More repercussions
Stuck between a religious rock and a political hard place
Jim Carroll

From This morning's Times
MAGDALENE VICTIMS DIE WAITING FOR REDRESS
Ellen Coyne
Women with disabilities who spent time in Magdalene laundries have died waiting for the state to pay them the compensation they were owed.
The 'shocking' experiences of Magdalene laundry survivors who were denied compensation by the government was detailed in scathing evidence to an Oireachtas committee yesterday.
Peter Tyndall, the ombudsman, strongly criticised the government for refusing to compensate some of the women who were incarcerated in simi?lar workhouses because it claimed that it would cost too much.
Women with intellectual disabilities who are owed a total of ?1 million have not been paid because assisted capacity legislation has not been enacted. It was revealed yesterday that it would not be enacted until at least 2019, despite 17 elderly survivors waiting for compensation. Many are in the care of the religious orders that once housed them in Magdalene laundries.
The Department of Justice is locked in a dispute with Mr Tyndall, who pub?lished a damning report last year that said that the criteria the government was using for the redress scheme were too narrow. A total of 106 women have been refused payments because offi?cials found that they were not put in one of 12 specific institutions.
Mr Tyndall said that many of the women cleaned the same sheets as those in the laundries but were unfairly excluded from access to compensation. He told politicians that less than half of the ?54 million estimated cost of the scheme had been paid out and that it would cost a fraction of the remaining amount to pay the 106 women.
"I personally believe that the nature of the wrong that's been done to these women needs to be addressed regardless of the cost," Mr Tyndall said. After being an ombudsman for ten years, his report on the Magdalene laundry scheme was the first time that he had reached a point where a department "absolutely, categorically" refused to engage with a report before it was published, he said. "I am very, very disappointed by that."
He also criticised the department's decision to exclude women who qualified for an industrial schools compensation scheme from the Magdalene re?dress scheme Many women who were taught in one of the schools were sent to laundries when they were older.
"In order to avoid some people being compensated twice for the same wrongdoing, some people are being de?nied any compensation. That can't be right," Mr Tyndall said. The only explanation he had received for excluding them was a financial one.
When the scheme was set up in 2013 there were 40 women with serious in?tellectual disabilities who were owed compensation but were not paid because they had capacity issues. The Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act, which passed in 2015 and would allow the women to be paid, cannot come into effect because a new decision support service has not yet been set up.
The figure is now 17 women. The group includes nine women who spent more than a decade in the institutions and are entitled to the maximum ?100,000 under the state's restorative scheme. Mr Tyndall said that while some women had been made wards of court others had died before they could be paid. He said the department was not "proactively" ensuring women were paid and had not started to address the issue until it was raised by his office.
Jimmy Martin, assistant secretary at the Department of Justic?, later con?firmed that some women had been permanently excluded from the scheme because they had died waiting for the government to pay them.
Department officials also said that the crucial law would not be enacted this year, describing a 2018 date as "very, very ambitious".