IRELAND
Irish Examiner
By Bette Brown
In the course of compiling her book, ‘Stolen Lives’, Bette Brown has come to believe that the abuse of children in industrial schools was one of the darkest chapters in Ireland’s history.
TOWER BRIDGE stands majestically in the morning sunlight above the Saturday strollers. Among them, Mary Collins is admiring the scene in the city of London that she now calls home but her peace is fleeting.
Fear suddenly seizes her like a physical grip on the back of her head and she is a little girl again, running with her mother through fields in Cork, escaping from hell.
“The fear goes in through the back of my head. We are running, running all the time across the fields.” Mary is just two and a half, but she can sense her mother’s desperation.
“She was escaping. She’d found me, maybe she was looking for my sister Angela too. It could be days or weeks. I remember the rain all the time and the running.”
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