Irish Examiner view: Repeal 2004 act which limits transparency around inquiries

A Bill, passed by the Oireachtas, means all Mother and Baby Homes records apart from a database shared with Tusla and the contents of a 4,000-page report due next week will be sealed for three decades.

At lunchtime yesterday more than 130,000 people had signed a petition demanding that the seal on archives testimony from survivors of mother and baby homes be lifted. 

When, some decades ago, the institutions of Irish Catholicism, international Catholicism too, refused to confront the horrors of abuse and neglect exposed by one report after another that stand, that early rejection, led to an unimagined loss of authority and influence. 

That authority and the credibility that flowed from it may never be recovered.