Mary Raftery, 54, Dies; Irish Journalist Documented Child Abuse

By Bruce Weber
New York Times
January 12, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/world/europe/mary-raftery-54-dies-documented-child-abuse-in-ireland.html?_r=1

Mary Raftery, a journalist whose television documentaries exposed decades of abuse of needy children in state-sponsored, church-run schools in Ireland, prompting an apology by the prime minister and a government investigation, died on Tuesday in Dublin. She was 54.

The cause was cancer, her niece Isolde Raftery said.

Ms. Raftery uncovered the child abuse as a producer for Ireland’s national broadcasting service, RTE, and brought it to national attention in “States of Fear,” a three-part documentary series broadcast in April and May 1999. In examining the state child-care system in Ireland, the series brought to light a Dickensian network of reformatories and residential schools for poor, neglected and abandoned children known as industrial schools.

The schools, which were financed and supervised by the government and managed largely by religious orders, mainly Roman Catholic, served about 30,000 children from the 1930s to the 1990s, according to a government report in 2009.

The films, making poignant use of interviews with victims, focused on the system in midcentury and presented a horrifying litany of torments the young people suffered at the schools: beatings, semi-starvation, insufficient clothing, filthy living conditions, overwork, emotional abuse and sexual assault.

Ms. Raftery was not the first to report on the abuse. In 1970, in what was known as the Kennedy Report, a government commission deplored the mistreatment and recommended that the schools be closed. (Some of the more egregious ones were.)

Later, memoirs like “The God Squad” by Paddy Doyle and “Fear of the Collar” by Patrick Touher, as well as “Dear Daughter,” a television documentary about a woman named Christine Buckley, all bore vivid witness to the savagery visited upon children by the school authorities, including priests and nuns. In 1998, the Christian Brothers, a Catholic order that ran many of the most notorious schools in Ireland, issued a public apology to those who had been abused in their care.

The widely seen “States of Fear” was not only painstakingly researched but also comprehensive, making the powerful case that the abuse had been widespread and systemic.

“What television can do, if you get it right, is it can concentrate and focus a story at a particular time, and make people face it and make people furious,” Ms. Raftery said in a television interview in 2010. “So it was a question of constructing a series of programs that wouldn’t allow people to go back into denial again, in other words that the body of evidence would be so overwhelming that it could not be denied anymore.”

Ms. Raftery and a co-author, Eoin O’Sullivan, followed the series with a book-length adaptation of the material, “Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools.”

The documentary series and the public outcry it engendered prompted the Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern, to apologize publicly. “The government wishes to make a sincere and long overdue apology to the victims of childhood abuse for our collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue,” he said, speaking before the Irish Parliament on May 11, 1999.

His government also established the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse, which, after an investigation of nearly a decade, released a withering report in 2009, describing the schools’ treatment of young people in agonizing detail. Thousands of victims received compensation, though the report was criticized by victims’ advocates for not naming the abusers.

After “States of Fear,” Ms. Raftery further jolted Irish society with investigative programs like “Cardinal Secrets,” about the sexual abuse of children in the Dublin Archdiocese, and “Behind the Walls,” about Ireland’s psychiatric hospitals and the large number of people committed there by their families.

“Bringing the truth out is always a positive thing, even though it may be a painful truth,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of the Dublin Archdiocese said in a tribute to Ms. Raftery this week. “I believe that through her exposition of sins of the past and of the moment, that the church is a better place for children and a place which has learned many lessons.”

Mary Frances Therese Raftery was born in Dublin on Dec. 21, 1957. Her father, Adrian, was in the Irish foreign service, and she spent much of her childhood abroad. Though she entered the University College of Dublin to study engineering, she was derailed by an interest in journalism and never finished her degree.

Ms. Raftery was a reporter for a local weekly in Dublin and a radio critic for another newspaper before she began writing investigative pieces for Magill, a current affairs magazine. A prescient article that forecast the collapse of a powerful developer’s empire propelled her career. She worked for RTE from 1984 to 2002.

Ms. Raftery is survived by her mother, Ita; her husband, David Waddell; a son, Ben; two brothers, Adrian and Iain; and a sister, Iseult.

“She demanded attention to the stories she told,” Colm O’Gorman, executive director of Amnesty International in Ireland and the founder of One in Four, an organization that supports victims of sexual abuse, said in an interview on RTE after Ms. Raftery’s death. “And they changed Ireland. They changed our society.”