Suffer the Little Children

Clutching their eight-week-old sister in their arms, three-year-old Frances and six-year-old Loretta Reilly were abandoned by their mother outside the gates of the Poor Sisters of Nazareth convent in Belfast. It was 1956. Little did the children know these walls were to imprison them for the next thirteen years. In the charge of the sisters, Frances lived with daily brutal and bloody beatings, treated as a slave to be abused, raped and molested. She fought a decade-long court case against the Poor Sisters of Nazareth order to bring to account the nuns who so viciously stole her childhood. She is a survivor.