IRELAND
New York Times

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: January 12, 2012

Mary Raftery, a journalist whose television documentaries exposed decades of abuse of needy children in state-sponsored, church-run schools in Ireland, prompting an apology by the prime minister and a government investigation, died on Tuesday in Dublin. She was 54.

The cause was cancer, her niece Isolde Raftery said.

Ms. Raftery uncovered the child abuse as a producer for Ireland’s national broadcasting service, RTE, and brought it to national attention in “States of Fear,” a three-part documentary series broadcast in April and May 1999. In examining the state child-care system in Ireland, the series brought to light a Dickensian network of reformatories and residential schools for poor, neglected and abandoned children known as industrial schools.

The schools, which were financed and supervised by the government and managed largely by religious orders, mainly Roman Catholic, served about 30,000 children from…