They knew and did nothing about it.

Worse still, rather than own up and seek to make amends, they went after the whistleblower and took away her job.

Described as the “greatest scandal of our times”, the case of Grace — the intellectually disabled child who was abused and neglected for 20 years — took centre stage in Dáil Éireann today.

Focusing on two interim reports by the Commission of Investigation into the scandal of a foster home in the Southeast in which 47 young, vulnerable, disabled people stayed, TDs gathered to air their views.

The debate began inauspiciously with a “scant” speech from Disabilities Minister Anne Rabbitte.

Quoting a legal-ese script, she said she was precluded from commenting in detail.

She later accepted her speech was inadequate.

The opposition however, was not having it.

Social Democrats co-leader Róisín Shortall was the first to take issue with the minister.

Galway Independent TD Catherine Connolly criticised Ms Rabbitte.

But it was the speech of Kilkenny TD John McGuinness which raised the temperature of proceedings significantly.

Mr McGuinness chaired the Public Accounts Committee which first exposed the Grace scandal in 2015 and 2016.

Someone sexually abused Grace and others in that house. Nobody thought fit to report the bruises on her thighs, legs, and breasts, that were all inflicted by the hands of people, and not, as it was said, by a fall on the bus, he said.

In a powerhouse speech of 12 minutes duration, Mr McGuinness said HSE officials “lied” to his committee about what happened to Grace.

“Officials told blatant lies,” Mr McGuinness said under absolute privilege in the Dáil.

They should be called back before the Oireachtas and “put through the wringer,” he said saying it made him "sick to the pit of my stomach".

Worse still, the Dáil also heard that the HSE using taxpayers' money targeted a whistleblower who raised Grace’s case, who subsequently lost her job for speaking out.

There was considerable criticism that the commission, which has so far taken €7m and four-and-a-half years and is yet to conclude its work, has until next July to produce a final report.

But Ms Rabbitte, speaking frankly, said she has little confidence as the line minister that the deadline will be met.

She also revealed that there are two new investigations into serious failures into disability care in the Southeast, the same area where Grace stayed.

Again and again, politicians, from Sinn Féin’s David Cullinane, Kathleen Funchion, and Mark Ward to Ms Connolly and the Green’s Marc Ó Caithasaigh called for people who knew what happened and did nothing to be held to account.

Not in an Irish way of being held to account — like a promotion or retirement on enhanced terms

— but actual accountability.

“There are individuals in the HSE that know what went on. They are criminals. They should be brought to court and prosecuted,” Mr McGuinness told the Dáil.

So strong were the contributions from Mr McGuinness, Ms Connolly, and Mr Ó Caithasaigh, Ceann Comhairle Seán Ó Fearghail intervened and said further debates on Grace and the other 46 victims are not only warranted but required.

Good speeches are one thing, but action in terms of delivering justice for Grace is long overdue.

They began digging the grave shortly after 8am last Tuesday. The teeth of the mechanical digger clawed at a film of frost and down into the cold ground.

It was all done in a matter of minutes, the displaced earth carted off in a dumper. Timber supports were placed at the side of the hole, straw dropped in to make a bed for the coffins.

A hearse drove at speed along the road that runs at the edge of Dardistown cemetery. It stopped and a simple wooden coffin was slid from the rear of the vehicle and carried by workmen to the side of the freshly dug grave.

“Miroslaw Sierakowski, 21 October 2021” was inscribed on a brass plate. He was 36 years of age.

The hearse took off again. Over the following 20 minutes, a small knot of people gathered at the side of the grave, next to a row of silver birch trees. They were from agencies that provide services to homeless people, the Alice Leahy Trust, The Order of Malta, The Mendicity Institution.

The hearse returned and a second coffin was taken from it. The inscription on this one read, “Robert Matacz, 10 June 2021”.

He was 47 when he died.

The coffins were then lowered into the grave, one on top of the other.

One of their first glimpses of Ireland is now their final resting place

As best could be determined, the two Polish men probably were acquainted but weren’t friends and nobody could recall seeing them in each other’s company. Yet they were now joined in their final resting place, in a different country and society from where their lives took shape.

A plane comes in to land at nearby Dublin Airport as Miroslaw and Robert are buried at Dardistown. Each probably arrived in Ireland on similar flights, full of hopes and expectations, little knowing they were looking down on their last resting place. Picture: Dara Mac Donaill/The Irish Times

Monsignor Eoin Thynne stepped forward to say a few words. As he did so, another Ryanair plane descended from a sky heavy with grey clouds, coming in to land at Dublin Airport which adjoins Dardistown.

