The scandal of the religious-run Magdalene laundries, where young women deemed to have offended the moral code of the Catholic Church were incarcerated and put to work, is a stain on the public history of the Irish state. It has taken years of campaigning to bring this injustice to light.
Even now, it is more than feasible that further revelations will emerge. They did in 2012, when amateur historian Catherine Corliss uncovered evidence of a mass grave containing the remains of 796 infants at St Mary’s mother-and-baby home in Tuam, Co Galway.
Overall, it is estimated that a minimum of 10,000 women were sent to the institutions in the years from the founding of the state in 1922 to the closure of the final Magdalene laundry in 1996. Most were forced into unpaid, brutalising work in the profitable laundry system.
