In August 2012, Justice for Magdalenes (JFM, now JFM Research) made its principal submission, State Involvement in 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 is now donating 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 and where the original archive will also be stored, while the digitised archive will also be made available at UCD Archives.

JFM Research is delighted to have had the opportunity to work with Dr Jennifer O’Mahony 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.

Click here to return to the Magdalene Oral History page.