There is a term used in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church: "making reparation". It's required before a sin can be forgiven. But the four orders of nuns whose members used, abused and exploited for profit hundreds of other women over generations, seem not to be aware of it. The women who had the power, the all-powerful authority figures in the headquarters of the religious orders, and their "sisters", who had less but perhaps even more dangerous power, and stalked the Magdalene Laundries like the jailers they were, denied their prisoners hope, justice and charity. And they made a nice little (actually a very large) financial profit from it.

The crimes for which their victims were imprisoned were poverty, loneliness, bereavement, abandonment, and in the cases of those who were pregnant, innocence betrayed.

The money the victims' unpaid sweated labour made for the orders who had power over them amounted to vast wealth: assessed at €1.5bn in 2009.

And now the inheritors of that huge wealth, the current heads of the religious orders of nuns whose names struck terror into the dispossessed of past generations, are arrogantly and yes, wickedly, refusing to hand over a penny piece to make reparation for years of profitable and cruel exploitation.

It's that glaring and that simple.

Equally simple, it seems, is the fact that neither the legal system, the parliamentary system, nor the judicial system can do anything about it. Once again our utterly inadequate and flawed Constitution has failed to make provision for justice. Because that is what it means if the Dail is unable to pass laws to rectify this glaring injustice. And I certainly give the Taoiseach enough credit on the Magdalene issue to accept that he has taken advice before telling the Dail that he can only appeal to the hard-faced, financially cold-hearted money-grabbing religious orders of nuns to do their "moral and ethical duty", in the phrase used by the Minister for Justice Alan Shatter.

The Roman Catholic Church's power and wealth is constitutionally protected at every turn: the original Constitution was drafted to ensure it, as was the current document dating from 1937.

And these terrible, faceless women, who are refusing even to come into the light of day to be questioned concerning their greed and arrogance, can hide behind deeds of trust, and other acts of financial sleight of hand to ensure that they cannot be touched. The "saintly simple sisters" made damn sure that their wealth was beyond the reach of the helpless women they betrayed and destroyed over the generations, and is still beyond the reach of the taxpayers who are footing the bill for their cruel injustices. (Not that any taxpayer that I have spoken to begrudges the share of the national take that is going to set up the redress scheme for the surviving Magdalene victims. The State, after all, was complicit, again due to the nefarious influence of religious brainwashing.) But most of them are incensed at our national helplessness in pursuing the perpetrators of the daily vicious cruelties and humiliations suffered by the victims.

I am haunted to this day by a very early reporting experience when I covered the Children's Court. Yes, there were young thugs brought before it from time to time. But since it pre-dated the heroin scourge, it seemed to be a more innocent place than it is now. I certainly thought it was both innocent and sad as I watched two skinny (and filthy) little girls, who were 13 and 14 years old respectively, on a charge of being abroad without visible means of support. They were sentenced to a Magdalene Laundry, and fool that I was, I breathed a sigh of relief on their behalf, reared as I had been to believe the church was a just and caring institution (although I was already beginning to doubt it, and had never seen any evidence that it was a gentle one). I was talking to the clerk later and he said: "If you ask me, it should have been the two married men they were caught with who should be up here." The little girls were working prostitutes. And I was told that it was a rule that newspapers didn't report on child prostitution. Copy spiked.

I shudder to imagine what they would have been put through when the holy nuns got their hands on them. I hope they escaped. I even hope they were ill enough to die before they had to suffer the hellhole for too long.

We have the power under the Constitution to put people in Mountjoy for not paying their TV licence. And we do. We have the power to put people in Mountjoy for not paying parking fines. And we do (admittedly only after they've been sneering at their fellow taxpayers for years). But we don't have the power to incarcerate women who subjected others to slave labour over years. And we don't have the power to confiscate the obscene wealth that accrued because of the slave labour.

Religion is supposed to be based on morality: the church teaches (or is supposed to teach) the difference between what is legal and what is moral. It's damn good at doing that when its power over lay women's bodies is threatened, as we've seen recently.

But the proof of the hold the religious orders and the overall Catholic Church still have is that the most severe measure being called for on the Magdalene issue is merely that the orders involved should be stripped of their charitable status. (Even that, of course, is not possible under the laws in place in accordance with the Constitution, as the Taoiseach has had to tell us.)

He also told us that the victims do not have time on their side to allow the Government to pursue the orders. There is a solution: let the taxpayer pay; we won't object. And then let the Government, and all future governments if necessary, pursue these orders of nuns, relentlessly and mercilessly, up to and including bankruptcy if necessary, until they have made full financial, if not moral, reparation.

What we should be calling for, and I make no apology for writing it, is that any members of the religious orders who were responsible for the

shameful behaviour highlighted by Martin McAleese in his report into conditions in the Magdalene Laundries (in itself found to be inadequate and lacking in rigour by some survivors' representatives) who are still alive, any authority figures within the orders at the time of the laundries' operation still alive, should individually be required to serve a six-month internment under exactly the conditions imposed on their victims in the past.

They should be under lock and key 24 hours a day, receive inadequate, unhealthy food, work 12 hours of hard labour daily, not be permitted to speak to each other, sleep in filthy bedding, and be regularly verbally abused and humiliated, while receiving vicious physical punishment for any infringement of the rules.

For the record, the religious orders who should be so subject are: the Mercy Sisters, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Sisters of Charity and the Good Shepherd Sisters. These dreadful cold-blooded women shame Ireland; they shame religion; they shame womanhood; and they shame the God they profess to serve.

Irish Independent