Catherine is angry that she could have been made to disappear from the school system without anybody looking for her.
"It's up to the Department of Education to make this woman answer for what she has done to me," she says. "She got away with everything."
The national school from which her mother removed her when she was still only in third class accepted her word that the child was being sent to another school in the same county.
But a Garda investigation in recent years established that she never attended the new school.
The Department of Education and Science said this week that Catherine's disappearance would have come to light at the time only if a complaint was made to the Garda. Most counties have no school attendance officers.
The Education (Welfare) Bill, currently on its way through the Oireachtas, will provide for an expansion of the school attendance service.
More importantly, perhaps, it provides that a child cannot be removed from the register of one school until another school has confirmed that the child is attending it.
Catherine sees herself as uneducated and believes she cannot make up the ground she has lost.
Yet she is an intelligent, articulate and, indeed, elegant person to speak to. She devours books, newspapers and magazines and says she could not live without reading.
"I always felt I was good at school for the few years I went, starting at six and coming out at 11," she says. "I loved school and I think I would have succeeded in something, anyway."
She remembers one teacher, now retired, with affection. "She gave me a prayer book for my First Communion. That meant a lot to me. I treasured that."
It saddens Catherine that when gardai spoke to the teacher during the investigation, she could not remember her at all.