Comment: Compensation for Magdalene survivors remains unresolved five years on

Over five years on from Enda Kenny’s State apology to the Magdalene Laundry women, the issue of the redress scheme to compensate those women is still making the headlines.

The scheme was widened following an Ombudsman report in November 2017, which found the department had wrongly refused some Magdalene survivors access to redress payments.

A key recommendation of the report was that the department should reconsider the applications of women who worked in one of the listed laundries but who were recorded as having been “admitted” to a training centre or industrial school in the same building, attached to or located on the grounds of the laundry.

A key piece of information in relation to the Ombudsman’s findings was uncovered in a 2015 Irish Examiner investigation, showing that evidence that An Grianán training centre and High Park Magdalene laundry were “one and the same thing” was uncovered by the HSE in 2011. Despite this, it was excluded from the redress scheme.

It has taken a further year to publish the promised addendum to the scheme to allow for those excluded to be granted the redress they should have received from the beginning. However, this addendum has now raised concerns.

The payments are not at issue. Any period of work in a week will be determined to be equal to a week. In the overall calculation of the period spent working in the laundry, the number of weeks worked will be rounded up to the nearest month. If the applicant is deemed to have worked in the laundry for any period, a minimum payment equivalent to three months will apply.

However, concerns have centred on the requirement of the women to provide ‘records’ showing how long they worked in the institution before receiving any redress payments.

The addendum to the scheme states that applications “must be accompanied” by “records from that institution and/or from the relevant Magdalene institution stating that you worked in the laundry and the period of time involved”.

Campaigners and survivors are worried that the onus has been placed on the victims to provide written records of their time in a laundry.

The senior research and policy officer at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and voluntary member of Justice for Magdalenes Research, Maeve O’Rourke, said in many cases the records may not exist, nor can it be ascertained from the Government whether they do.

“I have never seen a single record of a return to the Government pursuant to the factories legislation and regulations (stating children’s ages and hours worked etc) in the info the nuns have provided in response to personal data access requests by survivors.”

“This suggests that they did not keep, or do not still have, the records they were legally required to create under the Conditions of Employment (Records) Regulations 1947, sections 122 and 124 Factories Act 1955, and Factories (General Register) Regulations 1956,” she said.

This reliance on records was a key criticism of the scheme in the ombdusman’s report. The investigation found the department was overly reliant on evidence and, often the word, of the religious congregations “to the exclusion of other evidence”.

The personal testimony of survivors had been only considered “as a last resort”. In response to queries, the department has sought to clarify personal testimony along with relevant records will be used when deciding an application. However, survivors and campaigners feel they have been down this road before.

Another section of the addendum states that the Department of Justice will calculate payments on the basis that “no child under the age of 12 years of age worked in a Magdalene Laundry” unless it can be proven otherwise.

It is already a proven fact that children as young as nine were in the laundries. The State’s own investigation, the McAleese Report, proved that.