“They left me with nothing,” said Mary.

“They left me without a home, without my mother, without my brother.”

Mary lives in Dublin now. Sitting in her top floor one-bedroom flat, she insists on sitting with a photograph of her brother, Christy Smith, by her side.

Christy was sent to an industrial school while her mother, pregnant with Mary, was put into a Magdalene Laundry at Peacock Lane in Cork in 1952.

Their mother was 34 when she died. Mary never met her.

“Without a mother’s love, you’ll never be right.”

“If you don’t have that, then the rest of your life is destroyed.”

There is no record of Mary - beyond that she was born in Fermoy in east Cork – until she was three.

She was brought up at St Aloysius’ Industrial School for Roman Catholic Girls, in Clonakilty.

Until she was 14, Mary never knew her date of birth, or even what a birthday was.

There was no toothpaste, there were no mirrors. All the girls had the same haircut.

Instead of being called by name, each girl had a number. Mary said hers was 1,346.

As far back as Mary can remember, she was put to work in the laundry. She was so small that she had to stand on top of a pile of stacked pallets to reach the sink.

“We had to wash sanitary towels. I didn’t even know what they were at the time,” she said.

“We had to scrub them and the nun would give you a thump to keep going.”

Even though Mary never went to school, she and the other girls would clean the rooms of a nearby boarding school.

One of the worst beatings Mary can remember is when she and another girl asked a child at the boarding school what it was like to go to school.

The nun caught them and told them to get back to work.

“Later that night she came in and she called me and the other girl. I thought I was dead I got such a beating,” said Mary.

She remembers it well. The nun had a stick in one hand and a leather strap in the other.

“She lashed me and told me: ‘You’re not to talk to people,’” she said.

“I fell to the ground and she was beating me, just for talking to the outside world.”

Sometimes, Mary would be sent to work on a farm for a day. On those days, she would not be fed. She was so hungry, she would eat the chicken feed to sustain her.

When she reached puberty, the nuns put a wrap around her chest to flatten her breasts.

Every Saturday she wore a red petticoat down to the floor to take her bath.

“You weren’t allowed to look at your body developing,” she said.

When Mary was 14, the Clonakilty industrial school closed down and she was transferred to St Joseph’s Industrial School for Girls in Mallow.

“The regime there was completely different. I got a uniform and I started to go to school,” she said.

It was there that Mary was told what money was for the first time when she was given a small allowance to go to the local carnival.

There she met a young man who bought her an ice-cream.

“I was stunned that someone could hand me something. I thought it was my birthday, because I knew you get presents on your birthday,” she said.

Mary and the young man fell in love. It was the happiest time of her life.

“It was like I was in another world,” she said.

But her time in Mallow lasted little more than a year.

A woman from a town 27 miles away came to the school and asked Mary to work for her. At first, Mary did not want to leave. But when the woman came asking for her a second time, she agreed.

“I thought it would be a great escape. Little did I know, worse was to come for me,” she said.

Mary said the house to which she was brought was a large one, but that her room was tiny, and she shared it with the brushes and the hoover.

“The woman told me: ‘You’re my slave now,’” she said.

Her boyfriend from Mallow wrote to her and she started writing to him.

“He sent me a photo and I remember burning my hand on an iron I was looking at it so hard and not paying attention,” said Mary.

When the woman of the house found out about the letters, she called the “cruelty man”.

The “cruelty men”, also known as the “poverty men”, were officers who worked for the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC).

Ireland’s Child Abuse Commission found that ISPCC officers played an important role in committing children to residential care.

In 2006, the chief executive of the ISPCC at the time, Paul Gilligan, told the commission: “It is reasonable to suspect that we certainly would have committed a significant number to the industrial schools.

"But I really have no idea about the overall percentage.”

One day, Mary was told to go into the parlour where the “cruelty man” was waiting for her.

“He started talking about my mother,” she said.

“He told me: ‘You’re getting more like your mother.’”

Then the woman of the house told Mary that she would end up getting pregnant, packed her case and sent her to Sunday's Well Magdalene Laundry in Cork.

“All I heard [the “cruelty man”] say when he left me there is: ‘I have another one for you,’” she said.

“When that door locked my body went into shellshock. I’ve never moved on from that.”

“I wouldn’t eat for them. They had to tie my hands behind my back to get me to eat. But I wouldn’t. I wanted to die.

“What was the point in living if I was going to be in there for the rest of my life?”

Mary’s hair was shaved. Her name was changed to Mairéad. She was told not to talk.

She was 16 years old.

Mary said she spent almost a year at Sunday’s Well, before being sent for again by the woman for whom she had worked before.

She was put to work again. Her boyfriend was never told where she went and there was no way to contact him.

Three months later, the woman of the house rang for the “cruelty man” again when she saw Mary speaking to the bread man.

The “cruelty man” put her into his black van. She was crying hysterically, she said.

Mary remembers the next part of the story vividly.

“The car stopped. I didn’t know where I was,” she said.

“I pulled my hands from my face and looked up. I saw we were at a field or something. It was the middle of nowhere.

“I thought to myself: ‘This is great. I’m going to escape.’

“I opened the door and started running.

“I remember exactly what I was wearing. I had a navy skirt and I had blue tights on me.

“I ran. The next thing, he knocked me to the ground and pulled down my tights and raped me.”

Mary never went back to Sunday’s Well. Instead the “cruelty man” took her to a hostel, where she lived for two weeks before it closed down.

With nowhere to go, she settled on the streets of Cork, homeless.