The legislation had been due in Committee State in the coming weeks but this has now been deferred to allow the Oireachtas education committee to further scrutinise.

A religious order that accepted that children were abused in its care told the Minister for Education in 2015 that plans to retain child abuse records would lead to “eternal besmirching of the names of good people”.

The State’s proposal to seal the records of the Laffoy/Ryan commission of inquiry and its associated bodies for 75 years is unjustified and wrong, writes

Social change, recent referendum results and a changing social order mean the Ireland of today is very different from that seen by Pope John Paul II in 1979.

IT is disappointing that the Ombudsman for Children Niall Muldoon has reported that the Health Service Executive failed to ensure that children in some residential care centres were not exposed to unnecessary risk.

I KNOW one of them fell off a train on his way home from school and two people have told me his shoe-laces were tied together. I know he never came back to school, and no-one ever mentioned him again, recalls Victoria White.

Amnesty International has joined a growing chorus of calls for a full-scale inquiry into the operation of mother-and-baby homes.

In the course of compiling her book, ‘Stolen Lives’, Bette Brown has come to believe that the abuse of children in industrial schools was one of the darkest chapters in Ireland’s history.

Only 21 survivors of the country’s industrial schools have availed of the Department of Justice offer to provide them with certificates clarifying that they do not have a criminal record.

In the early ’90s, her lone voice exposed a dark period in history, writes Conall Ó Fátharta

I want to pay tribute to Dublin City Council, for backing the Bethany Survivors’ Group, and for saying that the State should apologise to, and compensate, Bethany victims.

An Bord Pleanála’s decision to turn down a memorial to victims of institutional abuse, planned for the Garden of Remembrance on Parnell Square in Dublin, represents a slap in the face for those who were treated outrageously by nuns and brothers of religious orders under the unseeing eyes of state agencies.

Questions surround a section of the McAleese Report which states it asked the Ryan Commission to contact seven women mentioned in the Ryan Report who were in Magdalene Laundries.

Thirty-nine children spent up to 10 nights in youth homeless centres last year, according to Health Service Executive figures.

The relentless work of Mary Raftery exposed what went on behind the walls of the Magdalene Laundries, writes Dan Buckley

It was one of the darkest chapters in the history of the State and now a memorial called Journey of Light will be built to remember survivors and victims of clerical sex abuse.

I REFER to the letter from Mr Tom Hayes published on November 2 regarding the Ryan Report on child abuse, and in particular the following:

THE Department of Education has set aside almost €12.5 million to meet legal costs associated with the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse this year.

An inquiry will be held into historic institutional child abuse in the North, the ministerial Executive said today.

Members of the Ryan Commission who carried out the investigation into institutional child abuse here are in Belfast this morning to address one of the biggest ever gatherings of victims there.

I READ with interest your report headlined ‘Year delay before abuse inquiry decides on documents’ (July 5).

IT will be another year before it will be known if the Ryan Commission’s one million written documents and oral testimony will be destroyed.

A state inquiry into institutional and clerical child abuse in the North is almost inevitable, government sources said tonight.

EMBATTLED Bishop of Galway Martin Drennan has pleaded for patience as the Church deals with the impact of the Murphy report.

THE head of the Department of Education has admitted the cost of the 10-year long Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was widely underestimated and is now set to cost taxpayers over €130 million, more than 60 times the estimated bill.

An increasing number of people in Ireland are opting for the religious life.

A petition demanding a full inquiry into children's treatment in institutions run by the Catholic Church and Irish State will be handed into the Northern Ireland Assembley today.

CRIES for help received by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre last year were equally divided between childhood sexual abuse and adult rape.

“THE darkest corner of the history of the State” is how Taoiseach Brian Cowen described the country’s “deepest shame” – the systemic abuse and neglect of children in residential institutions run by religious orders.

TWO features of modern life are:

IN his letter (May 29), Gregóir de Buitléir posed the question “cui bono... to whose benefit is it to censure all religious brothers and all schools?

SURVIVORS of institutional child abuse held their first meeting with Taoiseach Brian Cowen last night in an attempt to strike a new atonement deal.

Our republic is just over 60 years old. As you mature through life, you reflect on your own failures, errors and shortcomings. As a nation we need to face these with honesty. We have been too trusting and deferential to those on whom we have conferred authority

I HOPE tens of thousands of people march tomorrow week.

THE most important lesson to come from the Ryan commission report into institutional child abuse is that all Irish citizens who were old enough to understand what was going on in these hellhole institutions for childcare must carry some of the blame for not caring or speaking up.

HUNDREDS of thousands of documents and witness testimonies compiled by the Child Abuse Commission are not in any imminent danger of destruction, the commission said.

ELDERLY nuns, priests and brothers who abused children in religious run institutions could face trial in the courts after a groundswell of support by the authorities for criminal investigations into their behaviour.

IN the wake of the Ryan commission report, something that has been rarely spoken about so far is the hatred of working people and the rural poor that permeated the state and its agencies as well as the Catholic church.

FOLLOWING publication of the Ryan commission report, no doubt the accusing finger will be pointed at the Catholic Church for its failure to monitor the behaviour of the personnel of these orders and take appropriate disciplinary action.

THE exclusion of institutional abuse victims from the Ryan Commission’s press conference, and the use of gardaí to expel them, served as a stark reminder that Ireland has yet to accept the implications of that horrific legacy.

MY father suffered all the horrors described by the Ryan Commission report on institutional child abuse.

VICTIMS of child abuse at industrial schools and other Catholic schools have expressed disgust at the Child Abuse Commission’s failure to provide them with advance copies of an explosive report before its publication on Wednesday.

I am responding to Florence Horseman Hogan’s letter (‘Most abuse claims exaggerated,’ Irish Examiner, July 2).

AS the closing date draws closer for Residential Institutions Redress Board (RIRB) applications (December ‘05), the campaign for sourcing claimants is really stepping up, with victim support groups, solicitors and the Government extensively advertising in Ireland and abroad.