Magdalene laundries - Report not final chapter in tragedy

Yesterday’s Magdalene report joined a litany of eviscerating documents detailing our past of neglect, abuse, and harrowing inhumanity.

And though we, as individuals, can sidestep the burden of guilt those horrors bequeath us, we cannot avoid the responsibility of making amends or belatedly showing some simple humanity to those so long denied it.

There have been so many reports — Ferns, Cloyne, the Murphy report on the diocese of Dublin, Raphoe, and too many others — that we might prefer to look away, to consign the horrors of the past to the past, but we cannot. We cannot, if we want to imagine ourselves a moral and decent people, pretend again that we do not know that there are hundreds if not thousands of women in our society who have been misused and betrayed in the name of cruel, medieval mores.