepherd Convent in Sunday’s Well, Cork, as Hell and revealed she was afraid to have children as an adult in case she was locked up.

‘It was horrendous and inhumane. It was worse than any prison,’ she added. ‘It was soul destroying, it will never ever leave me,’ she said.

Senator McAleese’s inquiry found women were forced into Magdalene laundries for minor offences such as theft and vagrancy as opposed to major crimes such as infanticide.

Despite the stigma of being known as Maggies – a slang term for a prostitute – only a small number of the women were sent to them for prostitution.

In 2011, the UN Committee Against Torture called on the Irish government to set up an inquiry into the treatment of women in the laundries.

The McAleese inquiry spoke to more than 100 women and 40 per cent spent more than a year incarcerated.

In 2002, a film titled The Magdalene Sisters, written and directed by Peter Mullan, was released telling the story of three girls who were sent to 'Magdalene laundries'.

The film's director initially said that he had been inspired to undertake the project as the victims had never been given closure.


A scene from The Magdalene Sisters in which one of the girls is humiliated in front of a nun

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