THE harrowing TV documentaries about Romanian and Chinese orphanages bring back horrific memories for women like Christine Buckley and Caroline Hunt. They grew up in the Goldenbridge orphanage in Inchicore, Dublin, where they were systematically abused and tortured.
They too were so dehumanised by brutality that their faces had an animal look as they rhythmically rocked and twitched to ease their pain. They too lived in a place where babies were strapped to potties for hours and forced to defecate so that their rectums hung outside their tiny bodies.
Babies too weak to hold themselves up would fall over to one side with the potty marking their soft flesh, Ms Buckley recalls. It was her job, still a tiny child herself, to unstrap the babies and put them in their cots. One day, a recently arrived eight month old baby was smiling and laughing at her, something which the babies usually never did. When a nun saw Christine playing with the baby, she beat Christine then picked up the eight month old baby by the legs and beat it savagely. Within a week, Ms Buckley recalls, the baby had learned never to smile.
In Dear Daughter, Crescendo Concepts dramatised TV documentary about Goldenbridge, there is no doubt that this was the Romanian orphans scandal of the 1940s and 1950s - except that there were no film crews then to expose it. Corroborated by 18 other women survivors of the orphanage, Ms Buckley, Ms Hunt and others, recall how their bodies were black and blue from daily beatings and how they were so hungry that they stole carrots and cabbage from the rabbit hutches and ate apple parings from the garbage bin on the nights when the nuns had apple tart.
Ms Buckley first spoke about Goldenbridge on The Gay Byrne Show on radio in 1992, making her one of the first survivors to speak out. She summoned up the courage because she believes that we have never learned from Goldenbridge and so are unable to prevent similar abuse happening today.
To merely blame "the nuns" for what happened is to bury the extent of the tragedy and to avoid learning from it, she believes. Most to blame, Ms Buckley believes, are parents such as hers - a 31 year old married Dublin woman and a 20-year-old Nigerian medical student - who freely abandoned the babies who were born as a result of their irresponsible sexual behaviour.
"Their pleasure was our pain," she says. "For years, I wanted to find my parents so that I could kill them for what they did." Such parents should be confronted with their abandonment of their children, instead of being protected by adoption societies which may make tracing them virtually impossible, Ms Buckley believes.
After the plants the blame rests with the departments of health, education and the judiciary who silently conspired to "dump" babies in orphanages, then turned a blind eye to the abuse which went on there. Today, we continue to ignore, abuse and protect parents, she argues, by allowing parents who have abused a baby to have another baby and abuse it too.
And as if we had learned nothing, the State is still allowing single fathers to abandon their children to the care of single mothers. Such abandonment is a kind of dehumanisation of the child because it strips them of half their identity, Christine believes.
"To me, Ireland is a terrible place where the torture of my childhood began," says Caroline Hunt, who now lives in London. One of the worst humiliations at Goldenbridge occurred once a week when a nun would display the children's panties one by one on a stick in the yard. The nun would loudly ask the group if the panties were soiled and if the older children thought they were, the child - no matter how small was viciously beaten by the nun with a long, thick, wooden rod like the trunk of a small tree, with the older bullies joining in.
Survivors such as Ms Hunt and Ms Buckley have somehow endured psychological pain of a depth which most of us don't want to imagine. Caroline has been in three psychiatric hospitals and has been a drug abuser, although she is now happily settled with three children. Christine, a nurse, is married (to PR consultant Donal Buckley) and has three bright, happy teenagers. How these women managed survive their childhoods and become gentle nurturers of the next generation is a tribute to the strength of the human spirit, but it is no tribute to our society.