Caitriona Palmer: Stolen Lives - How Women like Josie Were Cruelly Robbed of Their Best Years

By Caitriona Palmer
Irish Independent
February 5, 2013

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/caitriona-palmer-stolen-lives-how-women-like-josie-were-cruelly-robbed-of-their-best-years-3376978.html

TO account for a missing decade of her life, 79-year-old Josephine Murphy uses a comforting euphemism: she tells friends and family that between 1947 and 1957 she was simply, "with the nuns".

A product of Ireland's industrial school system, Josephine is a formidable character. A tiny woman with a steely interior, her back-breaking work ethic is the product of nearly three decades spent in Ireland's gulag. This remarkable woman has suffered personal tragedies that would have left most human beings inconsolable.

As a child, Murphy – not her real name – was taken from her unmarried mother and sent to live in an industrial school in Waterford. As a naive 26-year-old, after a life spent in institutions, Josephine fell pregnant and was put in a mother-and-baby home in Bessboro, Cork city.

There she gave birth to a little girl, a baby she adored for 18 months before the child was taken from her by the nuns and sent to live with another family in America.