IRELAND
RTE News
In 2009, Donal O’Donoghue met Mary Raftery – the woman behind the landmark RTÉ series States of Fear.
Interview first published in June 2009
The recently published Ryan Report was a shocking indictment of institutional child abuse in Ireland. But a decade earlier, the RTÉ TV series States of Fear opened a Pandora’s box. Donal O’Donoghue meets the woman behind the landmark programme, Mary Raftery.
There’s no assigned doorbell and the office is a largely empty space. But if Mary Raftery has yet to set up base in Dublin city centre, the award-winning documentary-maker and journalist anticipates the day the shelves will groan with the weight of files and history.
But right now the furnishings are meagre: a couple of chairs and a table bearing a laptop, a mobile phone and bottle of juice. Coincidentally, or maybe not, Raftery’s neighbours are Saffron Pictures, makers of the award-winning Whistleblower, a drama based on the Lourdes Hospital scandal. Ten years after making the TV series States of Fear, Raftery remains best-known as someone who blew the whistle on institutional child abuse in this country. She is still asking the hard questions.
Mary Raftery is a bright woman, curious, clever and precise. “Don’t hold me to that”, she says, when exact statistics are not immediately to hand, but she’s not afraid to point the finger.
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