We’re all to blame for the child hellholes

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.

Everyone of us – including our parents, aunts, uncles and siblings – are guilty at the very least of the most craven moral cowardice in not speaking out against what went on.

No Irish citizen of the period, from 1930 to the abolition of corporal punishment in state schools run by the religious orders, can honestly say they did not know what these sadists and hypocrites were capable of.