The apology in the Dail (Irish parliament) came about two weeks after a damning 1,000-plus page report was released detailing the way women and girls were maltreated inside the nun-controlled laundries.

Survivors groups were enfuriated when the Irish premier initially declined a fortnight ago to explicitly apologise for the state’s role in sending women and girls into the Magdalene Laundries, sometimes simply for coming from broken homes or being unmarried mothers.

In a powerful speech to a packed Dail Eireann, Kenny made some amends for what many view as a major error of judgment on the day the report was released.

At the end of his address, Kenny appeared to break down briefly, choking back tears as he quoted a Magdalene woman’s song to him during a meeting recently.

The Taoiseach said what happened to the Magdalene women had “cast a long shadow over Irish life, over our sense of who we are”.

He said he “deeply regretted and apologised” for the hurt and trauma inflicted upon those sent to the Magdalene Laundries.

Apologising to the women and girls of the Magdalene Laundries, he told parliament that they deserved “the compassion and recognition for which they have fought for so long, deservedly so deeply.” He said he hoped “it would help us make amends in the state’s role in the hurt of these extraordinary women.”

Kenny also announced a government-funded memorial to remember the 10,000 Magdalene women. As Kenny made his announcement, former residents of the Magdalene institutions held a vigil outside the gates of the Irish parliament in Dublin’s Kildare Street where they lit candles in memory of all those sent to the laundries.

The apology was accompanied by the announcement of a fresh compensation package for around 800 women still alive who were held in the laundries across Ireland. A senior Irish judge would be appointed to oversee how the survivors are looked after. The compensation deal will include counselling services, healthcare and individual payments, which Dublin hopes can be implemented without the involvement of lawyers and hefty legal bills.

Amnesty International accused the Fine Gael-Labour government of ignoring women exploited in laundries that operated across the border in Northern Ireland.

The report, headed by Senator Martin McAleese, found that the Irish State was complicit in sending girls and women to the laundries where they received no pay. However, the McAleese report did not cover Magdalene Laundries run in Northern Ireland up until the 1980s.

Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty’s director in Northern Ireland said: “Magdalene Laundries operated in Northern Ireland into the 1980s. I have spoken with women survivors of these institutions who now fear being left behind, with no inquiry in place – north or south – into their suffering.

By arrangement with the Guardian

A spontaneous protest movement about Belfast city council’s decision in early December to restrict the number of days the Union flag flies above city hall has morphed into a wider organisation whose actions, its opponents claim, are destabilising Northern Ireland.

Now, as the smoke clears from the battle grounds, especially in working class east Belfast, loyalists are threatening to take their protests south of the border. The newly constituted Ulster People’s Forum will hold a rally outside the Irish parliament next Saturday as well as a series of demonstrations close to one of the most unstable sectarian interfaces in Belfast.

A loyalist working class/underclass disconnected from the mainstream unionist parties has established a movement that has become a fresh focus for many other grievances ranging from social deprivation to the alleged maltreatment of unionist victims of the Troubles. Some of its demands are wildly unrealistic, such as the reintroduction of direct rule and the suspension of devolution.

The leaders emerging range from a former soldier who sells Nazi uniforms from a shop in Carrickfergus to veteran loyalists previously lukewarm about their paramilitary leadership’s support for the peace process and the Good Friday agreement.

Many of the protests that later turned violent have been organised on an ad hoc basis through social media. The “foot soldiers” of the disorder are mostly young men and teenagers wearing the uniform of hoodie and football scarf wrapped around face. And while some loyalist paramilitaries have been in the vanguard, such as members of the Ulster Volunteer Force, they have been unprepared for the depth of anger within their communities. Leading figures in the UVF have said they are concerned that extreme, anti-ceasefire elements, including loyalists with connections to the British far right, are trying to exploit the flag issue.

Ulster People’s Forum spokesman Willie Frazer said three coaches would take 150 people to the Irish capital this weekend. “We will be challenging the Irish government to change its flag flying policy and stop flying the tricolour 365 days per year over the Dail. If nationalists insist we can’t do this in Belfast, in our capital, then there should be full equality on this island. They should take down their flag.”

Frazer added that among those coming to Dublin would be unionist victims of the IRA during the Troubles.

“They are coming down to tell the taoiseach, Enda Kenny, and his government that they have reneged on their promise to meet and listen to them, to hear their concerns about collusion between the Irish state and the IRA.”

He also confirmed that the nascent protest movement would be targeting the home of Northern Ireland’s first minister and Democratic Unionist leader, Peter Robinson.

“When the idea that we march on Peter Robinson’s home was raised at a meeting of the Ulster People’s Forum last week in Newtonards it was met with wild cheering. There is a lot of pressure on to picket Robinson’s home, to make it clear to him on his doorstep that he is letting the loyalist, Protestant people down,” added Frazer.

He claimed that there had been meetings about the flag dispute from Enniskillen in the west to Bangor in the east. But the movement’s critics believe their hardline rhetoric is enabling dissident republicans to portray themselves as defenders of embattled nationalists and Catholics worried about loyalist attacks.

The Continuity IRA has warned loyalists to stay from the Irish capital this weekend; the demonstrators are arriving in a state which itself has lost its economic sovereignty to the IMF and EU and where there is little sympathy for the international image of Ireland portrayed by the northern protests.

