based women meeting Enda Kenny 16 February 2013 Last updated at 11:46 Around 10,000 women and girls were sent to the laundries Irish prime minister Enda Kenny is meeting UK-based women in London who spent time in the Republic of Ireland's Magdalene laundries. About 10,000 women passed through laundries - run by Roman Catholic nuns - between 1922 and 1996. Earlier this month a report found the Irish Republic government was involved in running the laundries, where women and girls worked without pay. Mr Kenny has so far stopped short of a formal apology. The taoiseach has admitted the laundries operated in a "harsh and uncompromising Ireland" but has resisted calls from the opposition Fianna Fail party to make a formal apology from the Irish state. Magdalene Laundries BBC correspondent Nick Higham said: "The inmates included unmarried mothers, women guilty of petty crimes, or simply girls from broken homes. The last laundry - in a Dublin convent - closed as late as 1996. The inquiry chaired by Senator Martin McAleese found 2,124 of those detained in the institutions were sent by the authorities. Whole lives Mr Kenny has offered an expression of regret for the stigma attached to former inmates. Earlier this week he met the Magdalene Survivors Together group, who have said they are confident they will receive an apology. Our correspondent said Mr Kenny was coming to London to talk to more than a dozen former inmates living in the UK. Our correspondent said: "Some women spent their whole lives in the laundries and died there, but most stayed only a few months, and many fled Ireland after their release... never to return." Women were forced into Magdalene laundries for a crime as minor as not paying for a train ticket, the McAleese report found. The report also confirmed that a police officer could arrest a girl or a woman without warrant if she was being recalled to the laundry or if she had run away. Fianna Fail has called for the establishment of a dedicated unit within the Department of Justice to co-ordinate the Irish Republic's response to the McAleese report, including all forms of redress for the survivors. The system was the subject of a 2002 film, The Magdalene Sisters, which starred Geradline McEwan and Anne-Marie Duff, whose director said at the time he believed the former inmates should have received an apology.