A friend of mine rang me after reading Medb Ruane's column of December 20th, 1999. "Congratulations," he said sardonically. "I see that the `paper of record' has not only allowed Fintan O'Toole to proclaim that you are in denial of the reality of child abuse, but that Medb Ruane has decided to imply that you and your family profited personally from child labour. Oh, yeah, I forgot that you are also responsible for the Statute of Limitations Bill. What the hell did you do to these people?"

What indeed? I have written often in the Sunday Business Post about the lack of an adequate forum where people misrepresented and damaged by the media could seek redress. Ironically, I now find myself in exactly that position.

The facts of the case are simple, but nowhere in the archives of the "paper of record" will you find these facts, except in this piece penned by the person who was misrepresented, and to some small extent in the Letters to the Editor.

Late on Friday, November 19th, the producer of the Today with Pat Kenny show asked me to read and review Suffer the Little Children by Mary Raftery and Eoin O'Sullivan for the following Monday. I was adamant that I could not do so, but eventually she persuaded me.

On December 10th, 1999, Fintan O'Toole declares that "Breda O'Brien, a sincere and committed journalist, has made extravagant claims about her own alleged ability to uncover flawed research in Suffer the Little Children. (One shudders to think what an insincere and uncommitted journalist might be capable of.)" He says that I would prefer to think that child abuse did not happen, that I claimed survivors of child abuse were misremembering or imagining their experiences, that I then apologised for so implying.

He says the context in which I made my "attack" on Suffer the Little Children was the belief that this was all "some kind of awful nightmare that will go away when we all wake up." He claims my "attack" comes down to just two issues, and then goes on to list three.

His litany of inaccuracies, omissions, damaging allegations and mischievous half-truths illustrates perfectly the impossible position a person who has been misrepresented finds herself in.

It is exactly like answering "When did you stop beating your husband?" to have to say that you are not an apologist for child abuse; that you never claimed that people were misremembering their experiences; that you apologised for any hurt you might have inadvertently caused anyone already greatly damaged by an appalling system, and not for alleging that they dreamt up their experiences, as O'Toole claimed.

The most charitable interpretation is that Fintan O'Toole did not listen to the Pat Kenny programme (the date of which he got wrong in his column).

Otherwise he would have heard me say: "One of the things I don't take issue with, Pat, is the reality of the abuse. I absolutely accept that. I accept totally the fact that people were battered, beaten, sexually abused and in some instances, starved. I accept that completely."

It is completely disingenuous to suggest that my problems with the book (which incidentally I praised as well as criticised) revolve around two or three minor issues. My contention is that the frame within which child abuse is investigated is too narrow and therefore distorts the whole picture.

The biggest flaw is that the authors state baldly that there were not just a few "bad apples" in the religious orders. In other words, the religious orders were either all bad apples or mostly bad apples.

Since this belief frames all the research in the book, the authors feel it unnecessary to seek independent verification of any of the personal stories damaging to religious orders, even where such contrary evidence is available in the public domain. The fair option would have been to present the contrary evidence also, if only to challenge it. Readers could then make up their own minds.

The authors also fail to establish a context for what happened in industrial schools by referring to the high levels of physical punishment in all schools at the time, here and abroad.

I have repeatedly said it is shameful for religious orders, and the church as a whole, to address the scandalous abuse of children with a barrister on one arm and a public relations person on the other. But neither is it right to ignore or leave out evidence of much good work done by religious orders.

I choose to dispute issues which illustrate how the underlying beliefs of the authors distort the picture. For example, I highlighted the existence of a coroner's report on the death of a boy in Artane which the authors either failed to find or ignored.

In response to this, Mary Raftery alleged on radio that there were a number of deaths on staircases in Artane, while providing no documentary evidence whatsoever to back her claims. The eyewitness she relies upon is now on record with three totally different versions of the one incident. (See Letters page, December 22nd.) This raises legitimate questions which O'Toole conveniently ignores.

O'Toole claims that in the 1970s Sister Stan, along with Bishop Casey, in a private room berated the two civil servants from the Department of Justice and Education who sat on the Kennedy Committee. O'Toole claims sources who say this incident happened.

My sources who say it did not happen are; Sister Stan: Risteard MacConcradha, the representative of the Department of Justice; Antoin O'Gormain, the representative of the Department of Education; and Richard O'Donovan, of the Department of Education, secretary to the Kennedy Committee. Who are O'Toole's "sources"? Bishop Casey, perhaps?

As to whether Sister Stan knew of child sex abuse, Edward Murphy, the childcare worker who initially told her about physical abuse, confirmed in the letters page of this paper (December 22nd) that she could not have known because he himself did not know; and that she did all she possibly could in the circumstances. Why was this not an item in the news columns of this paper?

Why indeed?

To make Suffer the Little Children sacred canon, and therefore above all question, is to do an injustice to the quest for the whole truth. It is massive moral blackmail to imply that anyone who questions it is questioning the reality of child abuse.

Nothing is gained by suppression of free speech and honest dissent. The "paper of record" could have set the record straight about my role in this debate by some decent investigative journalism on the issues I raised. Instead it allowed two columnists the luxury of misleading ad hominem attacks.

Breda O'Brien is a columnist with the Sunday Business Post

Ms O'Brien is, of course, at liberty to take issue with our journalists or to challenge any aspect of our reportage or commentary upon matters of public interest. The Irish Times is happy to provide space for her to do so in this instance - hardly a "suppression of free speech and honest dissent".

Ms O'Brien raised serious, valid and sustainable questions about aspects of the book in question and the subsequent media coverage. She has not sought to deny the scale of child abuse, nor has she argued that survivors were imagining their experiences. The quotation of her remarks (above) on the Pat Kenny programme in question is accurate