DURING the past two weeks Irish society has been convulsed in painful catharsis. We are finally ending our collective denial of a regime of rigid social control in which between 6,000 and 8,000 children were detained by the courts in "industrial schools" at any one time.

A cautious estimate is that between 1900 and 1970, 70,000 children were detained.

On Thursday night the Tanaiste, Mr Spring, confirmed what many in the adoption area have long suspected that our society's obsession with sexual morality led babies to be taken from their mothers and "exported" to the US for adoption.

For the tens of thousands of institutionalised and rejected children that remained here, however, conditions could be so appalling that the exported children were fortunate in comparison.

Over the fortnight we have also heard many disturbing allegations of physical and mental cruelty in the massive system of industrial schools, run by religious orders who were paid by the State for the service.

The Sisters of Mercy, with their reputation for supreme efficiency, excelled at running industrial schools. At its peak in 1910 the order also ran 70 orphanages, or about 70 per cent of all such institutions.

Those who have survived to tell their stories are mostly adults who were detained by the courts in "industrial schools" during the 1940s and 1950s.

We tend to counter the pain of their stories by telling ourselves that those in charge of children in the 1950s had "the best will in the world" when they "rescued" so called illegitimate babies, thereby allowing their shamed mothers to continue life as though nothing had happened.

This comforting misconception is a dangerous myth which we must challenge, not only if we are to understand our past but if we are to confront our abuse of children in the present.

The truth is that the majority of these "orphans" had living, married parents. The problem was that society did not regard their parents as being good enough.

Children from the ages of a few weeks up to 18 years were detained in punitive institutions by the courts because they were convicted of the crime of having parents who were overwhelmingly poor and unskilled, and whose sexual behaviour was unacceptable to the powers that were.

Ms Patricia Davison O'Connor recalls being loaded with her four brothers and sisters into a van 40 years ago by the St Vincent de Paul charity and brought to the Dublin Metropolitan District Court, where she was committed to Goldenbridge.

"We saw [the charity] as busy bodies who watched everybody in the place we were living. Their mission was to clean up the streets," she says.

UNDER the Children Act, 1908, children could be "punished" and "sentenced" by the district courts for the crimes of being "found wandering", being "illegitimate" or showing a "lack of proper guardianship".

Children of sexually active single women were taken away from their mothers on the grounds that the mothers were engaged in prostitution or endangering the morality of the children. Girls whose fathers were accused of sexually abusing them could also be "committed".

The regime was designed to be punitive, because these were children being punished for the sins of their parents. The State paid religious orders to look after these children in regimes which were deliberately punitive.

The State and the Department of Education, which monitored the schools from 1924 onwards, accepted the need for corporal punishment and required the religious to write down each child's number, "offence", and "punishment" in log books, which were inspected by the authorities.

The myth that the nuns were working to their own agenda masks the reality that, from the 1940s to the 1960s, 80 per cent of children in industrial schools were detained by the courts, the majority on the grounds of "lack of proper guardianship". Girls were more often victimised by this process of "social cleansing" than boys.

The Kennedy Report in 1970 found that 70 per cent of the boys and 95 per cent of the girls were committed by the courts, and expressed the view that girls were being sentenced to protect their social purity (see panel).

Having a mother who was considered promiscuous or a prostitute doomed a girl to the orphanage. One orphanage inmate told The Irish Times of how her mother, who was unmarried had six children who were in orphanages one after the other until her mother was left with one baby whom she was allowed to keep.

Nobody questioned why the rest of her children were committed just as the mother herself did not question her own behaviour.

Life in the orphanages was hard, but no harder than the State wanted it to be. The State prescribed what the children ate ("plain wholesome food") how long they played (two hours per day), how long they worked in industrial training" in laundries, farms and small factories (three hours per day for juniors and six hours per day for seniors) and how long they went to school (four hours per day for juniors and three hours per day for seniors).

The sisters and other orders who ran such institutions were paid by the Department of Education for looking after these children. The more they took in, the more they were paid, and Department of Education records for 1950 show that many kept the maximum number allowed by the State. Most had between 50 and 100 pupils and 21 had more than 100 pupils.

In 1949, the beginning of the period covered by the current abuse scandals concerning Goldenbridge and other schools, there were 6,378 children in 45 certified industrial schools.

During the 1950s adoption became popular and many babies were exported for adoption to the US. There were fewer and fewer children in industrial schools 5,030 in 1955 and 4,173 in 1960.

THE figures continued to decrease during the 1960s, so that by 1969 2,000 children were detained in 29 industrial schools, 15 of them run by the Sisters of Mercy. But it is a complete myth that the sisters had their own agenda: they were simply operating the agenda of the State.

The adult survivors of Goldenbridge, St Kyran's and St Anne's who have been telling their stories over the past few weeks were really the victims of Irish society's need to reinvent itself according to de Valera's ideals, in the view of one of those survivors, Ms Bernadette Fahy, who is now a psychologist.

Considering that we have known for 25 years that children were being "scarred" - as the Kennedy Report put it - in these institutions, we have to ask why our society has not expressed its outrage until now.

Where was the outrage in 1985 when Mavis Arnold and Heather Lasky published their expose of an orphanage in Co Clare? Children of the Poor Clares described how in 1943 more then 30 children were incinerated at a Sacred Heart convent when a lay teacher prevented them from leaving their burning convent in the middle of the night.

In 1991, when Patrick Touher's Fear of the Collar and Paddy Doyle's The God Squad described the brutality of life in industrial schools, where was the media uproar?

Mavis Arnold believes two influences are now at work - the power of television and the ongoing scandal about paedophilia and sexual abuse by priests. She suggests that the sexual abuse scandal of 1995-96 primed the Irish public's outrage and gave people permission to abandon their unquestioning loyalty to Catholicism.

But at whom should we be angry? Nun bashing has been the order of the day. While they cannot be excused if they engaged in abusive behaviour, it may be harder for us to face the facts of history that the government, the Catholic Church and society as a whole were complicit in the institutional abuse of thousands of children.

The impact is still being felt, as the families of adult survivors reenact the trauma in multi generational patterns of grief and abandonment, says Ms Fahy, Researchers have found that adult survivors of the orphanage system have admitted abusing their own children, since abuse is all they have ever known. Others have found they cannot bring themselves to discipline their own children.

Ms Fahy has followed up many of the survivors of Goldenbridge. She estimates that about 50 per cent of those who grew up in the industrial schools have been able to have happy and successful adult lives and relationships.

But about 50 per cent suffer chronic mental illness, seem to enter into abusive relationships and themselves have children outside marriage.

Many former pupils of the schools have felt such shame that they have emigrated to escape the unmerciful regime in which they grew up. As Ms Fahy says herself: "Some of us have spent our lives trying to find ourselves, and some of us have spent our lives trying to hide ourselves."