There should have been widespread cheering at the highly principled resignation of Mary Laffoy, and the possible end of the commission into child abuse, argues Kevin Myers
Instead, there has been yet another epidemic of moral righteousness, as though we had not been drowning in that sea of glutinousness for a very long time now.
Are we incapable of learning even the simplest lesson from history - that it is impossible to achieve universal justice on this earth? Sometimes one must accept that evil has triumphed, and that our primary duty is not to try to undo the undoable, but to be vigilant against evil's next visitations.
Frankly, I'm surprised that there were only about 2,000 complaints of institutional sexual and physical abuse. Nonetheless, there must - given our courts' happy history of doling out compensation, whatever the merits of the claim - be a sizeable number of chancers among those who have made complaints.
Mary Laffoy is as much justiciar as she is lawyer. No more personally or professionally honest member of the legal profession exists. Every fibre of her being would be revolted at the notion she should seek hasty but expedient conclusions. So how could such a meticulous and scrupulous person possibly be expected to investigate so many complaints, some of them going back 50 years or even more? She was being asked to shift the Sahara using a fly-whisk.
And who would covet her former job? In such cases, there is usually no forensic evidence, nor any independent witnesses. In the absence of admission by the abuser, the allegation can be sustained usually only by the vehemence and the persuasiveness of the accuser; and these are as often the qualities of the con artist as they are of a victim.
Naturally, the accused do not forfeit their rights as citizens merely because of the allegations. And false accusations can have terrible consequences, as the Nora Wall scandal should remind us; and might prompt us, by the by, to wonder why no one has been called to account for that miscarriage of justice.
Poor Nora is a salutary reminder that righteous wrath is not enough; that we need careful dissection of the evidence available before we judge. But being inconvenient, her case has been ignored by the mob, as the chest-puffing and the finger-jabbing continue, and the witless chants fill the air: WE WANT THE TRUTH.
Life's not like that, for truth is not a rabbit pulled from a hat. And when you have crimes as vile and as numerous as those that occurred in Irish religious institutions, society must recognise that sometimes it's impossible to discover the truth. Too often, victims will never get the emotional release of seeing their abuser denounced or imprisoned. That, surely, is the lesson of the 20th century, from the gulag to the extermination camps, from the fire-bombed cities to the napalmed villages, to our very own Border execution squads, still at work and burying this year, while other spades toiled nearby to uncover their earlier handiwork.
It's horribly simple. Justice of any kind is simply not possible when evil has triumphed on a large enough scale, or sufficiently long ago; and all the surviving victims can do is to bathe their wounds, to bear up and get on with life as best they can, taking their scars to the grave.
Look at the alternative. The official estimate is that the Laffoy tribunal would last at least 11 years, but that is probably optimistic. Forty cases have been dealt with in four years. All our calamitous tribunals have lasted far longer than expected, and these allegations - as grave as any that can be made - are sure to be hotly and lengthily contested.
A remorseless cross-
examination of a genuine rape victim is to re-violate the already violated; but not to conduct such a ruthless forensic examination of the only evidence available would be a grotesque injustice to the accused.
So look, then, at the appalling vista opening before us: victims re-lacerated under interrogation; old men and women facing false or imagined or exaggerated charges from people they don't even remember; yet further vast capital transfers from the State to lawyers, as thousands of legal teams are employed; and inevitably, claims for compensation in time overwhelming the Redress Board.
And the cost of this farrago will be borne entirely by the public purse.
For inexplicably, and disgracefully, the last Government agreed a final settlement from the religious orders in compensation to the abused, no matter how valuable are the orders' still-large land banks around the country.
One further point. We must dispense with the fiction that the sexual abuse of children is an invention of independent Ireland. It was probably a characteristic of Irish life for a very long time, as a traumatised post-Famine Ireland conscripted large numbers of pre-adolescents into religious orders, where their sexuality became infantilised and distorted.
Given the extraordinary power of the Church in this country long before independence, these people's subsequent power to abuse children was almost absolute, with the possibility of discovery and redress virtually non-existent. Generations of victims must have grown old and gone to their death beds with the crimes against them unacknowledged, unpunished and unexpiated.
There is nothing new about child abuse, any more than there is about IRA violence: both are symptoms of powerful and diseased undercurrents in Irish life.
We cannot unbury terrorism's harvest of dead; nor can we ever make proper amends to those whose childhoods and lives were violated by sexual abuse. It is time we all realised that.