A RELIGIOUS ORDER was “adamant” with the government that women seeking redress did not work in a Magdalene Laundry after 1980, despite their claims and testimony.
Once new applications were made to the department from November, its Restorative Justice Unit began contacting religious orders to find out if, when and for how long women worked in Magdalene Laundries. Correspondence dated from December to January between the Department of Justice & Equality and the Sisters of Charity shows that the order firmly denied that girls were sent to the High Park laundry after 1980.
Following a 2017 Ombudsman review, the government’s compensation scheme was expanded to women who worked in the Magdalene laundries of 12 religious institutions but were resident in one of 14 adjoining institutions. Although they worked in Magdalene laundries they did not live in religious institutions which ran the laundries but in these adjacent training centres or industrial schools.
[The nun] is adamant that the girls were not sent to the laundry in St Mary’s to work there during the eighties. Lawyer Maeve O’Rourke, a member of Justice for Magdalenes Research , has said these emails “demonstrate the haphazard and opaque nature of the department’s process of examining Magdalene survivors’ applications” and that “women have had to contend with the nuns’ word against theirs”.
The Irish Examiner reported in April that a laundry was constructed in the early months of 1984 at a cost of £17,000. “The applicants in question will be invited to attend for interview so it would be very helpful for us to have a clear picture of how An Grianán operated during this period,” the department wrote in an email.
O’Rourke, of Justice for Magdalenes Research, has said the women who worked in An Grianán have had to endure serious delays in the processing of their applications.
Hmmm... lying nuns. So much for “thou shalt not bear false witness”! Guess maybe they missed that Bible class.
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