Kathy’s Story
By Kathy O’Beirne
Greystone Books

by April Drew

KATHY’S Story is a memoir of author Kathy O’Beirne’s childhood hell within Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries.

The Laundries became an international focus when Peter Mullan made an award winning film in 2002, The Magdalene Sisters, which demonstrated the abuse that went on in the laundries for over eight decades. Thousands of Irish girls either orphaned or who “posed a threat” were tossed into homes run by Catholic orders across the country.

The girls were then subjected to exhausting work routines and abuse, both physical and sexual. Those girls that became pregnant either had their babies stolen from them or they died.

O’Beirne’s memoir steals the emotions right from the reader’s soul. It is a distressing tale of mental, physical and sexual abuse that she suffered at the hands of people who should have been her role models.

Her father tortured her and her siblings until they could no longer take it. She was physically abused by boys in school and the day before her First Holy Communion these same boys raped little Kathy, filching the joy she should have known that special day.

One fine summer afternoon, Kathy thought her father had a change of heart when he promised to take her to the seaside. Instead, the ogre she feared so much brought her to a Catholic reformatory school and abandoned her.

“I was going to heaven and I ended up in hell,” she writes.

The abuse was just beginning. The nun’s torturous methods were worse than her father’s.

“Little did I know that I was about to enter a nightmare even worse than the one I had already known,” she writes.

Freezing baths and leather strap beating were the main source of punishment when the girls didn’t work hard enough, or spoke when they weren’t supposed to. Kathy was infrequently permitted home to see her family, and by the age of 10 she was put into a mental asylum.

At 12 she was sent to a Magdalen Laundry. Priests and lay people constantly raped her and at the age of 13 she fell pregnant. Nine months later she gave birth to a baby girl whom she called Annie.

Kathy even spent time in Mountjoy prison for stealing a coat. Stealing and living on the streets became a regular way of life in time.

The author, now in her forties, never recovered properly from the stolen childhood, abuse and neglect she suffered while growing up. She mulled suicide on occasion.

O’Beirne has gone on to pilot a campaign for justice to help other victims of institutional abuse.

Kathy’s Story is a tormenting account of a twisted, cruel society that was once Ireland. Once you pick the book up you will never want to put it down.

Kathy’s Story, released earlier this year

by Greystone Books (www.greystonebooks.com), is a tragedy that will rip your heart open, make you cry like you have never cried before and make you so furious that you want to go out and find O’Beirne and give her a huge hug.