The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, apologised to survivors of institutional abuse just over a year ago. It was a powerful gesture, and people believed he was completely sincere. The decision to set up a Commission of Inquiry into Child Abuse reassured most citizens that the State would not run away from its responsibilities. A new urgency had entered the debate, and the Taoiseach himself was supervising the pace.
But all is not well. One year on, the State's bona fides are being questioned by a number of survivors and, increasingly, within the legal profession. Whatever the Taoiseach's original motives, different arms of the State are believed to be playing good-cop-bad-cop on the whole issue. His apology is starting to look threadbare; the work of Judge Mary Laffoy's Commission may be at risk even before it holds its first public meeting.
A reliance on delay, and on ordinary people's sheer difficulty understanding all the different issues, is blunting what was a strong public consensus to deal fairly and sympathetically with the survivors. Although an amendment to the Statute of Limitations was passed relatively quickly so as to accommodate some survivors of sexual abuse, survivors of physical and mental abuse remain excluded from its terms. Mr Ahern had passed the awkward issue over to Mr John O'Donoghue, who in turn passed it to the Law Reform Commission. Where it lingers. Sceptics who criticised that move last year may find they were correct: the Law Reform Commission's expected deadline estimated for last autumn came and went. The expected deadline for May 2000 is gone, too.
However, letters sent by the Garda late in May, on the instructions of the Director of Public Prosecutions, told individual survivors that their cases could only be considered as common assault, rather than abuse.
Many people understandably concluded that the Garda and the DPP had pre-empted the findings of the Law Reform Commission, and might queer the pitch of the Child Abuse Commission, too.
The survivors have absolutely no reason to trust the State. Mr Ahern and Mr O'Donoghue may see the culture that injured them as a thing of the past, but from the outside, survivors are facing a system that is demonstrably similar to the one others think we have left behind.
THE constitutional provisions passed in 1937 affecting property, powerful interests, and definitions of criminality still hold, despite radical changes in how we understand equality and social justice. The children were on the outside then, and their position is relatively unchanged today.
Alleged abusers are free to appoint their own legal teams to represent them at the commission. Survivors, however, must accept the State's decision to appoint one legal team of three senior and two junior counsel on their collective behalf, and to decide for them which lawyers to appoint.
In other words, the survivors are being treated like children, even though they are now grown men and women. They are being considered as a faceless mass, rather than as individuals whose childhooods have continued to blight their life chances.
Their own legal representatives were ignored when the decision was taken. It is difficult not to read this as continuing evidence of the same paternalist system which always took decisions on their behalf; believing, no doubt, that it was for their own good.
Mr Ahern and his colleagues appear to think it's all over. It is not. There is a widespread belief that alleged abusers will be given immunity from further prosecution in order to encourage them to co-operate with the Child Abuse Commission.
In fact, their own testimony will not be allowed to be used against them in another forum, which does not constitute immunity as such. But that concern illustrates how much misunderstanding and suspicion have been allowed to grow, for whatever reason.
The lessons learned from the hepatitis abuses, and from the experiences of victims like the late Mrs Bridget McCole, appear to have taught the authorities little about justice, if a lot about how to postpone it.
Complex links between the need for justice, and the right to compensation, balanced against possible prosecutions of those who were responsible through negligence or ignorance, meant that Mrs McCole died before the State decided to present a clear and compassionate face. Such may be the fate of numbers of abuse survivors, too.
The single positive perception that remains across the spectrum of survivors is about the integrity of Judge Mary Laffoy herself. However, that also places her commission at risk of being used as a fall guy to delay even further proceedings and compensations that need not wait for her final report.
The commission is already starting to bear the brunt of the frustration experienced by many survivors with other aspects of the Irish State. Some have already decided to boycott it, because they believe it is unable to deliver the complex outcomes needed in their case.
It is a test of the justice system, not as it was but as it now works. We know institutionalised children formed an underclass whose rights were not paramount in Irish law and society. That enabled them to be treated as badly as they were.
We learned how vulnerable their experiences made them to depression, suicide and drink, or drug-related illnesses. The question is whether this State will be able to free itself from its own prejudices and vested interests sufficiently to acknowledge that Ireland refuses to have any underclasses, any more.
mruane@irish-times.ie