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Maurice Heffernan was born in September 1945. Sadly, his mother died when he was 6 months old and when he was approximately 9 months old, he was taken to an orphanage in Killarney, Co. Kerry, and eventually fostered by a family in West Kerry. During those years, he didn't even know he had another family.At age 7, he was taken from his foster parents by an NSPCC inspector and brought to the District Court in Tralee, where he was committed to St Josephs Residential Institution, spending the next 8 years there. During his detention, he was subjected to horrific physical and sexual abuse. Such was the impact, to this day, he has never discussed what happened during those formative years there. He was released in 1961 on licence and finally got to meet his father. He was then sent to Dublin to work in a clothing factory and had some form of relationship with his father until his death 6 years later. He also had some success in tracing the whereabouts of his other siblings.He joined An Garda Siochana in 1968, serving over 30 years, mainly in the detective branch. He married and had 6 children.After the release of the Ryan Report, he sought to apply to the Residential Institutions Redress Board in 2009, to discover they closed applications from December 2005. In 2011, he attended before the Redress Board, a humiliating experience and the catalyst for him leaving Ireland when his impending divorce was finalised.In late 2019, when the then Minister for Education set up a further review into survivors of Residential institution abuse, he started communicating with them regarding his role as a survivor of abuse. He resides in Malta with his wife Sonya, and has a good relationship with his children, and who are supportive of his writing this memoir.
