IRELAND
The Irish Times
Mary Raftery THERE’S A good deal of old guff handed out to young journalists in the guise of advice to guide them in their careers. The best of it emphasises getting the facts right, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and possibly making a difference if you work hard and get lucky.
Mary Raftery, a journalist best known for her television work, had succeeded on all those counts when she died in Dublin aged 54 earlier this week. Her singular achievement was to force Ireland to confront the fact that clergy had been sexually abusing children entrusted to their care, and that senior Catholic Church figures had conspired to cover this up.
She was not the first in the field, as RTÉ historian John Bowman has noted. Cathal Black’s independent documentary from 1980, Our Boys , dealt with traumatised former pupils of the Christian Brothers. Veteran TV director Louis Lentin’s 1996 drama documentary Dear Daughter vividly exposed cruelty at a Dublin orphanage run by nuns. But it was the work of Mary Raftery “which brought the conspiracy of silence which had protected the [Catholic] church in the 20th century to a dramatic end”, as historian Tom Garvin put it. Her work and that of her longtime collaborator and researcher Sheila Ahern was thorough, and it stuck.
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