Dear Daughter

'Dear Daughter' exposed the entire situation of past abuse in Irish Orphanages, particularly during the 50´s and 60´s. It provoked the largest media coverage arising from any RTE programme ever. Several of the incidences in the film and others since revealed are now the subject of Police investigation. 'Dear Daughter is dynamite. It goes right to the heart of Irish society, destroying one of the sacred myths which held it together.' Story: 'I wanted to find my parents and kill them for every ounce of pain I suffered because of what they did.' Christine Buckley, an Irish coloured woman was born in 1946 of a relationship between a Nigerian medical student and a married Dublin woman. When her father refused to accept the child she was given up by her mother at four weeks. Shortly before Christmas 1950 she was placed in Goldenbridge Orphanage run by the Sisters of Mercy in Dublin, where she remained for fourteen years. The film allows Christine Buckley and six other former inmates from Goldenbridge, now grown women, to tell their story directly to camera. Sequences on nightly beatings, of having to make rosaries, of scrambling for food scraps, of being forced to stand all night on a statue plinth, of being locked overnight in a dark furnace room are re-enacted, without prompting. The women tell us directly what it really was like. But it is ostensibly the story of Christine Buckley´s search for her parents, both of whom she finds. She tells her own story, re-enacting and remembering. At times actors are used to recreate sequences that it would be impossible for the older women to show. The script evolved from over two years research and recordings with Christine and from her own statements to camera. These statements did not result from interview but simply from asking her to tell what it was like.