A campaign group for former residents of Magdalene laundries has called for a ‘No’ vote in the upcoming referendum to replace the ‘mothers in the home’ clause with a statement on care within the family.

Writing in the Examiner newspaper, Professor Katherine O’Donnell, Dr Maeve O’Rourke, and Dr Claire McGettrick, of the Justice for Magdalenes Research group, noted the “growing numbers of Irish feminists who are publicly admitting that they will vote no” on the care amendment.

They say the proposed article “betrays the committed work of many years by groups who campaigned together to achieve important recommendations from the Citizens’ Assembly and an all-party Oireachtas Committee, only for the Government to propose an entirely opposed understanding of what best constitutes ‘Care.’”

They add: “The Government wants to insist that it is families, first, foremost and solely who must provide care while the State will “strive” to support them. The Government’s proposed clause makes a distance between citizens, presumed clustered in family groupings, and a transcendent State, removed from obligations to care, committed to (at best) offering forms of support for all of the caring work that must be done.”