FOLLOWING the screening of the RTE documentary Dear Daughter, the nun at the centre of the programme became the most reviled woman in Ireland.

However, on Monday's edition of Morning Ireland on RTE Radio 1, a woman who grew up in St Kyran's, Rathdrum, gave a quite different picture of the same nun, Sister Xavieria.

Can these two portraits be reconciled? Is this the same person or is one of the images distorted?

As a native of Rathdrum and a social worker in Wicklow for five years, I was very familiar with Sister Xavieria. The person I knew, however, did not fit the image of the tyrant who inflicted systematic brutality on Christine Buckley and her contemporaries in Goldenbridge. That is not to say that I disbelieve anything they have said or would in any way excuse the abuse that occurred.

The latter day Sister Xavieria seemed no different from many other matriarchal nuns of her time. They were known for their stoicism and dedication to hard work. But they tended to do things for people rather than with them and in return expected strict obedience.

For those who could adapt to this regime, survival was easier. Mary Phil Drennan, in her book You May Speak Now, tells how the nuns always had "pets", as well as children who were deeply disliked.

Sister Xavierik was net famous for her patience. She was a first talker and was constantly busy. She always seemed to be going to, or coming from, somewhere in a hurry.

Her reputation was no more fearsome than that of many of her contemporaries. There were other nuns in Rathdrum teaching in the local school in the 1950s and 1960s who were far better known for dishing out physical punishment.

She was a quick decision maker and her brusqueness sometimes met with protests from her staff. However, on occasion she also surprised them by her deep insight into children's needs. I remember one child care worker, someone I knew to be very skilled and kind, telling me how much she had learned from her in the time she worked in Rathdrum.

Sister Xavieria had an encyclopaedic knowledge of every child who ever came under her authority, and freely shared this with me - if I went seeking background information for clients who were, trying to trace relatives.

So how can we reconcile the two images of the same person? It may well be that, in the more open and enlightened era that followed the dark 1950s, Xavieria - like so many others in charge of orphanages - changed in her outlook towards children in State care.

And it is to the policies of the State that one must turn if the story of Goldenbridge, and other places like it, is to be understood. Enormous social change has occurred in Ireland since the 1960s, and the position of children in care must be seen within the social policies of that era.

When Pat Tierney committed suicide earlier this year, part of his motivation was to express deep anger at maltreatment within the care system of the 1950s and 1960s. As the child of an unwed mother, he was a victim of the social policy of the time which dealt with the "problem" of non marital births by stigmatising and shunning unmarried mothers and their children.

Irish society, in general, approved of this and did not care about the welfare of the so called, "undeserving" poor.

In 1980 the Task Force on Child Care Services pointed out: "The most striking feature of the child care scene in Ireland [of that era] was the alarming complacency and indifference of both the general public and the various government departments and statutory bodies with responsibility for the welfare of children.

"This state of affairs illustrated clearly the use by society of residential establishments to divest itself of responsibility for deprived children.

Of more recent vintage is an account I received from a woman who describes seeing her little sister being sent hurtling down a stairs to her death, from the force of a blow from a nun, while in care in the 1930s. She claims that this incident was systematically covered up.

The screening of Dear Daughter, has revealed a part of hidden Ireland that most people barely knew existed

Until the general public is moved emotionally, it seems our politicians are neither shaken nor stirred into action. They, too, want to be seen as caring, even if in the past it was otherwise.