The Irish Times – Saturday, February 4, 2012

JOANNE HUNT

THE MINISTER for Education is to write to the 18 religious congregations, which ran residential institutions where children were abused, asking them to contribute more towards the €1.2 billion bill for compensating victims.

The letter from Ruairí Quinn follows questions put to Taoiseach Enda Kenny in the Dáil yesterday about the status of the payment of compensation by the congregations.

In 2009, the Ryan commission published its finding that children put into State care in religious-run residential institutions had suffered systemic abuse. Under the 2002 indemnity agreement, the congregations agreed to provide a contribution of €128 million to those abused, comprising cash, property and counselling services.

The final cost of the response to residential institutional child abuse, however, has since been estimated to be in the region of €1.36 billion. The Government said last year that it believed this should be shared on a 50-50 basis, between the taxpayer and those responsible for managing the institutions where the abuse took place.

Last July, Mr Quinn expressed his disappointment at the level of contributions offered by religious congregations to meet costs of the compensation, saying that offers from the religious congregations to date had fallen far short of the amount needed.

The department said yesterday that the letter had already been in train, before the questions received by the Taoiseach, and that the correspondence was “the official expression” of what Mr Quinn had asked of the congregations last summer.

A spokeswoman confirmed that the letter would be sent in the next fortnight.

Congregations urged over compensation bill

The religious congregations that ran residential institutions where children were abused are to be asked to contribute more towards the €1.2bn bill for compensating victims.

The 18 religious congregations that ran residential institutions where children were abused are to be asked to contribute more towards the €1.2bn bill for compensating victims.

Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn is to write to the congregations within a fortnight.
He made his remarks after Taoiseach Enda Kenny told religious congregations in Dublin there is a responsibility on everybody concerned to conclude a deal on the matter.

Mr Kenny is also calling on these religious congregations to pay more towards the abuse compensation bill.

(From the RTE Website 3rd February 2012)

Shatter considers Bethany Home investigation

Minister for Justice & Equality Alan Shatter has said he is considering very carefully demands for an investigation of the former Protestant-run Bethany Home.

Former residents have accused the Government of discriminating against them on religious grounds by excluding them from the remit of its investigation of the Catholic-run Magdalene Laundries.
Mr Shatter gave his assurance to William Irwin, a Co Armagh-based member of the Northern Assembly.
However, he told him there are no plans at present to expand the brief of the Government-appointed McAleese Committee to include the Bethany mother-and-baby home where, despite State inspections, a number of unreported deaths occurred before and during WWII.

The McAleese Committee is investigating the State’s involvement in the Magdalene Laundries.
Mr Irwin had written to Mr Shatter echoing calls by Minister Arlene Foster from the Northern Executive for the former Dublin-based home to be included in the committee’s remit.
The two dozen or so former residents are confident such a move would lead to the State compensating them for neglect.

Mr Shatter assured Mr Irwin that he is carefully considering the appropriateness and practicality of addressing the issues surrounding the home in a satisfactory manner.
The Minister has already rejected suggestions that the State’s current position is motivated by religious discrimination.

Sally Mulready’s life began in a children’s institution in 1950s Ireland, followed by emigration and involvement in some of the biggest campaigns of the past two decades. Now she’s on the Council of State, writes MARK HENNESSY , London Editor

ENTERING THE WARMTH of Sally Mulready’s home in Hackney, in northeast London, on a bitterly cold day, you are greeted by echoes of Ireland: the sound of Pat Kenny’s radio show, and The Irish Times and Irish Independent on the dining-room table. Bridie the cat comes to investigate.

On the day we meet, Mulready is preparing to leave for Dublin, for the first meeting of President Michael D Higgins’s Council of State, at Áras an Uachtaráin – followed, sadly, by the funeral of Mary Raftery, the journalist who helped reveal the scandal of Ireland’s children’s institutions.

