IRELAND
Irish Times
[with video]
Patsy McGarry
Mon, Dec 29, 2014
Christine Buckley, who died on March 11th last, came from obscure origins.
She was, in the harsh language of the day, illegitimate, half caste and abandoned.
It was Ireland 1946, that same year Irish-born Fr Edward Flanagan of Boys’ Town in the US was appalled by the condition of children in such places as she grew up in. They were “a disgrace to the nation”, he said, before achieving the seemingly impossible and uniting all shades of Irish political opinion in untrammelled apoplexy.
She was a number, not a name, in a childhood full of terror, of endless beatings, casual cruelties, verbal lacerations, scaldings, and infants strapped to potties. She got 100 stitches in her leg after a beating. She made rosary beads, to a quota of 60 sets a day, and no one saw the irony.
Such was the childhood of a 21st century Irish hero.
It wouldn’t have happened in 20th century Ireland – a pious land where no bastard child of an Irish mother and a Nigerian father could hope to become a hero.
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