Earliest Magdalene Laundries outrage?

POD: A major British newspaper investigates the institutions and sensationally publishes the findings on their front page for day after day, causing witchhunts/outrage similar to OTL.
What's the earliest this could concievably happen?
 
My recollection is that Catholic clerical abuse scandals hit the global consciousness big-time only in the late 1980s. Before that, it was mostly just confined to hushed innuendo in Catholic circles and snide jokes in non-Catholic ones.

The earliest cases I can recall in Canada were the Christian Brothers cases in Newfoundland, which hit the news in 1989 or so. Those were the first significant cases I remember in Canada, but I seem to recall that they might have been following on the heels of revelations elsewhere.

I'm not exactly sure what made people at that time suddenly sit up and take notice of things that had been going on under everyone's collective nose for decades if not centuries. Possibly the weakened authority of the Catholic Church in traditional Catholic communities had something to do with it.

Whatever the social circumstances were that led to greater disclosure, I guess a good route for your scenario would be to get those circumstances somehow duplicated in Ireland. Though I notice that your OP calls for a BRITISH newspaper to expose the crimes. Is this because you regard Ireland at the time as being internally incapable of finding out on its own?
 
Is this because you regard Ireland at the time as being internally incapable of finding out on its own?

The Irish state was involved--they used the laundries as a sort of juvenile-reform institute* and police would return girls who ran away. And the Church wielded so much cultural power in Ireland for the longest time, an Irish paper might not be willing to investigate.

*Sinead O'Connor spent time in one after shoplifting as a teenager. Her experience wasn't this nightmarish hellhole of horror, but she still wasn't happy about it.
 
Would the expose also include all the other abuses in state run institutions? One thing that has become clear is that Catholic institutions were often bad, and that the kind of abuses were not confined to them alone.
 
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