In August 2012, Justice for Magdalenes (JFM, now JFM Research) made its principal submission, State Involvement with the Magdalene Laundries to the Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries (IDC). The submission consisted of a 145-page document which was supported by 795 pages of survivor testimony and 3,707 pages of archival evidence and legislative documentation. It outlined comprehensive evidence of State complicity in the abuses experienced by girls and women in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries.
JFM Research has donated this archival material to the Irish Research Council project Magdalene Institutions: Recording an Archival and Oral History, conducted at University College Dublin (UCD) and to the Waterford Memories Project at Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT). The archive has been digitised by WIT, which will host a copy of the digitised materials on this website. The original archive will be stored at UCD Archives, where a copy of the digitised archive will also be made available.
The 795 pages of witness statements are not included in the archive; however some witnesses have donated their testimonies to the Magdalene Oral History Project at UCD. These oral histories will be available through UCD Archives and the Irish Qualitative Data Archive. Further information is available at http://jfmresearch.com/home/oralhistoryproject/.
Detailed accounts of the JFM campaign are available in: O’Rourke, M. and Smith, JM. (2016) ‘Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries: Confronting a History Not Yet in the Past’. In: Alan Hayes and Maire Meagher (eds.), A Century of Progress? Irish Women Reflect. Galway: Arlen House. Please see also: http://jfmresearch.com/home/jfm-political-campaign-2009-2013/.
JFM Research is delighted to have had the opportunity to work with Dr Jennifer O'Mahoney and Kieran Cronin at WIT on this project and we look forward to continued collaboration in the future. We also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of WIT and the volunteers who helped to digitise the archive to such a high quality. We thank Jennifer, Kieran and their colleagues for their enthusiasm for this project, which plays vital role in making available a permanent record of the lived experiences of women in girls in the laundries.
Contents and Citation Instructions for the Archive
Bundle 3; Bundle 4;
Bundle 5; Bundle 6;
Bundle 7; Bundle 8;
Bundle 9; Bundle 10;
Special thanks
Special thanks must go to Maria Ronan, Sue Goona, Nancy Rochford-Flynn, Peggy McHale and David Kane for all their work on digitising, cataloguing and creating the digital archive.
Any correspondence concerning this specific repository should be sent to kcronin@wit.ie.
This project has been funded by the Heritage Council under the Heritage Management Grant Scheme 2016.
