Is it so very difficult to understand that we will never be able to discover the full truth about abuse of children in Irish institutions? Never.
And any attempt to establish that "full" truth can only be yet another expensively unproductive farrago of a tribunal.
Are we an upright, law-abiding, truth-telling, civic-minded people? Do you think we are? Yes? Which means you also think Lisa Minnelli will be Pope and David Gest the next James Bond.
The rest of us know what we are. We are the most litigious people and at times the most pathologically dishonest in Europe. Ask Dublin Corporation, which runs an entire department to crack down on the industry of false damages claims.
At least in such claims, you can't say you lost your leg without presenting either the stump or the limb to the defendant's lawyer. But claims of ancient abuse can be made without any physical evidence whatsoever; since abuse would normally occur in private, it is one person's word against another's, perhaps decades after the events - or non-events - in question.
How can any court rule on such conflicting evidence? How can damages be fairly awarded? And anyway, what real difference would damages make - other than to the lawyers? We all know there was abuse in our schools and institutions: but what we now regard as criminal behaviour was once a social norm. Before the 1970s, almost no boy could have emerged from the Irish secondary system without having been assaulted by a teacher with a weapon of some kind.
This was done with the general assent of parents, the churches and government. For generations, there was a social contract between adults to allow physical cruelty to children which everyone signed - except the child.
Of course, much abuse lay outside even the accepted and brutal norms of the time: but what would a jury of 20-somethings know of those norms? The savage flogging which was a standard Christian Brothers punishment a generation ago is straightforward criminal assault and battery by today's standards. So God help the 75-year-old brother who tries to tell a court what he lawfully, and with parental consent, did to boys 50 years ago, just as similar punishments had been inflicted on that boy's father by that teacher's predecessor.
So who can blame today's Christian Brothers for wishing to protect not merely the good name of elderly Brothers who have no way of refuting or rebutting or putting into a proper context allegations about events in the 1950s or 1960s, never mind of long dead brothers, about whom of course it is legally possible to say quite literally anything? We might not all care for the acronym LOVE, for Let Our Voices Emerge: but its founder, Florence Horseman-Hogan, is right to denounce all allegations against the religious being accepted as fact. For you can hear the bonfires are crackling nicely now, and for the lynch mob, any juicy, flammable religious on the top will do.
Yet the truth is that the majority of religious committed no abuse by the standards of what was acceptable at the time; and many will have committed no abuse even by our current standards. And it is the reality of the actual abuse that occurred which obliges us not to accept allegations on face value alone.
Because some little girl called Mary was genuinely sexually abused by a priest, we must accord that deed with the evil respect it deserves: it was, however, not a norm, and it would be wicked to use the fevers aroused by genuine abuse to accept unquestioningly false allegations of abuse, made either through spite, dementia or what Dublin Corporation knows all about: greed.
Moreover, we have to remember that many of the brutalities of the time were an expression of a grossly dysfunctional society: one that had a terror of sex, which prostrated itself before the unquestioning authority of the Catholic Church, which enforced religious laws by ruthless censorship and by the criminal law, and which had a diseased belief in the cleansing effects of violence.
You couldn't even begin to explain that neurotic, infantalised Ireland to a young jury today: suitcases being ransacked by customs men looking for Playboy and condoms to confiscate: restaurants refusing to serve meat on Fridays; Dublin theatre festivals opening with an episcopal Mass; university libraries standing as one to say the Angelus; The Sound of Music being widely hailed as the finest film ever made and the country wracked with hysterical grief for the IRA man Seán South as a perfervid nationalism pervaded every corner of Irish life.
This was a fantasy land which had to be protected from knowledge of itself: no wonder pregnant girls were isolated and brutalised. They were a terrible reminder of the sheer humanness of the Irish people: as, less intentionally, were the religious, who were usually conscripted in their early teens into being the moral janissaries of Ireland. Their job was to enforce the fantasy of Irish virtue on Irish youngsters, often enough with violence.
The past is always another country: but few countries have a past which is so totally foreign as ours. We have travellers from that country in our midst; and they are called religious.
After all these years, there is simply no way of finding out who did what to the 1,700 people who - to date - have alleged institutional abuse without perpetrating fresh injustices against old, baffled, helpless people, even as, yet again, we incur quite frightful legal costs.
We should simply and sadly acknowledge: what is, is.