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We Irish are surely a strange race of people, always craving some horrible aspect of our past or present with which to make a spectacle of ourselves before the world.

The ‘Tuam Babies’ incident is a case in point. Why should we now get so violently excited about this when everyone knows that Magdalen Laundries existed?

And in practically every parish in Ireland there is a cillin (Killeen), and in some parishes more than one. These were burial-grounds, usually in remote places, for unbaptised children, suicides and strangers, those who had no right to be buried in consecrated ground (note the similarity to Tuam). Everyone knows of these, or should. Why? Because they are marked clearly on all our Ordnance Survey maps, whether 25-inch, 6-inch or the convenient 1-inch “Discovery Series”.