IRELAND
Irish Independent
FRANK SHOULDICE – PUBLISHED IN THE IRISH INDEPENDENT ON WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1996 – PUBLISHED 11 MARCH 2014
Amid general shock and outrage over China’s so-called ‘Dying Rooms’, the focus of shame draws uncomfortably closer to home tomorrow evening when RTE broadcasts ‘Dear Daughter,’ a harrowing documentary about Christine Buckley, for 13 years a ward of the Goldenbridge orphanage in Dublin.
Louis Lentin’s one-hour programme retraces Christine Buckley’s difficult life. Abandoned after just three weeks, she passed from one orphanage to another for four years before entering Goldenbridge.
Her account of systematic humiliation and abuse, of deprivation, beatings and scaldings, suggests that for over a decade this Sisters of Mercy house ran on a form of discipline closer to sadism than charity.
“We got to the stage that it was so horrific we couldn’t believe it was happening,” she says. “It was the only way we could survive.”
Like over 100 other children who went into care there, her own name became taboo on admission. All individuality — including personal clothes and effects — was plucked away.
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