In all likelihood, the two deceased men separately entered the country on such a flight, their first view of this land of promise taking in the vast rows of headstones just before touchdown.

From there, they would have travelled by bus or taxi past the graveyard’s entrance, probably giddy with the kind of excitement known to recently-arrived immigrants.

Now their final resting place would symbolically note that they hadn’t got very far in the country in which they had invested their dreams.

The monsignor touched on fragments of the two men’s lives. Robert had used the services of Alice Leahy Trust on a frequent basis, as he had with the other agencies. He was always mannerly and polite. He had worked as a delivery driver. He had a twin sister, and his mother had died young.

Miroslaw had a great sense of humour. A few years back, during a heavy fall of snow, he had arrived at the gates of the trust and helped clear the paths. He was laughing at the big deal that was being made of the weather. “You Irish, you don’t know what snow is,” he said.

He called the people in the Alice Leahy Trust his Irish family. The last time he visited was October 4, 2021, six days before he died. He passed in four cigarettes and asked that they be shared out among the agency’s other clients.

Both men had worked at various jobs before the vicissitudes of life intervened to disrupt the dreams they must have harboured on immigrating to this country.

Throughout the pandemic, funerals were robbed of the warmth drawn from crowds gathering in around the bereaved. The spectre was one of the saddest through a strange and frightening time.

Yet beyond the confines of graveyards, communities did what they could to comfort those who had suffered loss, forming lines along the route, phoning, messaging, waving, transmitting that while they can’t be there in person, their collective spirit is pushing in around the graveside.

Lonely final journey for people on the margins

Thankfully, the ritual of funerals is, like everything else, returning to some form of normality.

For those who have been thrust onto the margins, bonds broken with family, the final journey remains lonely, unmarked and doesn’t do justice to the occasion. In the place of a eulogy, only fragments of the deceased’s life can be assembled.

Rather than the hum of conversation as friends and family reminisce, there is this quiet gathering of a few people who work with the unmoored, now bearing witness in the void.

The various agencies have plots reserved for those whose remains will go unclaimed and require the dignity of a final resting place. The grave for the two Polish men was provided by the Glasnevin Trust, which also reserves plots for this purpose.

At least 30 people have been buried in this manner in Dardistown over the last two years. In Cork, there have been two such burials in the same period at St Finbarr’s Cemetery, a woman from the Congo, and a Moroccan trawlerman recovered from the sea.

Immigrants' experience mirrors that of the Irish

When Monsignor Thynne concluded, Alice Leahy said a few words, noting that the sad ending for some immigrants in this country was a replica of what had occurred in previous generations for many Irish emigrants who died alone and were buried far from home.

The exceptions shine through.

In 2019, Tipperary man Joseph Tuohy died in north London after a hard life.

An appeal went out to bring his body home and ultimately he was afforded a funeral fit for a king in Dublin, complete with piper, a soprano, and hundreds of mourners who came to acknowledge that some lives never cop a lucky break.

Now and again, there is also the odd story about a successful rescue from the trajectory towards a premature death among those described as homeless.

On Tuesday morning, two men who attended at Dardistown were Garda Damien McCarthy and his retired colleague Joe Gannon. They, along with Garda Alan O’Dowd, assisted Ms Leahy’s organisation in repatriating a man last year who wanted to go home because things hadn’t worked out and he was living on the streets.

Garda Alan O'Dowd, Romi Ramtohul, and Garda Damien McCarthy at Dublin Airport as Romi started his journey back home to Mauritius. 

Romi Ramtohul had frequented the same agencies as the deceased Polish men. He also had struggled with finding a place for himself in society after coming here in search of a new life.

Unlike so many though, fate smiled on him and, with plenty of help, he ultimately made it back home to Mauritius. It was a rare good news story from the margins.

After Ms Leahy spoke the small gathering stood in silence.

Within an hour or so, the busy cemetery would be back to handling standard burials, with corteges crawling through the entrance, mourners arriving in droves to lend comfort to the bereaved.

'I want to go home'. Romi Ramtohul on board his plane at Dublin Airport as he embarked on the first leg of his journey home.

The small ritual on this cold morning came to a close. A woman from the Order of Malta stepped forward to the grave with a bunch of daffodils. A pair of lights shone through the clouds as another plane began its descent.

In the distance, where rush-hour was well underway on the intersecting M50 and M1 motorways, the traffic sounded like the sea.

