'I feel deflated, so low': Magdalene laundry survivor reacts to losing case at UN Committee Against Torture
A MAGDALENE LAUNDRY survivor has expressed her disappointment that the United Nations Committee Against Torture has concluded the Irish State did not breach her human rights.
Coppin was born in St Columbanus’s county home in Killarney in 1949 to a teenage single mother. Aged two, she was taken from her mother and a judge sent her to an industrial school. As a teenager, between 1964 and 1968, she was held in three different Magdalene laundries. On one occasion in the Magdalene laundry in Peacock Lane, Cork, Coppin was wrongly accused of stealing sweets. As punishment, she was forced to spend three days in solitary confinement in a padded room – a bare room with no light or bed.
I lived through this abuse. I was part of an experiment of keeping girls, women, children and babies suppressed. It was and remains a violation of girls’ and women’s human rights. In 2011, following a recommendation by CAT, the Irish Government set up a committee chaired by then-Senator Martin McAleese to examine the State’s involvement in Magdalene laundries.
This phrase is often used in cases where legal action is brought such a long time after the original injury that a fair trial is deemed impossible, for instance because perpetrators have since died. In its decision in October 2022, CAT noted Coppin’s “contention that none of the investigations undertaken by the State party have been effective”.
“I felt deflated, so low, and very sad, not just for me but for all of the Magdalene women who died in vain. “The record demonstrates that the State party, other than gathering information, has failed to conduct a prompt, independent and thorough investigation into allegations of arbitrary detention, forced labour and ill-treatment to which the complainant has been subjected. The Committee’s decision sets a discouraging precedent undermining the obligations under article 12.”
“Most significantly, this case does not come to the Committee on a blank slate. The Committee in 2017 concluded “that the State party has not undertaken an independent, thorough and effective investigation,” and explicitly reiterated these conclusions in the May 2019 letter of its Rapporteur for Follow-Up.
She said Coppin’s High Court case shows that time is “central to the Irish State’s treatment” of survivors of Magdalene laundries and related institutions.
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