I'll clean it up right quick for you:
"Ireland oversaw vilified workhouse laundries; Prime minister says depictions of sites inaccurate" by Shawn Pogatchnik | Associated Press, February 06, 2013
DUBLIN — Ireland’s government oversaw workhouses run by Catholic nuns that once held thousands of women and teenage girls in unpaid labor and usually against their will, a fact-finding report concluded Tuesday, establishing state involvement in the country’s infamous Magdalene Laundries for the first time.
But Prime Minister Enda Kenny stopped short of making any official apology for the decades of harsh treatment documented in 10 Magdalene Laundries, the last of which closed in 1996. He emphasized that the more than 1,000-page report offered a nuanced view of life in the laundries far less stark or one-sided than has been depicted on stage and in film.
I don't get it. Why no apology?
Kenny rejected activists’ claims of laundry conditions akin to prison and slavery, and confined his statement of regret to the longtime popular view in Ireland that most residents of the Magdalene Laundries were ‘‘fallen women,’’ a euphemism for prostitutes....
The report’s lead author, former Irish senator Martin McAleese, said until now the facts and figures of the workhouses run by four orders of nuns had been shrouded in ‘‘secrecy, silence, and shame.’’
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The report 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.
Translation: No apologies means no law$uits.
It found that the average length of stay was just seven months, not the lifetime imprisonment commonly depicted in fictional works.
Does the how long matter more than the what?
It said 14 percent stayed more than five years, and 8 percent more than a decade. And many hundreds checked into the facilities repeatedly for short periods, reflecting their poverty and the Irish state’s inadequate facilities for women needing a home.
It found that 27 percent 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 percent entered laundries voluntarily, 11 percent were consigned there by other family members, and 9 percent were sent there on the recommendation of a priest.
It found that until recent decades, judges often ordered women guilty of crimes ranging from shoplifting to infanticide into the laundries rather than the prison system.
The report disputed depictions 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 no complaints of sexual abuse by the nuns.
Nuns are better than priests.
The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, which ran the two biggest laundries in Dublin, in a statement expressed ‘‘deep regret’’ that many residents ‘‘did not experience our refuge as a place of protection and care.’’ But they suggested that women in their care faced worse conditions and fewer options in the hostile Ireland outside the laundry.
Campaigners for justice for the ‘‘Maggies’’ expressed disappointment with the report and particularly the government’s response.
Translation: They didn't get it; they got a limited hangout instead.
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"Ireland addresses women of Magdalene Laundries; Prime minister apologizes, vows compensation" by Shawn Pogatchnik | Associated Press, February 20, 2013
DUBLIN — Ireland ignored the mistreatment of thousands of women who were incarcerated within Catholic nun-operated laundries and must pay the survivors compensation, Prime Minister Enda Kenny said Tuesday in an emotional state apology for the decades of abuses in the so-called Magdalene Laundries.
What changed in two weeks?
‘‘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....
Tuesday’s state apology marks another step in Ireland’s two-decade effort to come to grips with the human rights abuses committed in Catholic-run institutions following Ireland’s independence from Britain in 1922, when the fledgling state gave church authorities substantial authority over the education of the young and care for the poor.
Over the past decade Ireland has published five investigations into the church’s serial coverup of crimes by pedophile priests in the Dublin Archdiocese and two rural Catholic dioceses; the sexual, physical, and psychological abuse of tens of thousands of children consigned to state-funded industrial schools since the 1930s; and now, as a final piece of that puzzle, the Magdalene Laundries....
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