Raftery’s death is especially poignant, as the broadcast of her documentary series States of Fear , in 1999, changed Mulready’s life, propelling her on a decade-long campaign to help abuse victims who had fled Ireland for Britain, and many of whom had never found peace.

Mulready herself knows something about the institutions. Born in 1950, she spent her first four years in the mother-and-babies home on Navan Road in Dublin with her mother, Sheila, before the two were separated, in accordance with the rules of the time, when Mulready was four.

Her mother went to England. Mulready went to an orphanage elsewhere in Dublin – “a benign, beautiful place on the Kilmacud Road in Stillorgan” – though at the age of nine her life changed once more with her transfer to St Mary’s Industrial School, in Sandymount.

“That was a completely different kind of institution, a big melting pot of children, from orphans to children sent there by the courts, children who were suddenly bereaved. It was a very, very wild place, [but] it wasn’t vicious.”

Fifty years on, she still keeps in occasional touch with one of the nuns. “I am 60. How old was she when she was looking after me? We had no sense of them being anything other than nuns. We never saw them as human beings, with feelings.”

Even while at St Mary’s, Mulready knew that boys in other institutions were being physically abused. It was not until Raftery’s investigation was broadcast that she understood about sexual abuse, “although it came as no surprise to me”.

The suffering was visible at Christmas, when the children held in the institutions were brought together for charity evenings at the Savoy – hosted, separately, by Cadbury and CIÉ – where they were encouraged “to stuff our faces with chocolate” and sing Christmas songs.

“I saw even then the absolute hardship and suffering of young boys. They had it in their faces. They were very subdued; they never smiled,” she says, adding that the St Mary’s children were “more assertive; we weren’t afraid”.

Decades later, having watched States of Fear , Mulready, by then secretary of the Federation of Irish Societies, knew that something had to be done in Britain, because there “was very little reference to the possibility that there were survivors outside of Ireland”.

Before States of Fear , two small groups of men had begun to gather separately in Coventry and Sheffield to talk among themselves about their experiences. But the programme opened the floodgates.

Mulready travelled Britain, briefing survivors on the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, which was set up in Ireland in 2000, and the later Residential Institutions Redress Board, which dealt with financial compensation. “A meeting that started at one o’clock would still be going on at six. People would just stand up and preface what they had to say by saying, ‘I’m telling this for the first time: I have never told a soul this.’ We heard testimonial after testimonial after testimonial.”

Unlike some former inmates of the industrial schools in Britain, Mulready accepts that the redress board “did its best with the evidence it had”. Most of those who went before it – she did not go before it – had their cases settled without having to give evidence. “Had we all been marched into court it would have taken us all eight to nine years to have our cases heard. Very few of us would have been able to produce any witnesses to the assaults. The people we were accusing were dead,” she says.

She is bitterly critical of the religious orders, however. “They have delivered less than a quarter of the promised funding, and Ruairí Quinn is having one hell of a battle to try to get more resources out of them.”

Today, Mulready, a British Labour Party councillor, is deeply involved in the fight for recognition by some of the 30,000 women who were held in the church-run Magdalen laundries, who were denied the right to seek compensation from the redress board.

Mulready was an experienced campaigner by the time States of Fear emerged, having supported the miners’ strike in Britain in 1984, the Birmingham Six release campaign, and efforts to get the Irish government to fund organisations working with vulnerable Irish emigrants.

In the early 1990s, the decayed bodies of a succession of elderly Irishmen were found dead in their flats in Camden – months and years after their lonely, ignored deaths – prompting demands for action.

In 1994, the Irish Elderly Advice Network was formed, with Mulready at its head and a budget of just £9,000 (€10,800). To date it has helped 4,000 vulnerable Irish people, aiding them, among other ways by securing millions in unclaimed welfare and pensions benefits.

