What happened to the Laffoy Commission was foreseeable and inevitable, writes John Waters.
It was established in a climate of hysteria, piety and dishonesty, and was, therefore, as with other tribunals, bound to muddy rather than clear the waters.
This society is incapable of honesty about what happened in church-operated institutions a generation ago. Some of the reasons for this relate to the relative recency of these events, and some, paradoxically, to their - in another sense - remoteness in time.
That the events in question are, in one context, relatively recent provokes a reluctance to owning up. The State, acting on behalf of society and its belief systems, incarcerated thousands of children in these institutions, with at least some knowledge of what they were like.
In my childhood, words like "Letterfrack" and "Artane" had a particular significance. At that time - and it is roughly the period from which the majority of complaints have arisen - this society's understanding of children was quite different to what it is now. There was a belief that children needed to be strictly controlled and disciplined in order to deter waywardness. There existed none of the contemporary understandings of social victimhood.
When a child was deemed a problem, the State acted with little mercy or compassion. Much of what happened in those institutions could therefore be described as the church doing society's dirty work, and so responsibility needs to be more widely spread.
This renders the issue confusing. For, although each of us, as children, was subject to the constant threat of such institutions, we were all also part of the society that employed them as a deterrent. Moreover, all adults whom we encountered seemed to regard their existence as necessary and even beneficial.
In this, there is no clear-cut "us and them". It is probably because so many people still have an underlying sense of moral responsibility for these wrongs that society has become so mobilised in its finger-pointing. It is easier now to pretend we did not know.
But our selectivity is telling. Is anyone, for example, interested in talking about the judges who signed the orders incarcerating children? What about the garda officers who implemented them? Did the families of children always acquit themselves well? And where, when it might have made a difference, were the newspapers that now publish almost daily excoriations of the religious orders? Can they produce files of investigations, or portfolios of editorials of condemnation? Of course they cannot. Silence does not easily lend itself to investigation.
And this brings up the paradoxical problem with regard to the passage of time. If these issues had surfaced a decade earlier, society would not so easily have evaded its collective responsibility, as most of those directly culpable would still have been in positions of authority.
And if a couple more decades had elapsed, we could well have proceeded at full throttle with the finger-pointing. Because the priests, nuns and brothers who operated these institutions would by then be dead, there would be no need for the pretence of due process.
Our societal scapegoats would have yielded up their reputations without a murmur from anyone.
So, the problem with Laffoy, from the viewpoint of this society's desire to continue lying to itself, has been one of timing. Who wanted to hear about the accused having a right to defend themselves when all we really wanted was to box this matter off quickly and on the cheap? Who was going to complain if a few more priests were led away in chains? It is all but forbidden to speak of these matters without uttering the approved platitudes and delivering a couple of kicks to the church.
There is an argument, for example, that the sum agreed between the State and the religious congregations in respect of the church's contribution to the compensation fund is more or less the right proportional representation of church responsibility. But even to suggest such a thing is to risk being branded an accomplice of child abusers.
Two years ago, I was savaged without remission for a fortnight for a rather understated article outlining the conundrums confronting Laffoy as a consequence of societal denial, piety, dishonesty and hysteria. (My main point was about the distorting effects of compensation.) Afterwards, I was contacted by dozens of brothers, priests and nuns, who swore they neither laid a hand on a child in their care nor witnessed anyone else do so.
Today, as every day, they wait alone, terrified, in dark corners of this society, for the vindictive vultures to swoop upon their twilight days. The potential here for false or mistaken accusations, and miscarriages of justice, is immense, but our desire to deflect attention from the true reach of culpability has allowed this to become a minor consideration.