Under The Eyes Of The World

For decades, Irish women were locked away in Church-run laundries, where they were forced to work for no pay until the nuns decided that the inmate had completed an adequate penance.

The crime was typically being pregnant outside of marriage, but there were those who were incarcerated because they had been impregnated as a result of rape. Or because they were pretty enough to foster impure thoughts in the male mind.

As for the rapist? You already know the answer to that. They suffered about as much as the pedophile priests. Sometimes the rapist was a priest.

The story is brilliantly told by Katie Hanrahan in The Leaven of the Pharisees.

Since 1996, when the story burst into public view, the Irish State and the Catholic Church have been dithering about how to handle the situation they created. Not only are the women psychologically shattered, but they are now in financial straits because the religious congregations who reaped the benefit of their slave labor never paid into a pension scheme. The Maggies, as they are called, are elderly and without the old-age stipend required by law.

The UN Committee Against Torture, at the urging of Justice for Magdalenes, has reviewed the evidence that the Irish Government would like to sweep under the rug, and called for an investigation.

Their findings? Perpetrators should be prosecuted. All victims have a right to redress and full compensation.

Some time this week, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter is expected to issue the government's official response, but if it's anything like Sean Aylward's testimony before the UN Committee, it will be more of the same.

Many of the victims are no longer with us, Mr. Aylward said. If the State dithers long enough, they'll all be dead, and no one will have to come up with the money needed to provide redress and compensation and pay for the legal costs of prosecuting the Catholic Church.

The Maggies have been getting the run-around for decades. Now the world has been notified of their plight.

Under such scrutiny, can the religious congregations and the Department of Justice keep right on dithering? Or will something finally be done, before the forgotten women who toiled at hard labor, without a penny of salary being paid, succumb to the Government's scheme to wait out their demise, when the need for compensation will become moot.