Why did Taoiseach find that sorry was still the hardest word to say?

Date Published: 20-Feb-2013

If you had time to read the very long and very thorough report of Martin McAleese and his committee into the Magdalene Laundries, one of the first words that would form on your lips – besides ‘horrible’ and ‘unbelievable’ – would be ‘sorry’.

And yet we’ve played out a political pantomime over the past fortnight with Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s supporters saying ‘oh yes he did’ and everybody else saying, more or less, ‘oh no, he didn’t’.

Why is ‘sorry’ the hardest word to say politically, especially for a serving Taoiseach? Why has it taken fourteen days, meetings with Magdalene survivors, and a trip to London to allow him come up with a formal apology on behalf of the State?

The doorstep-size report was very well flagged. And us political correspondents who patrol what we call the ‘prison landing’ (the corridor that links all our rooms) on the third floor of Molesworth House said to each other in the days leading up to its publication that Kenny was going to go big on the apology, in the same vein as he had done when the Report on child sexual abuse by clerics in the Diocese of Cloyne was published.

Imagine our shock with his insipid reaction in the Dail, telling survivors he was sorry that they had suffered and lived under a cloud for so many years and that it had taken so long to lift the stigmata.

Kenny has some limitations as a politician but one of them isn’t a lack of emotional intelligence. He can do empathy better than he can do petulance. If there is a human response needed for a situation, the politician from Islandeady has few peers.

And here was a report that wasn’t all bad and showed that the laundries had performed a societal function in some areas in the complete absence of State support (an alternative to prison; a sanctuary for destitute women). But the parts that were bad (and there were many) were often very bad. We read of bleak, harsh, compromised, indentured lives. We read of women who had been neglected, exploited, forgotten about, condemned to clean the soils and stains of other people’s lives.

And yet the Taoiseach’s apology was everything it shouldn’t have been – mealy-mouthed, conditional, qualified and ultimately insincere.

I knew a fair deal about what conditions were like going back to my days as a young reporter with The Connacht Tribune. In that year, the Magdalene Laundry in Galway closed down and I wrote a longish investigative piece which first appeared in November 1990.

I’m not going to revisit the details, only to say that I had never really known about the existence of the laundry in my native city until I started researching it (prompted by City Tribune editor Michael Glynn). What caught me in the throat more than anything else that it was still open in 1990 – it seemed even then like a dark relic from another era.

But then the orphanage and industrial school in Lower Salthill (another sinister throwback) was only being wound down around the same time. And despite a promise to modernise, the vast gloomy overcrowded psychiatric hospitals like St Brigid’s in Ballinasloe, they were still warehousing hundreds and hundreds of ‘clients’ in shabby dorms.

And you know, almost a quarter of a century later, in a few places around the country, some of those old wards – wholly inappropriate settings for a human being to live out their lives – are still trundling on.

We all though society had moved on but there was still an overlap that few saw, or wanted to see. The last Magdalene Laundry closed only in 1996 – that’s only 17 years ago.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.