Before the network was set up, she wrote to the Department of Foreign Affairs, in Dublin, seeking funds. She got a letter back saying the group was not a priority at the time. “I was absolutely astonished, but it actually put a bit of fight in me. “I said, ‘I’m not accepting this.’ This is the community that sent money back home in remittances, that had kept Irish families off their knees – brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers – through the money that they sent home every week in cash in envelopes.” Two years later, after campaigning by Mulready, the Federation of Irish Societies under Seamus McGarry, and the Council of Irish Counties, among others, funding arrived from Dublin and it has kept coming.

THE 1990s MARKED a sea change in the way Ireland looked on its emigrants, spurred on by documentaries that highlighted the squalidness that some endured.

Equally, the Irish Embassy started to change. “I have been here for 40 years, and it wasn’t until Ted Barrington came [as ambassador, in 1995] that I ever got an invitation to the Embassy. The Irish Embassy was some sort of remote place that well-to-do people in the community went to. Those with influence congregated around the Irish Embassy and the Irish Club in Eaton Square, and the rest of us did our socialising in the Irish Centre in Camden and in the pubs around Camden, Brent, Ealing, all those places.”

Like other Irish emigrants of the 1960s, Mulready remembers having to be most wary of one’s own people. “It was absolutely dreadful; I remember that myself. I came here in 1966 looking for accommodation, and like lots of people we were living in rooms. An awful lot of the landlords were Irish, and they were just downright exploitative, unpleasant, bossy,” she says, adding that her grandmother always used to say, “Strangers are better to you than your own.”

Mulready did benefit from the kindness of strangers, when she worked first in a laundry and in the London Electricity Board. “I was taken care of, looked after, my interests protected . . . They were all Londoners, old-fashioned, from Hackney.”

With just a primary education from St Mary’s, Mulready went back to school for a day a week, earning an A-Level and, later, “the whole Educating Rita bit”, achieving a degree in history.

“For the first five years of my life here I didn’t mix that much with Irish people. I went to the odd dance in the Gresham ballroom, on Holloway Road. But I found the Irish community difficult,” she says, referring to sexism and cliquishness.

Today, she says, “the Irish community is better, stronger, more caring than it ever was, and much more connected . . . but there are still hard-core sections of the Irish community, not just single Irishmen, who need help.”

Most new emigrants are better educated and more confident than their predecessors, “but not all of them are educated and competent. There are going to be a lot of really vulnerable people, feeling really rejected and disappointed, who are not leaving of their free will.”

The place on the Council of State offers a platform, but Mulready is not yet sure quite what she can do with it. “It means an awful lot. It is a terrific honour for me and my family. I have to pinch myself constantly and ask, ‘Is it really me?’ I don’t come from the normal classes on whom an honour of this sort is usually bestowed. It means an awful lot to the Irish community, too.”

The proposed Constitutional Convention offers the Irish in Britain the chance to be heard, she says, particularly on the right to vote in some elections, although she says she has not made up her mind on the issue. “I think we have to have a dialogue about what we mean about votes for the Irish. I have been here 40 years; I pay my taxes in this country; I am fully settled,” she says, adding, “My family is here; my whole life is here.

“I never wanted to leave Ireland, but, ironically, I regard it as the best thing I ever did. I wouldn’t have had any of those doors open for me. I believe that if I went back tomorrow they probably still wouldn’t be open to me.”

But now she must rush for her flight. The President is waiting.

Curriculum Vitae

Name Sally Mulready

Age 60

Born Dublin

Why is she in the news? President Michael D Higgins has appointed her to the Council of State

What does she do? She’s a British Labour Party councillor and head of the Irish Elderly Advice Network, which has helped 4,000 vulnerable Irish in Britain. She has also campaigned on behalf of abuse victims, the Birmingham Six and, more recently, those who were held in the Magdalen laundries, who have so far been denied compensation by the State

Jan. 12, 2012
By Thomas P. Doyle

APPRECIATION

Mary Raftery, an Irish journalist whose documentary series States of Fear exposed abuse in Irish Catholic schools, died in Dublin on Monday. She was 54.

