IRELAND
Irish Independent
By Caitriona Palmer
Tuesday February 05 2013
TO account for a missing decade of her life, 79-year-old Josephine Murphy uses a comforting euphemism: she tells friends and family that between 1947 and 1957 she was simply, “with the nuns”.
A product of Ireland’s industrial school system, Josephine is a formidable character. A tiny woman with a steely interior, her back-breaking work ethic is the product of nearly three decades spent in Ireland’s gulag. This remarkable woman has suffered personal tragedies that would have left most human beings inconsolable.
As a child, Murphy – not her real name – was taken from her unmarried mother and sent to live in an industrial school in Waterford. As a naive 26-year-old, after a life spent in institutions, Josephine fell pregnant and was put in a mother-and-baby home in Bessboro, Cork city.
There she gave birth to a little girl, a baby she adored for 18 months before the child was taken from her by the nuns and sent to live with another family in America.
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