In February last year Louis Lentin shocked the nation with the TV documentary Dear Daughter. When its revelations of brutalities in the old orphanage at Goldenbridge reached Teresita Durkan, a former Mercy nun in Chile, she wasn't surprised that Golden bridge orphanage should become the focus of public concern.

Amazingly, what shocked her was "the storm of adverse public criticism that followed". She decided to write her memoirs of Goldenbridge to try to find a critical focus for herself. What this seems to amount to is throwing doubt on the account given by people like myself who lived in the orphanage, while excusing those who perpetrated the brutalities.

The Goldenbridge story was first told in 1992 on Gay Byrne's radio programme and the Sisters of Mercy promised counselling in reparation. That never materialised. Surprisingly, Ms Durkan does not mention this in her book.

By 1996 the Catholic Church had undergone great turmoil. Irish people were ready to listen to and believe victims of abuse. Ms Durkan, on the other hand, chooses to attack Dear Daughter because it used a drama documentary format. She pronounces from her "hill", as she calls it, in Valparaiso that "drama, of its nature, works by isolating and heightening selected events". But what of the many similar stories that have emerged from other orphanages, here and in Australia? She is silent on that.

If anything happened at Goldenbridge that should not have happened, she blames it on specific personalities. Yet the experiences related by survivors of four Sisters of Mercy orphanages in Australia were very similar to those we experienced in Gol denbridge - stories of starvation, beatings and worse. Can that be blamed solely on "personalities", or was there something more institutionalised going on?

One of the most baffling things about Ms Durkan's book is that she knew so little of what went on inside the orphanage during her five years in the convent there. "I was seldom inside the orphanage," she writes. "I wasn't inclined to tempt fate." Yet from her hill in Valparaiso she appears to have such a clear retrospective view that she feels entitled to contradict those of us who lived there.

"Goldenbridge was a good place," she asserts. Yet on every level she seems to have had a deep fear of that orphanage: "Attending university by night saved me. It moved me further and further away from the likelihood of ever having to work in an orphanage." (What a privilege.)

She appears anxious to blame what is often seen as the harsh society of the 1950s and 1960s for any abuses that did occur in the orphanage. She also appears anxious to blame the paucity of state support. Yet many children at that time lived in poor homes and were not abused. And the church had ready access to funds to build cathedrals and churches throughout the country.

Teresita Durkan, or Sister Regina Mundi, as she was then known, arrived in Goldenbridge in 1959, a decade after my arrival as a bewildered and frightened child. What happened to me and others in those ten years was vital to the Dear Daughter story. She was not there for it.

She talks of some of the orphans as being "privileged" for being able to attend the secondary school. So what? Primary and secondary school was free in those days. Why should the orphans (charges) of the Sisters of Mercy not have been able to go to their secondary school? And does she not realise that many were denied that opportunity, not on the grounds of academic ability, but on the whim of nuns?

I was one of the "privileged" ones. I was 14 when Sister Regina taught me history. She was a brilliant teacher and I liked her, though I cannot say that she appeared entirely happy in what she was doing.

I wish Teresita Durkan had come down from her hill in Valparaiso and talked to those of us who lived in that orphanage which she so rarely visited. Had she done so she might not have written a book as flawed as this one. And she might have appreciated the immensity of the gap between us. She says Goldenbridge convent "was no bed of petunias". No: it was a bed of thorns. Ms Durkan explains that it took guts for novices to face the truth about whether convent life agreed with them and implies she didn't have those guts. Eventually, thirty-one years later, she found the guts to face that truth. But she does not explain why she left; after all, it was that truth which took her to Valparaiso. Is it because her loyalty to the Mercy Order is still stronger than the need to tell all of the truth?