Oh, the wonderful, messy humanity of it. That’s what I remember most about meeting my birth father for the first time, aged 26. There was gushing conversation followed by misty-eyed silence and then the really awkward goodbye. He swept me right off the ground and gave me a big sloppy kiss.

When I stepped into a taxi afterwards, the driver swung his big brass neck around and, with comic exaggeration, asked: “And who was that?”. I couldn’t but admire the cheek, so I gave him a straight answer: “That was my father — and it’s the first time we met.”

“Ah, go on, pull the other one,” he said, but I could see he was doubting himself as his big, astonished eyebrows shot due north.

Many years ago, I wrote a paragraph describing that encounter for a competition for a place on a memoir-writing course. It was read out on the radio among the runners-up. At the time, I was incredibly relieved not to win because I would not have been able to write any more.

Until now.

For many, 2020 will be remembered as the year Covid-19 upended life as we know it, but I will remember it as the year the Mother and Baby Homes Bill passed through the Dáil.

That day in late October, when an undebated bill was rushed through the Houses of the Oireachtas with indecent haste, was the very worst of days. It felt like a punch in the gut — not just to me, but the many thousands like me who passed through the institutions under investigation by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission.

It seemed, at first, as if the Government was going to do what officialdom had done so many times before and seal information that hundreds of thousands of people have spent a lifetime trying to find. “A lost generation muted by bureaucracy,” as a fellow adopted friend put it.

But then, something extraordinary happened. The Government bowed to a groundswell of public opinion and did a perfect U-turn, promising that survivors, birth mothers, and adoptees would be granted access to their personal information.

The culture of silence and secrecy that has caused incalculable damage stops now. That was the message coming loud and clear from the general public. Or so it seemed to me. That was the very best of days.

In the months since then, the issue of mother and baby institutions and what needs to happen so that we, as a country, can at last make restitution has never been far from the headlines.

The tone has changed too. There seems to be a new — and very welcome — understanding of the depth of the hurt and, perhaps, a sense that the publication of the final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes in January will only be the start of it.

Last week, Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman talked of ongoing consultation and the need to put counselling services in place.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin has also given us reason to hope. He has spoken of the need for a dedicated archive where the story of the dark chapters of our past would be told, and has questioned the wisdom of developing land at Bessborough where the remains of hundreds of children are believed to be buried.

He also seems committed to letting the truth come out at last: “I’ve no interest in any records being put into some vault and left there for a long time that no one has access to.”

As a person who waited seven years for a reply to a letter asking for details of my birth, this feels like a very important moment. It should be said, however, that there is still no mechanism for the estimated 100,000 children adopted from Ireland between 1922 to 1998 to access their personal information.

That means adopted children, like me, are obliged to write to child agency Tusla which, up to now, has over-zealously interpreted data-protection laws, blacking out the very information sought — the name of the woman who brought them into the world.So many fellow adopted friends have tried, without success, to find details of their own beginnings. Their documents come back criss-crossed with black or white lines, deleting any mention of anything that might tell them who they are.

Little wonder, then, that one of the things I felt when I first met my birth father was shame. Not his shame, or indeed mine, but the shame that Irish society has, in the past, laid like a mantle on the shoulders of those who fall outside its norms. Secrecy and the withholding of information can have that effect on a person.

There was also the matter of State-sponsored name-calling. The term ‘illegitimate’ was not abolished in Ireland until 1987, too late for many of my generation who suffered under its insidious tarring brush.

Perhaps that sense of being outside the norm has kept many people affected by mother and baby homes silent for so long. But those voices need to be listened to now, a point made eloquently this week by two former mother and baby home residents Francis Timmons and Terri Harrison, who have set up a helpline for survivors.

It will be needed. There will be very hard moments ahead if, as is hoped, the Commission reveals more about the allegations of detention, cruelty, neglect, forced adoption and vaccine trials that went on inside some of the institutions.

In all of that, I am one of the very lucky ones. I was legally adopted into a loving home and when I went looking for my birth information, I found it — albeit after a seven-year wait. And that brings me back to my birth father and the incomplete story of our first meeting.

I never got beyond that first paragraph because, up to now, it didn’t feel as if there was a space to tell the stories of the people who, for one reason or another, don’t quite fit the template.

