Redress wrongs will finally be put to right

It took the bravery of a group of ordinary citizens putting their heads above the parapet and taking on the State to get justice for Magdalene survivors, writes Conall Ó Fátharta.

Redress wrongs will finally be put to right

The commitment by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar that women wrongly excluded from the Magdalene laundries redress scheme will receive redress payments “without delay” is hopefully the final step on what has been a long road to justice for a small group of women.

As is often the case in Ireland, the Government had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing what was right.

And, as is also often the case in Ireland, it required the bravery of a group of ordinary citizens putting their heads above the parapet and taking on the State in order to get justice.

The Taoiseach is to be commended for committing to granting the women redress but to do otherwise would have been not just unjust but would also deny the facts of the experience of these women.

They worked in the laundries as young girls alongside the older Magdalene women, they ate the same food and, in many cases, they slept in the same building.

It’s worth noting just what it took to get to this point and how hard the Department of Justice fought against granting these women redress.

It began back in 2015 when two former residents of the An Grianán training centre, which was attached to the High Park Magdalene laundry in Drumcondra in Dublin, decided to go to the High Court to fight the department’s decision to exclude them from the redress scheme.

In June of last year, the court ruled that the women were denied fair procedures in how that decision was reached.

The department had denied the women redress because the women had been registered as having been admitted to An Grianán and not directly to the Magdalene laundry.

The view of the department — and which was publicly stated on numerous occasions by then justice minister Frances Fitzgerald — was that An Grianán was a separate entity to the High Park laundry which served a different purpose.

Former Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald.
Former Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald.

While it did not dispute that the women worked in the laundry, it had decided that only those women who were “admitted to and worked in” a laundry were to be included.

The Government also repeatedly defended the exclusion of the training centre from the scheme by stating it was included in the Residential Institutions Redress Board scheme (RIRB).

All women admitted to An Grianán were entitled to full compensation for the entire duration of their stay under that scheme and therefore they would be compensated twice.

After the Department of Justice refused the women on appeal in June and October 2015, proceedings were lodged.

Separately, in June 2015, the Ombudsman upheld a decision by the Department of Justice to refuse three other women who were in An Grianán access to the scheme.

“While the fact that you worked in the laundry attached to St Mary’s Refuge is not in dispute, I do not see

anywhere in the file where there is any dispute regarding the fact that you were admitted to An Grianán and not St Mary’s Refuge,” said the Ombudsman.

Therefore, as you were not admitted to one of the 12 listed institutions, I do not see a basis for concluding that there was maladministration in the team’s decision not to approve your application on the basis that you did not qualify for funding under the scheme.

The Ombudsman’s decision came on June 2, 2015 — just two days before the Irish Examiner revealed that evidence that An Grianán training centre and the High Park Magdalene laundry were “one and the same thing” was uncovered by the HSE in 2012.

This information was sent by Phil Garland, then the assistant national director, Children and Family Services at the HSE, to the Department of Children and Youth Affairs representative on the McAleese committee, Denis O’Sullivan.

Draft minutes of a meeting held by the McAleese committee investigating the Magdalene laundries on the same day the HSE evidence was uncovered indicate that, as An Grianán was previously included in the RIRB scheme, it would not be examined.

The three women sought a judicial review of the Ombudsman’s decision and in December 2015, as part of a settlement, the Ombudsman agreed to re-examine the cases.

By April 2016, the Ombudsman had completely changed its position on the matter and had formed the view that

An Grianán residents should be eligible for the Magdalene redress scheme.

Documents obtained by the Irish Examiner and published in June of last year then revealed an extraordinary nine-month dispute between the Ombudsman and the Department of Justice over the latter’s interpretation of An Grianán and the redress scheme itself.

Department of Justice.
Department of Justice.

It was to culminate with the Ombudsman stating, last December, that it had no choice but to launch an investigation into whether the scheme has been administered fairly. The results of that investigation were published last November and were scathing of the department’s administration of the scheme.

The investigation found that the women in question suffered a “clear injustice” by the Department of Justice which relied on an “overly narrow” interpretation of the scheme to deny women access to compensation they were entitled to.

The report took issue with the interpretation of the phrase “admitted to and worked in” when deciding applications and said the phrase was used by Mr Justice Quirke who designed the scheme, the Government and the department without anyone ever defining what it was intended to mean.

However, the Ombudsman found that the department chose to interpret this phrase in the most narrow sense and operated on the basis that only women who could demonstrate through available records that they had been officially recorded as admitted to one of the 12 named institutions were eligible.

The report found that, contrary to the claims of the department, the units that many of the women were admitted to and lived in were, in reality, “one and the same institution” as the laundries — a finding which echoed the evidence obtained by the Irish Examiner in 2015.

It said the department was overly reliant on the evidence, and sometimes just the word, of the religious congregations “to the exclusion of other evidence” when wrongly denying women access to the redress scheme. The personal testimony of the affected women was considered “as a last resort”.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.

On the question of double compensation, the Ombudsman said this was “simply not true” as that scheme was designed to compensate for address a different wrong. He also said he had never come across such an “entrenched and intransigent position” from a government department in his role before.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar acknowledged all these differences of opinion in the Dáil on Wednesday but said they don’t really matter.

“What is important is that the women affected receive redress and they will,” he said.

The women have waited long enough.

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