IRELAND
National Catholic Reporter
Jan. 12, 2012
By Thomas P. Doyle
APPRECIATION
Mary Raftery, an Irish journalist whose documentary series States of Fear exposed abuse in Irish Catholic schools, died in Dublin on Monday. She was 54.
Mary was a journalist by profession, but by vocation, she was a deeply honest and compassionate woman who fearlessly challenged the Irish Catholic Church, and in doing so, made the present and the future a safer place for children.
Mary may not be as well-known in the United States as she is in her native Ireland, yet her life has made a profound difference for victims of clergy abuse everywhere. She did more than any one person to force the systemic vicious abuse in the Irish industrial schools into the open. She continued with her passion to help victims with her documentary Cardinal Secrets, an expose of the cover-up of sexual abuse in the archdiocese of Dublin.
In 1999, Mary produced States of Fear. The ground-breaking documentary series revealed the almost-unbelievable and certainly horrifying degree of physical and sexual abuse in Irish industrial schools run by religious orders. The revelations chilled Ireland to the bone and resulted in what came to be known as the Ryan Commission to investigate the abuse.
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