That might explain why the strangeness of that first encounter never quite wore off. We had a few more meetings and exchanged cards and heartfelt good wishes. A few years after that, I read of his death in the paper and felt the urge to go the funeral but felt, again, that there wasn’t a space for me. I didn’t know if his other family — there was another family — even knew of my existence. I didn’t want to intrude, but I didn’t want to be absent either.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, I rang the priest who was to say his funeral Mass and I will be forever grateful for his offer to represent me, so to speak, on the day of the service by lighting a special candle.

It’s a story with a less than satisfactory ending, but it’s one I’m no longer reluctant to tell.

Now it’s time to hear all those voices that have been silent for so long. It’s time for truth and reconciliation.

How do you reckon Dimitri Payet slept Thursday night, after that goal, that beautiful goal for Marseille against PAOK, that you ought to look up now if you missed?

Even after all the sweet goals Dimitri has accumulated in his life so far, you’d imagine he drifted off easily in a kind of bliss, rewinding it. From his exclusive angle, despite all the cameras mounted in the Stade Vélodrome. Maybe he was lucky enough to stir awake in the middle of the night to briefly retrace its delicious arc before floating off again. Knowing true, fleeting contentment.

It’s surely still flickering into his mind Saturday morning, while stretching maybe, ahead of Montpellier coming to town Sunday. When reality may bite a little and the act of scoring a goal, that he made look so straightforward and inevitable, becomes a puzzle once more.

But then a goal as good as that one is locked away for safekeeping — a currency that will never devalue. A treasure to be taken out and polished.

Might it be the only means of ever achieving world peace, to somehow give everyone a goal every two or three days?

How did David Clifford sleep last Sunday night? His replays will look different to ours. He can’t see the boy O’Hora waterskiing behind him, locks flowing in the wind. Can Clifford watch it all back in glorious slow motion? Or is he like the mortals who occasionally pull off a worldy, and wonder what out of body intervention made them lift the shot just so? A puzzle you could happily lie awake all night trying to solve.

Is there anything more beautiful than a goal? Is it the missing sauce for Waterford? The gravy that sweetens all that running up and down they must do.

There is a rich culture of missionary work in Tipperary. Along some boreens, there is hardly a house that didn’t make a contribution to the efforts in Africa back in the day. And that fine tradition continues with the strides Liam Cahill and Mikey Bevans have made in exporting our zest for the goal.

How did it feel? It is the question most asked and most lie. The most important thing is the three points. It doesn’t matter who scores. It’s all about the team. The usual rubbish.

Some, like Troy Parrott, after the late one against Lithuania, muster what simple honesty they can. “The best feeling ever.” 

Even amid the current movement in policing celebration, with Ruben Neves and Ashley Young at the vanguard, it was among Roy Keane’s wronger contributions to suggest that Ireland overdid it that night.

Even if he’d scored it in a five-a-side back in Belvo, Troy was entitled to knee slide as far as he liked.

Some, like Wayne Rooney, a man whose intelligence has always been undervalued, have managed to go some way to capturing how it works for the elite.

“The initial feeling is like you're playing football underwater. When you score the goal it's like you come up for air and you can hear the crowd, the atmosphere, for that four or five seconds. It's a mad feeling.”

But as long ago as Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby assured us that doses of this drug were in supply far away from the world’s great stages.

“I’m no good at football, needless to say, although happily that is also true of the friends I play with. We are just good enough to make it worthwhile: every week one of us scores a blinding goal, a scorching right-foot volley or a side-foot into a corner that caps a mazy run through a bewildered opposition defence, and we think about it secretly and guiltily (this is not what grown men should dream about) until the next time.”

Is that what has agitated a man like Matt Le Tissier, a scorer of so many beautiful goals? That there is no next time. Is that what has taken him down so many strange rabbit holes, that the memories have faded? That even when he gets out the DVD, he can’t quite watch from his exclusive angle. Maybe unravelling conspiracies is coming closer than golf and languid punditry managed in replacing the buzz.

I’m thinking about goals, because this week drew the circle of life in our house.

The small girl got her first in a ‘real match’. Her twin had got there a bit before her, has already opened his savings account. And last Saturday was her turn.

She'd craved one. Though there was no extravagant celebration, it wouldn't be her style. Just the widest smile and a shy little clench of the fist. And next day she told me she’d scored it again in her dreams.

Let's hope she enjoys chasing that feeling, for however long. And that it never maddens her.

I can easily withdraw the first lodgment in the bank, from a 'real match', longer ago than Fever Pitch. A race with the keeper, who must have been slow. A half-slide and a little prod that somehow diverted the ball round him. A collision that wasn’t painful at all because the view from the ground saw it scuttling over the line.

