Children in jeopardy - We can never again say we didn’t know

ONE of the few straws of comfort many of us reached for when the obscenities revealed in Judge Seán Ryan’s society-defining report was that the atrocities were firmly rooted in the past.

We shuddered, we were ashamed of what went on in our name, but we took refuge in the notion that Ireland today is a different place and that, in this instance at least, the past is a different country. We hid behind the passage of time and the belief that those atrocities could not happen today.

Oh, that it were so. Children may not be gang-raped or starved and whipped in institutions today, but there are still thousands of Irish children in positions that are utterly unacceptable just because their families are in normal, everyday difficulties.