A childhood of hell, and yet she survived this! Made up or not, this story is chilling and heartbreaking. ( )

An account of the appalling institutionalised abuse (physical, mental, and sexual) of a child consigned to the Irish Magdalen Industrial School system in the 1970s and her struggle for justice for her peers in adulthood. There appears to be a conspiracy of silence against which the compelling rage of the victim is articulated with devastating lucidity. ( )

In 1995, Binjamin Wilkomirski published an autobiography entitled "Fragments", telling of his childhood in concentration and death camps in Germany. Three years later, the journalist Daniel Ganzfried exposed Wilkomirski as Bruno Grosjean, a fantasist whose childhood was spent in a middle-class home in Switzerland. The world was horrified at Wilkomirski's attempt to peddle lies as truth.

Now Kathy O'Beirne's memoir "Kathy's Story" (later retitled as "Don't Ever Tell"), detailing her childhood abuse and adolescence in a Magdalene Laundry, has been similarly exposed. For some of the newspaper reports showing discrepancies in Ms O'Beirne's story, see http://kathystoryscam.blogspot.com . From these, it would appear that Ms O'Beirne was indeed in a psychiatric hospital, Mountjoy prison and a homeless shelter (all described in the book) but that there is no documented proof that she was ever in a Magdalene Laundry, and that there are school registers which show her regular attendance at the same time she claimed to have been hard at work in the wash-rooms.

It's likely that O'Beirne's claim was prompted by the release of Peter Mullan's 2002 film "The Magdalene Sisters" which made the topic 'hot news' and led to pressure on the Catholic Church to issue a formal apology to the victims of these Church-sanctioned hell-holes.

Given the distortion of truth in her books and the insertion of a Magdalene Laundry for fun and profit (let's face it, what made this a best-seller were the words "Magdalene Laundry" on the cover), why is O'Beirne not subject to the same public revulsion as Wilkomirski? Consider also the photos from "Kathy's Story", which claimed to show a fellow ex-inmate of the laundry and which disappeared from the next edition, "Don't Ever Tell". Their disappearance is unexplained and somewhat suspicious.

However, full marks must go to Ms O'Beirne's ghost-writer, Michael Sheridan, for producing such an eloquent piece of writing. Such talent deserves a better (and more truthful) subject, and I hope he finds one in the near future.