Irish gov't and Catholic-run slave laundries

[Isgrimnur]

It's a 2-for-1 today:

Irish gov't admits involvement in Magdalene Laundries:

Ireland has admitted some responsibility for workhouses run by Catholic nuns that once kept thousands of women and teenage girls against their will in unpaid, forced labor.

The apology comes after an expert panel found that Ireland should be legally responsible for the defunct Magdalene Laundries because authorities committed about one-quarter of the 10,012 women to the workhouses from 1922 to 1996, often in response to school truancy or homelessness.

"To those residents who went through the Magdalene Laundries in a variety of ways, 26 percent of the time from state involvement, I am sorry for those people that they lived in that kind of environment," said Prime Minister Enda Kenny on behalf of the Irish government, according to Reuters.
....
Ireland stigmatized those that had been committed as "fallen" women - prostitutes - but most were simply unwed mothers or daughters of them.

The report found that 15 percent lived in the workhouses for more than five years, and police caught and returned women who fled. They endured 12-hour work days of washing and ironing.

This is an about face for the government:

Since 2001, the Irish government has acknowledged that women in the Magdalene laundries were abuse victims. However, the Irish government has resisted calls for investigation and proposals for compensation; the government maintains that the laundries were privately run, therefore abuses at the laundries are outside of the government's remit. In contrast to these claims, evidence exists that Irish courts routinely sent women convicted of petty crimes to the laundries, the government awarded lucrative contracts to the laundries without any insistence on protection and fair treatment of its workers, and Irish state employees helped to keep laundry facilities stocked with workers by bringing women to the laundries and returning escaped workers.

[Drazzil]

Jayzus.

[Isgrimnur]

Infant mass grave discovered at Bon Secours home for unmarried mothers

Ireland’s Roman Catholic Church told the order of nuns who ran the former home where a mass grave of almost 800 children was found that it must co-operate with any inquiry into the discovery.

Ireland is considering an investigation into what the government called a “deeply disturbing” discovery of an unmarked graveyard at a former home run by the Bon Secours Sister where 796 children died between 1925 and 1961.
...
Ireland’s once powerful Church has been rocked by a series of scandals over the abuse and neglect of children. Public records show that 796 children died in the county Galway “mother-and-baby home” before its closure, according to a local historian.

Researcher Catherine Corless said the bodies were buried in a sewage tank on the grounds and that some of the dead were as young as three-months-old.

The Catholic Church ran many of Ireland’s social services in the 20th century, including mother-and-baby homes where tens of thousands of unwed pregnant women, including rape victims, were sent to give birth.

Unmarried mothers and their children were seen as a stain on Ireland’s image as a devout Catholic nation. They were also a problem for some of the fathers, particularly powerful figures such as priests and wealthy, married men.

Like the Magdalene Laundries, where single women and girls were sent, the mother-and-baby homes were run by nuns but received state funding. They acted as adoption agencies and in that capacity were overseen by the state.

[Drazzil]

Yeah, the Catholic church acts evil, no two ways about it.

[LawBeefaroni]

It's a disgrace.

Sadly, the mass grave at Tuam is probably not unique. I visited the site — the home was demolished in the 1970s — and spoke with locals who remember babies’ skulls emerging from the soil around their houses. When boys broke open the cover of the sewage pit, they found it “full to the brim” of skeletons. Tuam was only one of a dozen mother and baby homes in Ireland in the years after the Second World War, all of which treated their inmates in a similar fashion.

During 10 years of research into the Catholic Church’s treatment of “fallen women” — I wrote about one of them in my book, Philomena, later turned into a feature film starring Dame Judi Dench — I discovered that the girls were refused medical attention, including painkillers, during even the most difficult births; the nuns told them the pain was the penance they must pay for their sin. In the home where Philomena gave birth, an unkempt plot bears the names of babies and mothers, some as young as 15. There are undoubtedly many more there who have no memorial.

[Isgrimnur]

Hasbro

The Good Shepherd order of nuns, in Waterford, Ireland, has admitted putting laundry inmates to work on packaging board games such as Mouse Trap, KerPlunk and Buckaroo!.

In a statement to me for a story published in the Sunday Times they admitted that:

“In the 1980s, Hasbro entered into an agreement with the Good Shepherd Sisters in Waterford to provide materials for packaging by our residents. The residents who participated in this activity were regularly given what was then known as their ‘Hasbro money envelope’.”

The work continued over three decades, for a global toy market. "Pocket money" was paid instead of wages. The work was still being carried out as recently as four years ago. [2012 -Isg]
...
A multi national global corporation, with a presence on the New York Stock Exchange, was, allegedly, using a third party to get cheap labour done on a hush hush basis. And the whole operation was being described like a couple of scouts doing a bob-a-job.

Not only did footsoldiers working in Hasbro know about this work at the time, they felt they were being undercut for cheaper labour too.

“People working for Hasbro objected to [this work being done] on the grounds that Hasbro were letting full time people go at the same time,” the woman explained.

[Daehawk]

Aye, ainna iffn me grandmother had a kickstand Id reckon She'd be a bicycle. ...-Scotty. I have no idea why I typed that lol