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My fieldwork took place at a Dublin based support centre for adult survivors of child abuse who grew up in Ireland's industrial school system. The role of the research was to bear witness to the process of the construction and presentation of testimony to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and the compensatory body that subsequently arose, the Residential Institutions Redress Board, with a view to understanding the nature of what it meant to be a victim and/or survivor of child abuse at a particular historical moment.

This paper highlights some of the ways in which a collaborative process between ethnographer and informants sought to overcome representational issues in an atmosphere fraught with issues of identity, veracity and litigation.