Accountability demands the truth, not our State’s culture of evasion

We made terrible mistakes. We never put a system in place to make sure that you were told what you needed to know when you needed it.

Instead of telling you the plain unvarnished truth, in a way that might have helped you, we hid it from you. We forced you into legal confrontation when it was unnecessary, and it was certainly the last thing you needed. And above all that, we put you at terrible risk of your life, when you should have had a much better, more realistic chance. For all of that, and for the pain and grief you have suffered, we are deeply ashamed, and terribly sorry.

If anyone saw Vicky Phelan on the news last week, sending a heart-broken message of despair to our forbidding State, you realised immediately that those are the words, at the very least, that she was entitled to hear. We saw her grief as she stood outside the