Goldenbridge - a Hell for Orphans

By Frank Shouldice
Irish Independent
March 11, 2014

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/archive-goldenbridge-a-hell-for-orphans-30082643.html

Christine Buckley, leaves a hotel in Merrion Square, Dublin where she attended the Schools. Child Sex Abuse Commission Inquiry, 2006.

Amid general shock and outrage over China's so-called ‘Dying Rooms’, the focus of shame draws uncomfortably closer to home tomorrow evening when RTE broadcasts 'Dear Daughter,' a harrowing documentary about Christine Buckley, for 13 years a ward of the Goldenbridge orphanage in Dublin.

Louis Lentin's one-hour programme retraces Christine Buckley's difficult life. Abandoned after just three weeks, she passed from one orphanage to another for four years before entering Goldenbridge.

Her account of systematic humiliation and abuse, of deprivation, beatings and scaldings, suggests that for over a decade this Sisters of Mercy house ran on a form of discipline closer to sadism than charity.

"We got to the stage that it was so horrific we couldn't believe it was happening," she says. "It was the only way we could survive."

Like over 100 other children who went into care there, her own name became taboo on admission. All individuality — including personal clothes and effects — was plucked away.

For 13 years Christine Buckley was instead numbered like a convict.

While the orphanage did not brand the number Nazi-like into children's wrists, the effect of such dehumanising treatment has tattooed a psychological imprint from which no one claims to fully recover.

Number 89 thus tells her story, courageously lifting the lid on an abusive regime that left most of its wards seeking therapy and counselling ever since.

Unfortunately many others will identify with Christine Buckley's horrific plight. For them the programme is sure to resurrect bad memories buried as deep as the years will allow.

Those who were similarly brutalised in Goldenbridge or elsewhere revisit a past they would like to forget.

As they watch it unfold on TV they will wonder if anybody cares about what happened. Nobody, they recall, seemed to care back then; what's to say things will be any different now?

In typical gallows humour, a running joke among Goldenbridge House orphans is that they called it GBH, as in a reference to Grievous Bodily Harm they experienced there.

Each one tells her own torrid story. Caroline Hunt (Number 57) and her sister Mary were born in England during the 1950s.