"It was as if the whole place is on a psychiatrist's couch," I said to a friend.
"Even men are beginning to talk now about what was done to boys. Everything cruel you can think of seems to have been going on. But at least it's all out in the open now. There can't be anything more to come."
But she said that there is more to come out.
She thinks there is a tale of gross cruelty to elderly and old people which has still to come out. And once she said it I knew she was right.
Wherever there has been power and powerlessness side by side in this society of ours, some of the powerful, aided by the silence of the majority, have abused the powerless. No inner ethic acted as a brake. Devoutness made no difference.
And anyway, I remember being told. Just as we were told about the orphanages, in Paddy Doyle's The God Squad and Mavis Arnold's book about the fire in the Cavan orphanage - a fire that came back to me when I read about the girls in a Thai brothel who perished not long ago, because they were chained to their beds.
We were told about extreme social cruelty in books like Noel Browne's autobiography. Remember his description of how the barefoot, ragged Irish speaking children were treated in the school in Ballinrobe? We were told in novels like Mary Leland's The Killeen. But individual writings read by single readers don't add up to a collective event in our culture. You need a television programme for that.
Perhaps some documentary maker is out there already talking to people like the doctor in a country town who once remarked to me: "It's terrible what's done to old people around here. A lot of them are on their own, and when they begin to fail they hand over their pension books to a neighbour, or they go into town with them to a solicitor to give over their land to them in exchange for being minded and fed. I see them a few months later and they're nearly unrecognisable from the abuse they get."
You, reading this, may think that that is some long ago aberration in peasant life, which has nothing to do with the caring and charming community you feel you belong to. But where it happens, everybody knows. Sons and daughters who are in third level education know. Solicitors and doctors and gardai know. Shopkeepers know.
In Dublin, it is possible to lead a perfectly sheltered life and to entertain illusions about how wonderful the Irish are. But even in Dublin, I daresay, cruelty is wreaked on the old and frail.
OLD people are even less likely to testify against their abusers than children are. They're on their way out, not up. And animals can't testify at all. So there are still areas where we can continue what is not so much a hypocritical way of life as one defended by line after line of double standards.
It is not as if all of us or even any one of us is all bad. But as neighbours and colleagues and relatives we know bad things, but don't want to interfere. We don't want other people to poke into our private affairs, so we turn a blind eye to their private affairs.
That's what the nice, good, people do - they turn a blind eye. The report on the Kelly Fitzgerald case notes that in the five months she lasted in Mayo, during which she was systematically beaten, and starved, and while one of her brothers and sisters was leaving home to steal food at night, clad only in a blanket, "there had not been a single report of concern about her condition, whether from neighbours, extended family, school, gardai or other health board personnel."
Not everyone is so good. In the Kilkenny incest case, men who drank with the father harassed mother and daughter for sex, and the daughter was sometimes put out naked into fields surrounded by houses. Of course, that's exceptional. But what is quite common is a local reaction to the children in the "west of Ireland farmer case. "They're just in it for the money," a neighbour said.
And this week, some women in a small country town went to a leading woman there, to talk about their awful memories of life in a nearby orphanage (which has not yet been mentioned in the media). They're not going to speak out. The other women in the town say "they're just jumping on the band wagon".
There is a whole spectrum of denial on view at the moment. By no means everyone agrees that it matters if you suffered when you were a child. It's in the past, isn't it?
Why rock the boat for something that can't be undone? This is what is so unsatisfactory about the present series of revelations. They consist of personal testimony piled on personal testimony. But while that is undoubtedly good for those testifying, it doesn't mount up to the revolution in social responsibility that we desperately need.
Most of us are as unchallenged as ever. All we have to do is sit here and gasp, as more and more horrible life stories are revealed. But no real check will be put on the savagery of modern Ireland until the by standing majority chooses to end certain taboos, such as the taboo on interfering between a father and his children or parents and their children, and such as the taboo on criticising religious.
A man who rang me last week visited all the child care places in this island regularly throughout the 1960s. He said the children in Catholic institutions were like Jews under the Nazis. In Northern Ireland, where lay people ran some more modern places, the atmosphere, he said, was quite different.
EITHER we must quite consciously change, or institutional and legislative changes will have to be put in place to protect the weak against our fear of interfering, our revulsion from squalor, and finally our indifference.
The recommendations in the Kelly Fitzgerald report are about such change. If they are acted upon, they will be the poor little girl's epitaph. She will have done more for us than we ever did for her.
She was 15 when she died - not really a child any longer. And the recommendations should not be limited to children. The one that says there should be "a legal requirement on health board personnel, GPs, gardai, teachers and staff of voluntary and private child care services to report actual or suspected abuse" should apply to the abuse of anybody, and not children alone.
Because adults get trapped in suffering, too. It is plain that as a society we can't trust ourselves, when it comes to the ramparts around other people's families. But if it is the law - the law will do our caring for us.