You Will Bear Witness

Your Will Bear Witness is a survival story provoking the reader to pay attention to whatmight be happening around them and to question their presumptions about normal decency.Set in a bucolic Irish Seaside village, so often idealised by tourist brochures, Erin Fado paints a heart-rending portrait of her childhood innocence ruthlessly exploited by those with the greatest responsibility for her safety.Far from being nurtured by her social-climbing parents and their eminent connections that encompass the prominent Church spires and beyond to the Houses of Westminster, Erin and the other children who “visit” are used and discarded like disposable chattels with no personal worth beyond their bodies.Her parents’ popular Hotel is the centre of the harbour village life and during the Summer months becomes a drawcard for visiting yachtsmen from the UK and Europe and high-profile Dubliners with holiday homes. In the middle of this apparently idyllic seaside village Erin Fado is kept imprisoned by her parents’ who, in league with a local entrepreneur, provide local men and visitors alike with children to satisfy more than their thirst.Without self-pity Fado somehow manages to tell a story of hope, extraordinary resilience and inspiring survival. Her concern is focussed on those other visiting children who may or may not have survived. This is a story that might have happened in many places to many people but nobody has survived to reach the place Erin Fado has managed to reach at great personal cost. Having at last escaped Ireland with the help of the Salvation Army and miraculously built a new life in Australia Erin Fado has survived and attained, only just, a level of safety where she can honestly recall her trauma and reach out to others. Her simple, heartfelt testimony inspires the reader to bear witness to truth in the hope that facing humanities’ demons might ensure such decimation of innocence under the thin veneer of respectability doesn’t keep happening.

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