A journalist who used the truth to set us free

MARY Raftery was a remarkable person. She shone a light into the hidden past of Ireland, exposing the horrors of the industrial schools and laying bare a crime against humanity for long covered up and denied.

Her book Suffer the Little Children and the brilliant States of Fear TV series appeared before the Ryan Report, alerting us to the shattering catalogue of shame that was slowly approaching publication.

She revealed the truth about what we now refer to increasingly as the “Irish Gulags“, where boys and girls cowered in terror from people who beat, bullied, and traumatised them on a daily basis or scarred their lives with sexual abuse.