Child abuse report - Findings challenge all of society

THERE were hardly more than one or two events since the Famine more cathartic for Ireland than the long-resisted acceptance, a little more than a decade ago, that a great and unchecked evil was active at the centre of our childcare institutions.

The depravity and violence, the emotional and psychological abuse uncovered, went well beyond anything that even a society almost numbed by decades of terrorism considered acceptable.

That these violations were inflicted on some of the weakest in society – isolated children without a home and whose only crime was poverty – by members of religious orders in honoured and trusted positions made the betrayals all the greater, the wounds all the deeper.