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The Irish government has unveiled a package of financial compensation, plus health and welfare support, for former residents of the Magdalene laundries.
Compensation totalling $NZ58 to 98 million will be paid to the estimated 770 survivors of more than 10,000 women who lived in the dozen facilities from the 1920s to 1996.
Justice Minister Alan Shatter said the aim was to compensate the women for their years of unpaid labour and public shame in the workhouses.
The tax-free payments will range from $NZ19,500 each for women who spent less than three months working in a laundry, to up to $NZ170,000 for those who spent 10 years or more there.
Although the laundries were owned and run by four religious congregations of nuns, the Irish state was responsible for about a quarter of all referrals.
Possible reasons included poverty, the loss of a mother, disability, the risk of becoming pregnant, being sexually abused, and having had a second child outside marriage.
But a government inquiry found that most girls were not told why they were put away.
The inquiry found that the laundries were “a harsh and physically demanding work environment” and many of the girls experienced them as “lonely and frightening places”.
The inquiry report said: “The psychological impact on these girls was undoubtedly traumatic and lasting.”
But the inquiry found that 61 per cent of residents had spent less than one year in the institutions — a finding that did not live up to the stereotype of laundry life portrayed by film-makers.
The four Catholic congregations that ran the laundries have expressed their regrets for how they had treated women and girls in their care.
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Image: Yahoo! News
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