Mary was a journalist by profession, but by vocation, she was a deeply honest and compassionate woman who fearlessly challenged the Irish Catholic Church, and in doing so, made the present and the future a safer place for children.

Mary may not be as well-known in the United States as she is in her native Ireland, yet her life has made a profound difference for victims of clergy abuse everywhere. She did more than any one person to force the systemic vicious abuse in the Irish industrial schools into the open. She continued with her passion to help victims with her documentary Cardinal Secrets, an expose of the cover-up of sexual abuse in the archdiocese of Dublin.

In 1999, Mary produced States of Fear. The ground-breaking documentary series revealed the almost-unbelievable and certainly horrifying degree of physical and sexual abuse in Irish industrial schools run by religious orders. The revelations chilled Ireland to the bone and resulted in what came to be known as the Ryan Commission to investigate the abuse.

When States of Fear aired in 1999, it sent shock waves through Ireland. But most importantly, it vindicated the thousands of victims whose youth had been destroyed in the living nightmares scattered throughout the country.

Mary’s other major project involving the church was a documentary about sexual abuse perpetrated by priests in the Dublin archdiocese.

Cardinal Secrets aired on a Thursday night in October 2002. On Friday morning, the front pages of the major Dublin newspapers zeroed in on the culture of dishonesty and cover-up orchestrated by the hierarchy.

The hard-hitting documentary portrayed the sexual violation in graphic and forceful terms. The most infuriating moment in the film comes when a reporter asks Cardinal Desmond Connell, then archbishop of Dublin, how often he met with victims. He replied, “I’m a very busy man.”

I first met Mary in 2002, when she was working on Cardinal Secrets. She wanted to interview me for the film, so I flew from Germany, where I was living at the time, to Dublin.

I met Mary and her co-producer, Mick Peelo, and we went to dinner at a small Thai restaurant. I liked her from the start. She was unassuming, gentle and obviously brilliant. But what struck me more than anything was her compassion and quiet outrage at the spectacle of sexual and physical violation of the innocent by the church. Our only point of contention was when Mary wanted me to wear a Roman collar for the interview. By then, I didn’t even own one, and was loath to put on the garb again for many reasons, not the least of which was my fear that abuse survivors would see me in it and think I had betrayed them.

Mary and Mick were adamant: “If you wear that thing, even the pious Irish old ladies will believe every word that comes out of your mouth.”

She won. I located a clergy collar and carried it in a shopping bag to the RTE studio the next day. I put it on in the men’s room and sat for the interview.

Cardinal Secrets was a success, certainly not because I was in it, but because Mary and Mick were thorough, fearless and direct. The result: the investigation by the Murphy Commission, whose report was issued in November 2009.

Mary and I were instant friends. We stayed in contact and would get together whenever I was in Dublin. She never changed — she was always gentle and sensitive, but her courage and willingness to take personal risks to expose injustice never wavered.

Mary Raftery’s life was short when considered in terms of years. Yet she did more in those years for Ireland, for children, for abuse survivors and for humanity than most could ever dream of accomplishing. The Irish culture was in desperate need of liberation from the chains of clericalism. Mary Raftery, more than anyone else, wielded the ax that shattered those stifling and destructive bonds.

[Tom Doyle is a priest, canon lawyer, addictions therapist and longtime supporter of justice and compassion for clergy sex abuse victims. He is a co-author of the first report ever issued to the U.S. bishops on clergy sex abuse, in 1986.]

By BRUCE WEBER
The New York Times.

Mary Raftery, a journalist whose television documentaries exposed decades of abuse of needy children in state-sponsored, church-run schools in Ireland, prompting an apology by the prime minister and a government investigation, died on Tuesday in Dublin. She was 54.
Enlarge This Image

The cause was cancer, her niece Isolde Raftery said.

