GENERATIONS of children who suffered savage abuse at the hands of religious orders were also failed by the Department of Education, which ignored its own regulations and kowtowed to the Church. The Commission into Child Abuse Report found various arms of the state failed children in industrial schools.

CRUELTY of the scale, intensity and impact revealed to the Child Abuse Commission is almost impossible to encapsulate, but one man epitomises the system that savaged the childhoods of thousands of innocents.