Over the years, no matter how lowly the stage, they have all been rewound secretly and guiltily, occasionally in slow motion.

Will there be a next time? This week both the doc and the physio were advising strongly against it. They were talking knee replacements and threatening pilates. They were warning about the six-a-side cage like it was the most dangerous block in the hood. They were offering cycling and maybe a small bit of tennis and the carrot of being able to walk up the stairs at 60. There was nothing in their prospectus about goals.

Initial reaction: what a waste of Lenten chocolate abstinence. And straight home to an early Easter egg.

We’re at the stage now of assessing the cost and figuring what compromises could be made. Once a month? Grass only? Walking football?

What would one more goal be worth? 

Last week, a friend told me that he had lost his confidence around women and love. He’s coming out of a bad, protracted, on-off breakup and his self-worth has taken a bashing.

People keep telling him to get back on the horse, put himself out there, get back in the game, even though he’s feeling low and unsure of himself.

He told me about a recent date. It went badly, there was no chemistry with the person and he doesn’t see any future, but she wants to see him again.

“I’ll probably go on another date with her,” he told me. But why, I asked. He shrugged. “Because I’ve lost my confidence,” he said.

When we’re feeling low, there’s nothing like the high of someone else’s interest, even someone we don’t like, to give us an ego boost.

I was thinking about confidence a lot last week. Due to circumstances (marriage), I’ve found myself being a passive viewer of the Masters golf tournament most years and have come to learn that confidence and nerve are as much a part of winning as talent and skill.

I have watched enough years now to know that once confidence is lost, all is lost. But isn’t it the same in all things? In work, in love, in life, when we lose our confidence, we lose our ability to be ourselves, to take full advantage of our natural abilities and to be joyful in our lives.

Losing confidence can be fatal to our sense of self. It makes us forget who we are. It makes us do things that we don’t want to do because we’re so uncertain about our own worth, failing to trust ourselves and our abilities because we have forgotten what we are capable of.

It seemed that everywhere I looked last week, confidence was on the agenda. Samantha Brick, the woman who was pilloried a decade ago for writing an article that claimed women didn’t like her because she was too confident and beautiful, wrote a follow-up article last week. The latest article dealt with the idea of confidence.

Brick said living in France, amongst French women, had supercharged her own confidence and she made a good point when she said that we don’t tend to like it when people like themselves. Now why is that? 

"I suppose there is a fine line between being confident and seeming arrogant but all that talk about loving ourselves doesn’t amount to very much if we don’t actually believe it."

Later that same day, I stumbled across the Derek Walcott poem ‘Love After Love’ which includes the line: ‘Give back your heart/to itself, to the stranger who has loved you/all your life, whom you ignored/for another.’

It made me think about how little we care for and value ourselves in general, and how if we liked ourselves just a little bit more, our confidence might find a more even keel.

It doesn’t help that confidence is such a nebulous thing that moves in and out of our lives like smoke. It reminds me of the gas in a hot air balloon. When we have it, we are buoyant and can reach such heady heights but without it we are deflated and land-bound, wondering how we ever possibly rode so high.

It’s amazing how fragile confidence is, how quickly it can disappear, or be pulled from under you, because of a careless cruel word or a thoughtless action. That can often be all it takes to completely puncture our confidence.

The loss of confidence in any area of our lives can be very damaging, paralysing even. As a writer, I lose confidence all the time but I am aware now that it’s part of the process. That doesn’t mean it’s easy and there have certainly been times in the past where I’ve lost my confidence for long periods of time.

I once worked with a particularly brutal editor who was so negative and aggressive that I almost left writing completely because my sense of my own ability was so reduced and diminished by the experience.

So how then do we protect this delicate human feature that is confidence and regain it if we have lost it? It’s good to turn to the facts sometimes, the objective, irrefutable facts. For me, with writing, I remind myself that I have managed to earn a living from writing for more than 20 years now.

Likewise with love, or other areas of life, it’s important to remind ourselves of the positive experiences we have had, the good things we have achieved, as a way of reconnecting with our inner confidence.

Because confidence is a truly magical ingredient in life with the power to greatly improve and transform our lives, to enhance our natural abilities and our enjoyment of life.

As Rory McIlroy finished his final round of the Masters in second place, having started the day in tenth, he spoke about his mindset that morning. “I asked myself why not me,” he said. It’s a question we should all have the confidence to ask ourselves a little more often.