MARY RAFTERY was arguably the finest Irish journalist of the last 25 years and unarguably the most influential.
Because of her, there are two groups of people for whom Ireland will never be the same again. The Catholic hierarchy will never recover the authority it lost when she exposed its systematic covering up of child abuse and Irish children will never again be so utterly exposed to systematic exploitation by those in power.
At a time when the value and the values of professional journalism are being called into question, her work stands as one of the greatest examples anywhere of the capacity of a committed, skilled and eloquent reporter to change things for the better.
I remember vividly the first time I saw Mary, in 1975, when we were both 17-year-olds newly arrived in University College Dublin. I was waiting, along with the other awkward, uncertain freshers, for a class to begin in a huge lecture theatre when this small woman appeared at the podium to tell us about problems at the College of Music, where she also studied, and to ask for support for a protest.
Everybody shut up and listened, for she was like an adult among adolescents: serious, authoritative, able to communicate with precision and clarity.
Perhaps because she had spent some of her childhood in France, she had an air of confidence that was startling in an Irish teenager. She was, at 17, exactly the figure the Irish public came to know much later from TV and radio, a woman who could be at once compelling and calm, fiercely rational and blazingly passionate. I went on the protest – there seemed to be no choice.
Mary was part of a group active in student politics and on a newspaper imaginatively called Student. Many of us migrated from UCD to In Dublinmagazine.
We were besotted by the American New Journalism, interested in applying the techniques of narrative fiction to the real-life stories of a changing Ireland. We were inordinately pleased with ourselves, but Mary was different.
She worked slowly and methodically on hard, factual stories. Her first big piece was about the property mogul and crook who was the forerunner of those who embodied the Celtic Tiger. It was called Patrick Gallagher: Property Speculator and Brat.
I remember that it bothered her at the time that she was unable to be explicit about a key part of Gallagher’s story: his closeness to Charles Haughey.
It was typical of her tenacity that many years later, when she was working for RTÉ's Prime Time, she produced the first documentary evidence of a truth that every Irish journalist knew but none could prove – that Haughey was on the take. She found, in a receiver's report on Gallagher's failed companies, reference to a payment from Gallagher to Haughey.
Mary was a terrific print journalist, as her columns and analysis for The Irish Timeswould later show. But television played to her greatest strength – her ability to move seamlessly between the intimately personal and the monumentally political.
TV tells stories through people and hates abstraction. That can tip it too easily towards the merely intimate, wallowing in personal suffering without challenging the structures and institutions that make it inevitable. Mary had the perfect combination of humanity and intellectual rigour, the ability both to move in very close and to stand back in cool appraisal that can turn television into dynamite.
The strongest mark of her achievement was one she would not have wanted: the debacle of RTÉ’s false accusations against Fr Kevin Reynolds. It showed how easily mere indignation could be misdirected and how extraordinary it was that never once did she lose perspective and allow scrupulousness to be overcome by anger.
She first perfected this combination on a health series called Check Up, probably envisaged initially as a health and lifestyle magazine show. She retained those elements while pushing it into hitherto taboo areas like medical negligence.
It was that ability to keep a programme warm and intimate while tackling tough and painful material that armed her for the enormous personal and professional challenge she undertook over two decades: exposing the appalling abuse of children by the institutions of church and State.
It always seemed to me that the two things she studied and abandoned fed into the extraordinary power of the States of Fearand Cardinal Sinsprogrammes.
One was engineering and the other was music. She abandoned her engineering degree and later, much more reluctantly, gave up playing the cello when she concluded that she could not give it the exclusive attention it demanded. I think though that she took something vital from each of them: the engineer's sense of structure and the artist's sense of empathy. In the making of a long, harrowing series like States of Fear, structure without empathy would have been hollow and empathy without structure would have been ineffectual.
The series was perfectly and robustly engineered, but at its core was Mary’s extraordinary empathy with people who had suffered so appallingly.
It is hard to exaggerate how difficult it must have been on a personal level for her to spend so much of her life exploring the very depths of human depravity and institutional cynicism – qualities that were so alien to her own decency, modesty and morality.
The people whose stories she told were not just journalistic material – they were wounded human beings whose trust she had to earn and keep through the force of her honesty and compassion.
She was sustained by her strong bond to her husband David and by her ironic sense of humour (she was one of Ireland’s greatest chucklers). Above all though she was profoundly affected by her love for her own son, Ben.
It was as a mother that she could imagine the pain and terror and confusion of all the lost childhoods she chronicled.
Her dearest wish would be for an Ireland in which savage injustice would not demand such implacable courage as hers.
It does not exist, but thanks to Mary Raftery, it is appreciably closer.
