NORTHERN IRELAND
Irish Times
Mon, Feb 10, 2014
A witness to the inquiry investigating historical institutional abuse in Northern Ireland has recounted how nuns refused to believe her when she told them of how she was sexually abused when she was a young girl.
The 58-year-old woman also told the inquiry today how for almost 50 years she has been trying to locate her older sister who was with her in the Sisters of Nazareth home in Derry.
The witness – who was in Nazareth House residential home from 1957 to 1969 – described a “cruel” regime where she suffered a number of beatings from individual nuns. Her most serious allegations were of two occasions when she spent time on placement on two farms when she was about 11 or 12 years of age, the inquiry in Banbridge, Co Down heard.
She recalled an occasion on the first farm where she was driving a tractor when another girl on board the vehicle from Nazareth House almost fell off. She said that in the aftermath of that incident a man abused her by touching her private parts. That abuse stopped when another man intervened and told him to stop.
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