Mary Raftery, the producer of States of Fear, the RTE documentary series which has provoked national soul-searching about our past treatment of each other, has spent most of her journalistic career shining a light into the darker corners of society.
The Dubliner first came to national prominence as a 19-year-old student officer in UCD. The late Christina Murphy was highly impressed that Raftery was the union's education officer because she looked about 12 years old. She wrote as much in an article in this newspaper at the time; Raftery was by her own admission "mortified".
Raftery grew up in Dublin and Paris and went to UCD in the mid-1970s. Although initially interested in a career in music - she is an enthusiastic cellist - she founded the student newspaper Bulletin and continued in journalism after college.
Her first job was as assistant editor and writer with the listings magazine In Dublin. Later, as a free lance, she produced hard-hitting investigative journalism for both the Colm Toibin-edited Magill and the Sunday Tribune. Among her Magill stories was an article on the notorious Dunne family, one of the first investigative pieces written about the heroin crisis in the capital. Many of the protagonists had attended industrial schools as boys. It was the first Raftery had heard of such places.
In 1984 she joined RTE as a producer/director. She was attracted to television, she says, "because of the size of the audience it brings and the kind of impact one can make". Her programmes on subjects as diverse as psychiatric hospitals, property tycoon Patrick Gallagher, landmines in Cambodia and the 1916 Rising won her several awards and the respect of seasoned colleagues.
Delighted with the positive response to States of Fear, she says it is a drawback with TV that it is often difficult to deal with the subtle. "But I am enormously gratified that numerous subtleties in these programmes have not been missed and that people have run with them and expanded on them."
