Full and honest co-operation essential

The welcome announcement of the terms of reference for the long-awaited Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes inevitably provokes a sense of foreboding but one tempered by a considerable degree of relief.

That unavoidable apprehension is rooted in the litany of damning reports already published into how various institutions run on behalf of the State — all of us like it or not — treated those vulnerable young and not so young people entrusted to their care.

Some of those reports were so harrowing that the phrase the Irish Holocaust was used — and not entirely inappropriately — to describe the barbarisms uncovered. The discovery of something like mass graves at some mother and child homes strengthens that shaming analogy.