DUBLIN (Reuters) – Harrowing tales of physical and sexual abuse at the heart of a best-selling memoir about growing up inside Ireland’s Roman Catholic institutions are simply not true, the author’s family said on Tuesday.
The brothers and sisters of Kathy O’Beirne, 50, whose autobiography "Kathy’s Story" has sold 350,000 copies in Ireland and Britain, say the book should be withdrawn or at the very least reclassified as fiction.
"Absolutely all or nearly all of this book is false — I don’t understand why she’s saying this," her older brother Oliver O’Beirne, 52, told Reuters following a news conference.
He said he and his other seven brothers and sisters had been forced to challenge Kathy’s account, set in the 1960s and 1970s, to clear his father’s and the family’s name of her abuse claims.
In the book, published as "Don’t Ever Tell" in Britain, O’Beirne writes about being beaten by her father and later about the torture and rape she suffered during 14 years in one of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries — church-run institutions for ‘wayward’ girls and women that became synonymous with brutality.
Her brother Oliver said she had been at a church school for girls in Dublin for about six weeks and later spent some time in a psychiatric home. He had never heard the Magdalen laundries mentioned in the house while growing up.
Claims that he and his siblings were abused by his father were "fiction, not a word of truth", he said.
"We are just ordinary working people and we’ve been put in a situation we didn’t want any part of and it has to come to an end. Today is about cutting the cord," he said.
Questions about the events portrayed in "Kathy’s Story" — subtitled "A childhood Hell Inside the Magdalen Laundries" — surfaced in Ireland earlier this year.
Last month an order of nuns threatened to sue state broadcaster RTE after it ran an interview with O’Beirne in which she identified an institution at which she says she was abused.
All four orders that ran the laundries — which were wound up a decade ago after 150 years in existence — have denied O’Beirne was ever a resident.
4 comments
There’s a FORTUNE to be made in these types of “memoirs”… just ask Dave Pelzer. After these authors do the lucrative talk show circuit they get to charge incredible fees as speakers telling their heroic tales… and then the Oprah book club makes them millionaires.
*A Million Little Pieces*
Oooh, church-run. Roman Catholic institutions. They’ll have people believe that that‘s the whole problem.
And so what? I am sure that the left-leaning will say that just because it is not accurate or truthful, doesn’t deter from its “message.”
Witness Rigoberta Menchu who still received a Nobel Prize notwithstanding her own “enhanced” autobiography. And when the movie “Amistad” was released with a study guide for schools to use, no one cried foul when it was pointed out that both the movie and the guide was inaccurate.
After all, feelings are more important than facts, right? Never let the truth get in the way of a good story . . . or better sales.
It seems that there is always money to be in accusing the Church of various misdeeds.