So there is a new report about the Magdalene laundries. People are so shocked! So upset! They never knew we were such a country, such a cold, cruel place!

Same with the hand wringing with regard to cyber bulling. The poor little things! Such pain they must go through, how we must protect them!

Lets be clear; no one gives a damn. Not at all, not in the slightest. Oh sure, there may be quite a bit of ‘please think of the children’, but it’s all steam from a kettle in terms of permanence. And there’ll be no tenacity in terms of moves to make amends.

The Magdalene Laundries were there for generations and no one cared. They are exactly what the Catholic Church wanted and still wants, a place of punishment and confinement for women who were seen to have slighted the moral code, with no oversight or correction over the authority supervising these women. These women were, as a result, denied person-hood,  economic power, sexual rights and any element of human expression, and most of our country didn’t and doesn’t care in the slightest. These women still have no economic power, and so the powers that be will just get in their car and go home at the end of the day, with no further thought of them.

What do you think is happening to women in prisons? In mental homes? In care homes for teenagers? What do you think is happening in maternity wards, in courts, in work place environments? No one thinks of these places at all, not in the slightest. We sigh, we tut, we change the channel. And our generation will be subject to the same anger, the same accusations from our children, and we’ll say we never knew. Because we never cared to know, and that will be that.