Mary Raftery

Mary Raftery, who has died of cancer aged 54, was a campaigning Irish journalist whose exposure of the abuse meted out to children in Church-run institutions in Ireland, and the ensuing cover-up, prompted a bout of national soul searching.

She was not the first to reveal that children had been abused in Ireland’s so-called industrial schools (state-financed reformatories for poor, neglected and abandoned children, which housed about 30,000 young people between the 1930s and 1990s), but previous reports had suggested the existence only of isolated incidents.

With her documentary States of Fear, however, Mary Raftery exposed a horrifying litany of torment – emotional, physical and sexual – suffered by the children at these schools, and made the case that abuse had been widespread, systematic and covered up by both Church and state authorities.

The programme was aired in three parts in 1999 on Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE and the public outcry which followed prompted the government of Bertie Ahern to issue a public apology to victims for the state’s failure to come to their rescue. He set up what became known as the Ryan Commission, which, after a 10-year investigation, issued a devastating report in 2009 confirming Mary Raftery’s key findings.

The Ryan report sparked a period of agonised debate which touched on the unholy alliance between Catholic Church and Irish state forged under Eamon de Valera. In a recent article in the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole observed that because of Mary Raftery “the Catholic hierarchy will never recover the authority it lost” in Ireland after her exposé.

Yet the search for the truth had been a traumatic one for all concerned. Mary Raftery claimed that she had faced opposition from within RTE when making her documentary and from “more powerful institutions” outside. The Ryan Committee, too, became so bogged down by legal challenges from religious orders and frustrated by obfuscation on the part of Ireland’s education department that the commission’s first chairman resigned in protest in 2003. “They were calling me a Nazi, citing blood libel, a whole stable of them,” Mary Raftery claimed recently. “But there’s absolute silence from those quarters since the Ryan Report.”

One of four children, Mary Frances Thérèse Raftery was born in Dublin on December 21 1957. Her father was in the Irish foreign service, and she spent much of her childhood in Paris, though the family returned to Dublin for her secondary education. Though brought up a Roman Catholic, she later lost her faith.

She went on to study Engineering at the University College of Dublin and Music (she was a fine cellist) at Dublin’s College of Music, but gave up both as she became involved in student politics and journalism.

She became a reporter for Magill, a current affairs magazine, where her first big piece, “Patrick Gallagher: Property Speculator and Brat”, exposed the murky business dealings of an underhand wheeler-dealer. At the time she was unable to be explicit about Gallagher’s closeness to the Irish Taoiseach Charles Haughey. Many years later, however, while working for RTE, she produced the first documentary evidence that Haughey was on the take – a reference in a receiver’s report on Gallagher’s failed companies to a payment from the property mogul to Haughey.

The industrial schools first came to her attention in the early 1980s, when she was researching a notorious Dublin crime family, almost all of whom were involved in dealing heroin. Wondering what could have corrupted an entire family so thoroughly, she discovered that almost every family member had spent time in the industrial schools. From then on, she collected information about the schools, building a picture of a world that few realised existed. By the mid-Nineties, and as a producer in RTE, she was ready to make a programme.

Mary Raftery was an accomplished print journalist and continued to write for papers and magazines, including the Irish Times, but television played best to her campaigning zeal. Other notable documentaries include Cardinal Secrets (2002), an investigation into the cover-up of clerical child sex abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese which led to the setting up of another commission into child abuse, the Murphy Commission, which reported in November 2009.

Her last documentary, Behind the Walls (2011), revealed that in the 1950s Ireland led the world in locking up its people in psychiatric hospitals; on a per-capita basis it was even ahead of the Soviet Union. Brutal and squalid state-run mental institutions, she found, were “dumping grounds for Irish social problems”, locking away for life not only the mentally ill, but people who were simply regarded as an inconvenience by their families. These included, typically, the “unmarried sister on the farm, getting in the way of your brother marrying” and, in one case, a woman whose cause of insanity was listed as “husband in California”.

As one Irish reviewer observed: “One thing is for certain: you’re not going to come away from a Mary Raftery documentary marvelling at what a great little race we are.”

Mary Raftery is survived by her husband, David Waddell, and by a son.

Mary Raftery, born December 21 1957, died January 10 2012