Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and the state's duty to protect

Abstract

Irish society has recently begun to come to terms with a legacy of systemic physical, sexual and emotional maltreatment of children from the 1930s to the 1970s in State-funded, Catholic Church-run Industrial and Reformatory Schools. Soon after the findings from a nine-year official inquiry into institutional child abuse were released in Ireland in May 2009,1 questions began to surface as to why the Magdalene Laundries had not been covered by the inquiry, nor their survivors compensated by the Residential Institutions Redress Board, set up by the government in 2002.2