Irish leader Enda Kenny issues state apology to Magdalene Laundries survivors - VIDEO

My comments are taken from an excellent article by Brendan O'Neill. It was featured in the Telegraph but I can't post the link for some reason.

"In the Irish mind, and in the minds of everyone else who has seen or read one of the many films, plays and books about the Magdalene laundries, these were horrific institutions brimming with violence and overseen by sadistic, pervy nuns. Yet the McAleese Report found not a single incident of sexual abuse by a nun in a Magdalene laundry. Not one. Also, the vast majority of its interviewees said they were never physically punished in the laundries. As one woman said, "It has shocked me to read in papers that we were beat and our heads shaved and that we were badly treated by the nuns… I was not touched by any nun and I never saw anyone touched." The small number of cases of corporal punishment reported to McAleese consisted of the kind of thing that happened in many normal schools in the 1960s, 70s and 80s: being caned on the legs or rapped on the knuckles. The authors of the McAleese Report, having like the rest of us imbibed the popular image of the Magdalene laundries as nun-run concentration camps, seem to have been taken aback by "the number of women who spoke positively about the nuns"

"Catholic-bashers have embellished the truth about abuse in Catholic institutions. It's time to put the record straight. The publication last week of the Irish government's McAleese Report on the Magdalene laundries has proved kind of awkward for Catholic-bashers. For if McAleese's thorough, 1,000-page study is to be believed, then it would appear that those laundries were not as evil and foul as they had been depicted over the past decade. Specifically the image of the laundries promoted by the popular, much-lauded film The Magdalene Sisters – which showed them as places where women were stripped, slapped, sexually abused and more – has been called into question by McAleese. This has led even The Irish Times, which never turns down an opportunity to wring its hands over Catholic wickedness, to say: "There is no escaping the fact that the [McAleese] report jars with popular perceptions."

@seamus60 & cillowen - even so, An Taoiseach still walked that walk, and he named that shameful stain on the Irish Nation and its people AND HE DID SO ON BEHALF OF THAT SAME IRISH NATION AND ITS PEOPLE!! It can never now be unnamed despite the fact that some might wish it so.

Well done all the same. Lets face it, anyone on this website "of a certain age" may also recall the terrible treatment and abusive conditions in the rural National Schools in the 1950's and 1960's. No apologies asked for but it was horrifically abusive and I remember it well.

He`s walking the only walk open to him, not bad at the acting either.

What a great man he is. If you can't recognize the greatness in him, I hope someday you can. He is walking the walk.

Yeah, Kenny apologized after he was forced! He had to be dragged, kicking and screaming all the way! Now let's see those settlement suits!

Shatter is keeping his eye on his puppet Enda - can't be too long more before he'll be having his boy apologize for what the Irish might have done during WWII to save Shatter's own, unfortunates. A piece of a nation, in name only, makes for a sickness that keeps on giving. See the insane acting out in Perth Australia and elsewhere - there but for the grace of God did many manage to survive.

The government apology has been a long time coming but better late than never. The reason for the most recent delay by the Taoiseach was that government lawyers were working feverishly on making Kenny's apology "safe," or at least as safe as possible regarding the matter of state liability for its complicity with the Catholic Church in operating a system of punishment and slave labor as cruel and heartless as anything you would find in the most vile totalitarian countries. The inmates imprisoned behind these walls were often children, young girls whose only crime may have been as trivial as stealing a train ticket because they didn't have the money to pay for it. For this they were robbed of their freedom and worked like slaves. The McAleese Report makes brutal reading - you're left begging the question, how could this happen in Ireland, a civilized Catholic country. We know the answer and it should fill us with shame and revulsion.

Excellent Kenny, providing a just compensation to the living and a lasting memorial to the dead is proof that you deserve to lead the country.

Well done an Taoiseach. You have done the country, its people and the Magdalene survivors a great service.

pretty rare that any action by a government official has so much humanity in it, no?

A very good speech that, so seldom for a politician, included heart as well as packs a punch. Having seen the Magdalene Laundries movie and read about the situation later, the perpetrators as well as the victims need to have those dark days brought out into the light, and this Irish leader did that. More power to him for finally upholding the rights of the least among us, as Christ asked us to do.