Compensation totalling $NZ58 to 98 million will be paid to the estimated 770 survivors of more than 10,000 women who lived in the dozen facilities from the 1920s to 1996.

Justice Minister Alan Shatter said the aim was to compensate the women for their years of unpaid labour and public shame in the workhouses.

The tax-free payments will range from $NZ19,500 each for women who spent less than three months working in a laundry, to up to $NZ170,000 for those who spent 10 years or more there.

Although the laundries were owned and run by four religious congregations of nuns, the Irish state was responsible for about a quarter of all referrals.

Possible reasons included poverty, the loss of a mother, disability, the risk of becoming pregnant, being sexually abused, and having had a second child outside marriage.

But a government inquiry found that most girls were not told why they were put away.

The inquiry found that the laundries were "a harsh and physically demanding work environment" and many of the girls experienced them as "lonely and frightening places".

The inquiry report said: "The psychological impact on these girls was undoubtedly traumatic and lasting."

But the inquiry found that 61 per cent of residents had spent less than one year in the institutions — a finding that did not live up to the stereotype of laundry life portrayed by film-makers.

The four Catholic congregations that ran the laundries have expressed their regrets for how they had treated women and girls in their care.

Sources:

Irish Examiner

RTE

Image: Yahoo! News

"By any standards it was a cruel, pitiless Ireland, distinctly lacking in a quality of mercy," Kenny said, as dozens of former Magdalenes watched tearfully from parliament's public gallery overhead.

Kenny told lawmakers his government has appointed a senior judge to recommend an aid programme for the approximately 1000 women still living from the residential workhouses, and pledged government funding for a national memorial.

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The Irish government has previously denied direct involvement in the system, which was run by four religious congregations: the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Good Shepherd Sisters, the Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of Charity.

The report's lead author, former Irish Senator Martin McAleese — husband of former Irish president Mary McAleese — said until now the facts and figures of the workhouses had been shrouded in "secrecy, silence and shame."

The investigation found that 10,012 women were committed to the workhouses from 1922, the first year of Ireland's independence from Britain, to the closure of the last two laundries in 1996.

It found that the average length of stay was just seven months, not the lifetime imprisonment commonly depicted in fictional works.

Though Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny held back from a formal apology, he expressed regret that the residents of the Magdalene laundries were stigmatised as "fallen women," a euphemism for prostitutes.

The investigators "found no evidence to support the perception that unmarried girls had babies there, or that many of the women of the Magdalene Laundries since 1922 were prostitutes. The reality is much more complex."

About 27 per cent of the women were ordered into the facilities by an array of state employees: judges, probation officers, school truancy officials, social workers, doctors at psychiatric hospitals, or officials at state-funded shelters for unwed mothers and their babies.

Some 16 per cent entered laundries voluntarily, 11 per cent were consigned there by other family members, and 9 per cent were sent there on the recommendation of a priest.

The report disputed depictions in popular culture of physical beatings in the institutions, noting that many Magdalene residents had transferred there as teenagers from other Catholic-run industrial schools where such violence was common, and some survivors failed to distinguish between the two.

It found no evidence of such attacks in the nuns' care and, specifically, no complaints of sexual abuse by the nuns.

Sources:

Associated Press

The Journal

Image: RTE News