Eoghan Harris (Independent)

Under British rule, these abuses were not practised in Roman Catholic institutions and Protestants did not practise them. The responsibility belongs to the Republic as a whole. I will not rehearse any political indignation but I challenge the assumption that this cover-up is new.

Daniel Corkery said Irish identity was made up of land, religion and nationality. These three factors operated in this abuse. Most of the Irish Christian Brothers I knew came from rural Ireland. They came from the tradition of the cover-up of the Great Famine. The fact that strong farmers survived the Famine and spailpíns died was covered up. In west Cork they talk about the descendants of Famine victims. The victims of the Famine are all dead and the descendants are in graves. The victims of the Famine in the Skibbereen area were all people who looked after their turnips. The complicity of the Famine has been covered up. A few landlords cannot grow, transport and export grain. The rural bourgeoisie was involved in the Famine.

There was a cover-up of the brutality of the War of Independence and the Civil War. We covered up pogroms against Protestants. We are very good at covering up things which touch on the national question. I have no doubt that every brother and priest involved was a devout nationalist. Indeed, that was part and parcel of the thing. The relationship with the Republic, its professional classes and the republican ethic concerns me. Ministers for Education, politicians, barristers, lawyers, doctors and the entire Irish professional middle class, who all professed republicanism and all wanted a united Ireland, turned a blind eye. It is ironic that if we had never left the British Empire and if the Treaty had never been signed, whatever else we might have suffered, these innocent victims would never have suffered. Our promise to cherish the children of the nation equally turned out to be an empty one.

I say these things as a warning. There is a deep brutality in Irish nationalism. It came up most recently in the Provos punishment beatings of children in Belfast ghettos. The problem is not simply in the Roman Catholic Church. It is in the republican ethic itself.