As the tales of abuse in institutions wend their way through our court and inquiry systems, I often think of a girl I knew who was sent to an orphanage in the 1960s.
She was a neighbour's child from the west of Ireland, and when her father died her mother was unable to support her large family on the small family farm. The girl, along with some siblings, was sent to this institution in Dublin.
The orphanage she was sent to has received little of the public discussion afforded to those featured in the States of Fear programme. It did receive a brief mention when a separate scandal emerged. This concerned the use of children in a group of Protestant-run orphanages in clinical trials by pharmaceutical companies without, apparently, the consent of their families. The matter has been referred to the Laffoy Commission on Child Abuse.
But what was striking about the story was that, while the backgrounds and situations of the children in the industrial schools received widespread public discussion, no one thought to inquire about the children in Protestant orphanages.
Where did these children come from? Why were they there? If these children did have living family members, why were they in institutions?
None of these questions were asked, as if they fell outside the known boundaries of public discourse about Catholic and non-Catholic, rich and poor, privileged and marginalised, into which the other discussion of the children's institutions fell.
It is commonplace now for us to congratulate ourselves on how multi-cultural we are becoming, or to argue that we should make more efforts in this regard. But this is rarely accompanied by much discussion of what this means, and in particular by any in-depth analysis of the "other" cultures we are purportedly embracing.
The roots of this can be found in the stereotypical treatment of our longest-standing minority, the Protestant community, which has been presented as a homogenous group whose minority status somehow puts it beyond any criticism or analytical discussion.
The misfortune of losing her father deprived this girl of more than a normal family life. It also deprived her of a place in the broader, close-knit community into which she had been born.
In the west of Ireland community where we both grew up, the handful of Protestant families, most of them small farmers, was an integral part of the local community, sharing its memory of evictions and neighbourly solidarity, its customs and superstitions, its leisure activities, limited as they were to the GAA, dances, traditional music and the local pub.
Such integration was not complete, of course. The ongoing reality of Ne Temere, and the influence of Protestant fundamentalism on the theology of the Church of Ireland, produced a suspicion of the Catholic Church and a fear of mixed marriages which resulted in a layer of parallel social activities designed to keep marriages within the Protestant community.
Instead of participating in this community this girl was now the beneficiary of Protestant "charity", and would be trapped in this exclusive environment at the lowest level of its rigid hierarchy, destined to work at the bottom of the service industry, often run by prosperous members of the same religion.
AT secondary school I discovered another world, vastly different both from what I knew and she was learning. That was the world of the south Dublin, Protestant middle class in the 1960s, an intimate, smug and complacent world where networking assured children secure employment in the areas of finance, insurance and manufacturing where the old Protestant middle class still held sway.
Its social life was almost hermetically sealed, with its scout and girl guide troops, its tennis and youth clubs. Unlike the people I grew up with, the girls I went to school with - and, indeed, their parents - passed their entire lives with practically no social interaction with their Catholic neighbours. Within its secure walls racist comments about Jews and Catholics could be, and were, heard.
In college I was puzzled, and sometimes irritated, by the distorted and extraordinarily benign view my Catholic friends had of the Protestant community in Ireland. In their view it was a homogenous group, made up of those uniformly economically-comfortable, diligent, hard-working, tolerant, and devoted to slightly eccentric pursuits like market gardening and home-baking.
Such a view does not accommodate differences in historical origin, geography or class. It glosses over the undeniably unpleasant aspects of this history, like the disproportionately powerful grip a section of the Protestant community held, up into the 1960s, on swathes of the Irish economy, and the religious bigotry which surfaced from time to time. Nor does it accommodate the reality of the economically underprivileged in the community.
This community has changed a lot. But, like the Catholic community, it has its internal contradictions and flaws. We will not be truly pluralist unless we seriously consider our minorities, rather than trapping them in unexamined stereotypes.