Time to cherish all our children - Hidden abuse

There was a time when many people in Ireland could have pleaded justifiable ignorance of child abuse.

For decades, this hideous practice continued hidden and obscured, with the result that a sizeable proportion of our youngest citizens grew up in terror, knowing that the abuse they suffered was unlikely to be acknowledged, let alone addressed.

That is no longer the case. We now know the full horror of child abuse but perhaps we thought that, following years of revelations and concerted efforts to confront it, this huge problem had been solved.