Dr. Mary Harney
speaker
111 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 21 Jul
Dr. Mary Harney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
My story is that I was born in 1949 in Bessborough Mother and Baby Institution and I was with my mother there for two and a half years and then I was taken away from her at a half an hour's notice.
She had not signed any documents and I was fostered or boarded out to an elderly care
couple who consequently had neglected me and also abused me physically.
And then the cruelty man or the prevention of cruelty to children officer took me from them.
I was taken to Cork, the courthouse in Cork, where the judge
sentenced me to the Good Shepherds Industrial School in Cork until I was 16.
So that's basically my life in a nutshell in the institutions.
No, I was two and a half when I was taken from her.
So I didn't remember her.
But when I was taken away from the institution, although it was an institution, the dormitories where the babies were kept were full of light and, you know, airy.
They were big dormitories.
And then when I was taken to,
the foster parents, it was a small, dark, two up, two down house and I was always terrified there.
Well, I did find out and it turns out that the foster mother had a connection to one of the nuns in Bessborough and they were
chums, I think you'd call them, and was able to, even though they were in their, I would say, probably mid-50s, my mother was only 22 at that time, I was just handed over to them.
Simply because one of the nuns, they had asked for a child, and one of the nuns thought,
We'll give him Mary.
That's right, yes.
Yeah, I was almost five when I went there, so I'd been with the foster parents
parents for two and a half years, and I'd already gone to school in the South Press.
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