Ms. Raftery uncovered the child abuse as a producer for Ireland’s national broadcasting service, RTE, and brought it to national attention in “States of Fear,” a three-part documentary series broadcast in April and May 1999. In examining the state child-care system in Ireland, the series brought to light a Dickensian network of reformatories and residential schools for poor, neglected and abandoned children known as industrial schools.

The schools, which were financed and supervised by the government and managed largely by religious orders, mainly Roman Catholic, served about 30,000 children from the 1930s to the 1990s, according to a government report in 2009.

The films, making poignant use of interviews with victims, focused on the system in midcentury and presented a horrifying litany of torments the young people suffered at the schools: beatings, semi-starvation, insufficient clothing, filthy living conditions, overwork, emotional abuse and sexual assault.

Ms. Raftery was not the first to report on the abuse. In 1970, in what was known as the Kennedy Report, a government commission deplored the mistreatment and recommended that the schools be closed. (Some of the more egregious ones were.)

Later, memoirs like “The God Squad” by Paddy Doyle and “Fear of the Collar” by Patrick Touher, as well as “Dear Daughter,” a television documentary about a woman named Christine Buckley, all bore vivid witness to the savagery visited upon children by the school authorities, including priests and nuns. In 1998, the Christian Brothers, a Catholic order that ran many of the most notorious schools in Ireland, issued a public apology to those who had been abused in their care.

The widely seen “States of Fear” was not only painstakingly researched but also comprehensive, making the powerful case that the abuse had been widespread and systemic.

“What television can do, if you get it right, is it can concentrate and focus a story at a particular time, and make people face it and make people furious,” Ms. Raftery said in a television interview in 2010. “So it was a question of constructing a series of programs that wouldn’t allow people to go back into denial again, in other words that the body of evidence would be so overwhelming that it could not be denied anymore.”

Ms. Raftery and a co-author, Eoin O’Sullivan, followed the series with a book-length adaptation of the material, “Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools.”

The documentary series and the public outcry it engendered prompted the Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern, to apologize publicly. “The government wishes to make a sincere and long overdue apology to the victims of childhood abuse for our collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue,” he said, speaking before the Irish Parliament on May 11, 1999.

His government also established the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse, which, after an investigation of nearly a decade, released a withering report in 2009, describing the schools’ treatment of young people in agonizing detail. Thousands of victims received compensation, though the report was criticized by victims’ advocates for not naming the abusers.

After “States of Fear,” Ms. Raftery further jolted Irish society with investigative programs like “Cardinal Secrets,” about the sexual abuse of children in the Dublin Archdiocese, and “Behind the Walls,” about Ireland’s psychiatric hospitals and the large number of people committed there by their families.

“Bringing the truth out is always a positive thing, even though it may be a painful truth,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of the Dublin Archdiocese said in a tribute to Ms. Raftery this week. “I believe that through her exposition of sins of the past and of the moment, that the church is a better place for children and a place which has learned many lessons.”

Mary Frances Thérèse Raftery was born in Dublin on Dec. 21, 1957. Her father, Adrian, was in the Irish foreign service, and she spent much of her childhood abroad. Though she entered the University College of Dublin to study engineering, she was derailed by an interest in journalism and never finished her degree.

Ms. Raftery was a reporter for a local weekly in Dublin and a radio critic for another newspaper before she began writing investigative pieces for Magill, a current affairs magazine. A prescient article that forecast the collapse of a powerful developer’s empire propelled her career. She worked for RTE from 1984 to 2002.

Ms. Raftery is survived by her mother, Ita; her husband, David Waddell; a son, Ben; two brothers, Adrian and Iain; and a sister, Iseult.

“She demanded attention to the stories she told,” Colm O’Gorman, executive director of Amnesty International in Ireland and the founder of One in Four, an organization that supports victims of sexual abuse, said in an interview on RTE after Ms. Raftery’s death. “And they changed Ireland. They changed our society.”

PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

A large attendance at journalist and broadcaster Mary Raftery’s funeral this morning included many abuse victims as well as representatives from the worlds of politics, media and the arts.

A humanist ceremony, it took place at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin and was conducted by Brian Whiteside. “Mary”, he said, “very much identified with the humanist world view, based on a concern for humanity in general and the individual in particular.”

The ceremony was prepared by Mary Raftery herself before her death last Tuesday.

Her husband David Waddell said his was “a command performance. She asked that I speak and, slightly witheringly, said – if you’re able to!”

Following the extensive publicity which followed her death in recent days he felt “we must concentrate on her flaws. It is important for balance.”

He recalled that she “couldn’t cook for nuts” and had even “burnt a boiled egg.” She was also “a dreadful gardener.” She was very competitive, “played pool viciously and with great determination.” She was also a great supporter of the Leinster rugby team.

More seriously he said she drew inspiration from ideas rooted in “socialism. Social democracy, human rights, human dignity.” And from Primo Levi’s book If This is a Man , dealing with experiences in a German concentration camp near Auschwitz.

Her idea was “to be a voice for the voiceless” and for those who needed support in pursuit of justice. He spoke of the opposition she had faced in this from institutions, “including RTÉ”, in the preparation of the 1999 States of Fear series. There was “little support” then for Mary and her colleague Sheila Ahern, he said. It had “direct adverse health consequences for both of them,” he said.

Contemplating the future, he commented “with friends and family we will overcome this agony.”

Mary’s close friend Sheila Ahern reflected that “what people didn’t see was the very soft side she shared with close friends and family.” She spoke of Mary’s courage and the difficulties they had both faced at RTÉ in getting States of Fear broadcast in 1999.

“There hadn’t been a whole lot of support for the series,” she said. At one stage Mary “said to me ‘we’re going – I said where?’ and she said ‘we’re packing tapes and all and we are going home’. She was absolutely determined to leave taking the transmission tapes and not coming back. Luckily there were phone call negotiations….”

She concluded “I have lost my best friend but she’ll never be far from my heart.”

Niece Isolde Raftery recalled how Mary “loved children and growing up she treated us all as adults.” She also “loved to play but hated to lose”. She concluded with words on behalf of Mary’s mother Ita, “good night sweet Mary, and may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

Friend and colleague Fintan O’Toole said “Irish society was blessed to have her courage and integrity and Irish journalism was blessed to have in her its finest exemplar of the ways in which a sometimes grubby business can yet immensely enrich a democracy. The people whose stories she helped to tell were blessed to find a champion of such tirelessness and resilience, such deep sympathy and such clarity of purpose.

“Those of us who were her friends are blessed to have shared, in however small a way, in a life that will not be extinguished while the dream of justice lives in our hearts,” he said.

Bartitone Mark Ennis sang the songs Moonriver and Sunshine . Other music included Bob Dylan’s Forever Young with some classical pieces by a string quartet.

Chief mourners were Mary’s husband David, their son Ben, her mother Ita, sister Iseult and brothers Adrian and Iain.

Captain Emmet Harney represented President Higgins with Cmdt Mick Treacy representing the Taoiseach Enda Kenny.

Government Ministers present included Pat Rabbitte, Joan Burton, Roisin Shortall and Joe Costello.

Abuse victims present included John Kelly of Soca Ireland, Carmel McDonnell-Byrne of the Aislinn Centre, Michael O’Brien of the Right to Peace group, Colm O’Gorman, founder of the One in Four Group, Mannix Flynn, Paddy Doyle, Marie Collins, musician Don Baker, Andrew Madden, and Darren McGavin whose evidence led to former priest Tony Walsh being jailed for 16 years in December 2010.

