Twenty-five years ago this month, Mary Raftery stopped us hurtling smugly towards the close of the 20th century. The economy was booming, the shackles of historic enmities seemingly lifting, and narratives of Irish confidence abounded, but Raftery, through her three-part States of Fear documentary series, pricked the balloon. The harrowing testimonies of the former child residents of carceral institutions suggested Ireland had much to come to terms with in relation to the lies and abuses it had lived with and compartmentalised.

Raftery, a gifted and dogged journalist, assisted by her co-researcher Sheila Ahern, had begun her excavations with one question: “why were so many children incarcerated in institutions all over Ireland?” During the programmes, many former residents spoke of ritual humiliation and abuse. What was striking was not just the scale but the casualness of the abuse; one interviewee, Barney, said of his abuser: “He didn’t even have the goodness to bugger you in private”. That line resonated with another account of institutional abuse that followed the programmes, when a Christian Brother was quoted telling the boys in Letterfrack industrial school in the 1920s “you will always be identified by your sheepish look”, surely one of the most devastating assertions to appear about such........

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