Irish Examiner view: A reminder of our dark complicity and denial

No religious order, no matter how powerful or vicious, could hold hostage and abuse, vulnerable women, in the ways this report describes without the complicity of swathes of society. 

This long-anticipated moment has been reached as Judge Yvonne Murphy, after six years of investigation, today published the report on what went on in these homes between the 1920s and 1990s. Picture: Larry Cummins

Belief, as last week’s events in Washington showed and as events this day week may show, can be a strange, disruptive, volatile thing. It can motivate people to do the most irrational things, sometimes veering towards the bizarre, absolutely cruel, and dangerous. 

Belief can, and it need not be an extreme, uncommon belief, lead to the darkest outcomes, sometimes even death on a grand scale. This dynamic, this certainty that belief validates almost any behaviour is all too obvious in the bloody and recent history of this small island.