A number of planned loyalist demonstrations close to a sectarian divide in east Belfast are also in danger of “creating fresh space for republican dissident terrorists”, according the MP for the area. Naomi Long, the Alliance MP who has been the subject of death threats because of her party’s role in the Belfast city council flag vote, was responding to reports that republican opponents of the peace process have offered to “defend” the Catholic enclave of Short Strand.

Long said the increasingly sectarian nature of the protests was “enabling dissident republicans to offer themselves as defenders of their people”.

“There are reflections here of 1969 and 1970 when people feeling under threat unfortunately looked towards paramilitary groups to defend them.”

By arrangement with the Guardian

On the day hardline loyalists — angered over Belfast city council’s decision to only fly the union flag (the flag of the United Kingdom) on designated days such as Queen Elizabeth’s birthday — moved their violent protests to the highly symbolic town of Carrickfergus, the Irish Republic introduced its sixth austerity budget in a row.

While the extremists saw the end of a policy of flying the union flag 365 days a year as an existential threat to the union itself, the financial and political realities in Dublin said otherwise.

Irish budget day showed how bankrupt and dependent the Republic is on the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the EU to fund the social welfare system, hospitals, schools and public services.

The idea of the Republic absorbing Northern Ireland in a unitary state seems economically far-fetched. The cost would add 15 per cent to the Republic’s public spending, which even in the Celtic Tiger boom years would have been a shock to the system.

So, in reality, the row over the UK’s flag on top of the City Hall in Belfast is more about an inter-communal squabble over symbols. Why then do unionist politicians employ incendiary language, denouncing the Alliance party this week as a “delivery system for Sinn Fein”, and loyalists riot and burn over a policy that does not alter the status quo?

Professor Peter Shirlow, from Queen’s University Belfast, who has spent over a decade mapping sectarian patterns across Northern Irish society, believes loyalists see red concerning double standards of nationalists. Shirlow points out Sinn Fein and the less nationalist SDLP recently voted to retain naming a children’s playground after IRA hunger striker Raymond McCreesh in Newry.

The Alliance party began 2012 in the crosshairs of the dissident republican terror groups because their leader, David Ford, is Northern Ireland’s justice minister. As part of the ongoing disputes in Maghaberry prison, for which Ford has responsibility, supporters of Continuity IRA and new IRA prisoners picketed Alliance’s HQ in Belfast’s University district and later smeared it with excrement.

Now Alliance is in the sights of hardline loyalists because the party was able to implement one of its core policies: to make parts of Northern Ireland, including council buildings, neutral venues for both communities. It was Alliance councillors, who hold the balance of power at City Hall, whose councillors were critical of taking down the union flag while ensuring it will still fly on 20 key days of the year.

This compromise did not satisfy mainstream unionist parties or the more extreme elements connected to loyalist paramilitaries. But, they ignored a key fact that the unionist electorate only has itself to blame for the growing representation of nationalist councillors in Belfast. Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson has called for an end to demonstrations around the flag flying, as loyalist protesters mounted road blocks in Belfast. — The Guardian, London

The story of the bank that almost bankrupted Ireland is about to be retold as a stage show, with the villains of the piece — from greedy bankers to politicians such as the former taoiseach Bertie Ahern — played by puppets. Or, according to its writer Paul Howard, could that be muppets?

Anglo: the Musical, opening at Dublin’s Bord Gais theatre, recounts through songs and drama how the Anglo Irish Bank fuelled the property boom and then collapsed, costing the Irish taxpayer up to 30 billion euros to date.

“There is a lot of doom and gloom out there,” said the co-producer Donal Shields. “So the idea of the show is to try and put on some form of entertainment, and spread some sort of happiness in the situation that we are in. We are not trying to trivialise it but at the same time it’s still an opportunity to laugh about it all.”

Shields accepted that the Irish appeared more inclined to send up their grim fiscal situation than go out and riot.

“We have a great history of satirists, going back to Jonathan Swift, and we like to send ourselves up. It’s in all of us. We have this ability not to take ourselves too seriously,” he said, as young men and women passed by with their hands up the insides of Enda Kenny, Brian Cowen and Angela Merkel dolls.

Howard was forced to make late changes to his script and score for legal reasons. He wrote the original version in March, before the arrest and charging of key figures in Anglo Irish such as its former chief executive Sean Fitzpatrick, whose characters had to be taken out of the show.

“I never thought I’d be writing a musical about a bank but the producers came to me with the idea,” Howard said. “Anglo Irish Bank is after all the biggest episode in our country’s history since independence…. it was a huge challenge to mine the laughs out of all that.”

The storyline revolves around a young Irish couple living on the fictional island of Innisdail, off the Irish Atlantic seaboard. Set initially in the time of the Celtic Tiger boom, Anglo Irish arrives on the island and offers the pair an 890 million euros loan to develop their home. The subsequent property crash leaves the couple — and the rest of the island, and indeed the whole state — bankrupt and near destitute.

Among the songs is Put Another Nought on the End — He’s a Friend. The use of puppets in the production raises the question of who was pulling whose strings during the boom years in Ireland — the politicians or the builders and bankers.

Asked whether he envisaged writing a musical about global financial scandals such as the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Howard said: “No, something closer to home. The rise and fall of Sean Quinn. Call it Quinnasty!” — The Guardian, London