RTÉ was represented by director general Noel Curran, head of news and current affairs Ed Mulhall, head of corporate communications Kevin Dawson, former director general Cahal Goan and former head of religious programmes Fr Dermod McCarthy. Also present from RTÉ were broadcasters Miriam O’Callaghan, Mary Wilson, Joe Duffy, Marian Richardson, and Cathal Poirteir.

Representing The Irish Times were Editor Kevin O’Sullivan and Managing Editor Paddy Smyth. There too was Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly, Labour TD Alex White, Fiaich McConghail of the Abbey theatre and actor Lorcan Cranitch who performed in Mary Raftery’s play “No Escape” at the Peacock theatre.

The wicker coffin was carried out afterwards by Mary’s female family and friends. They included Sheila Ahern, Sheila De Courcy, her sister Iseult Raftery, niece Isolde Raftery, Pauline Waddell, and niece Deirdre Roycroft.

Cremation took place this afternoon at Mount Jerome in Harold’s Cross.

I suggest that we – subscribers to this website and others press the Government or City and County Councils that some kind of posthumous award be mad to Mary Raftery for the work she has done in highlighting the plight of people who live on the very margins of society.

Write to newspapers, to TD’s and County and City Councillors. It’s the least we could do.

I trust you’ll support this idea.

Paddy.

www.paddydoyle.com

By INDEPENDENT.IE REPORTERS and SARAH STACK

Tuesday January 10 2012

JOURNALIST Mary Raftery (54) whose documentary ‘States of Fear’ exposed the extent of physical and sexual abuse of children in State run institutions, has died following an illness.

For the last 15 years she had been a fearless critic of both Church and State.

The 1999 documentary chronicled the horrific conditions of children who were cared for in Irish orphanages run by religious orders.

Her work led to the establishment of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and later the Residential Institutions Redress Board which provided compensation to victims of abuse in institutions run by 18 religious orders.

Colm O’Gorman, who founded the One in Four organisation for victims of sex abuse tweeted: “Very sad to hear about the death of Mary Raftery. One of our finest journalists & filmmakers. A courageous, principled, wonderful woman.”

He later said that she had done this society an extraordinary service.

Fellow broadcaster Joe Duffy posted on his Twitter account: “Mary Raftery – honest, dignified, determined , good humoured – RIP.

Speaking on Morning Ireland RTE journalist Mick Peelo, who worked with her, said: “Mary was a force to contend with. She was ruthless, fearless and tireless in getting to the truth.”

RTE Director General Noel Curran today said her journalism was defined by determination and fearlessness.

“Her record in broadcasting is extraordinary, and not just in current affairs, with which she is most associated,” he said. “She has left an important legacy for Irish society, particularly for some of our most vulnerable citizens.

“RTE will remain sincerely grateful to Mary for the powerful contribution she made to public service broadcasting.”

Her series of three States of Fear documentaries had a huge impact and prompted a public apology by then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to the abuse victims on behalf of the state.

In 2002 she made a Prime Time programme ‘Cardinal Secrets’ which led to the establishment of the Commission of Investigation into clerical abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese.

Ms Raftery wrote extensively on the plight of former residents of state-run institutions and was a regular commentator on the issue on radio and TV.

The well-known journalist last year made ‘Behind the Walls’ revealing damning evidence of appalling conditions in Ireland’s psychiatric hospitals.

She was nominated for the Journalist of the Year award by the National Newspapers of Ireland 2011.

She worked for RTE from 1984 – 2002 and later wrote a column for the Irish Times.

A native of Dublin she studied engineering at UCD before joining RTE as a producer on Today Tonight and then Prime Time.

Her investigative journalism also included exposing the plight of inmates of the Magdalene laundries, medical negligence, deaths in Garda custody and the activities of property developers.

She worked for a period in the 1980s for Magill magazine.

Ms Raftery is survived by her husband David Waddell and her son Ben.

- INDEPENDENT.IE REPORTERS and SARAH STACK

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Courtesy: The Irish Times.