We can still lend our voice to survivors of institutions – it is not too late

Those of us who are lucky enough to gather with our families at Christmas are truly wealthy.

There are those for whom, for many reasons, this will not be possible. Among them are the families torn apart by the Magdalene Laundries and the State’s industrial schools. There are some who talk as though the atrocities are part of our history but in reality the consequences are still very real.

Lives have been destroyed. Souls crushed. Babies deprived of their lives; both those who survived and those who died. Both mothers and babies were deprived of the rituals and rites of the religion that scorned them and condemned to a man-made hellfire both on earth and if we are to believe the rhetoric of that that Church, in the hereafter.