Every time a milestone report such as Ferns or Ryan or Murphy is published, an avalanche of letters and phonecalls and e-mails pours from the hidden distressed. People who were abused as children and had resolved long ago to live with their secret become overwhelmed by the prevalence of a crime that they felt sure happened only to them, and by the cold-blooded perniciousness of the cover-up.
It is a terrible indictment of Ireland that many people are left so despairing of trust that they turn, in numbers, to journalists, who have no professional qualifications to assist them.
Last week I met Malachy Kinnerney. He is a retired teacher and a counselling psychologist in his 60s with a lovely home in Dublin suburbia and a gorgeous dog called Patch. Outwardly, his life is one of textbook serenity. Malachy was born in the mother-and-baby home run by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus & Mary in Castlepollard, Co Westmeath and was transferred at the age of four to the Tullamore County Home, whence he was sent to the Christian Brothers' hell-hole of Letterfrack industrial school.
From the moment he was cleaved from his mother's side until she died, only once did he get to visit her in her home. Malachy wept when he recalled their first meeting after he was released from Letterfrack. He had been expecting to meet a queen. Instead, he met a small, grey-haired woman with glasses and a slight stoop. Her hand in his felt as coarse as his own, roughened by manual labour.
In the country we call Mother Ireland, the church that calls itself Mother Church has behaved since the inception of the state as if it despises women. It claims to venerate the Madonna, but my mother and her generation, and the generations before them, had to be "churched" after childbirth; purified after the dirty deed of producing human life.
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The Irish state grant-aided the Catholic church through local authorities to incarcerate pregnant women in "homes" where they and their children scrubbed floors, tilled lands and tarred roads, like slaves. In my privileged boarding school in the 1970s, the nuns instructed us not to look at the women in the fields beyond the wire perimeter of the basketball court. Only in adulthood did I learn why. Those were the fields of Bessborough, the Cork mother-and-baby home investigated by the Ryan Inquiry, and better-off Catholic girls might have been contaminated by looking at those other girls' faces.
That our state, which has spent the past week crying crocodile tears over the Murphy report, is denying compensation to the 200 survivors of the Magdalene laundries is a fact that makes Ireland a hard country to love. There could be up to 300 pregnant women in one mother-and-baby home at a given time but, under the Maternity Homes Act, there was no requirement for the presence of a registered midwife as, at the time, the Pope did not allow women to be midwives.
Judge Yvonne Murphy has done her country a tremendous service, if for no other reason (and there are plenty of others) than that she has exposed the collusion of this so-called republic with the misogynist, sexist micro-state that is the Vatican. What are we doing having any diplomatic relations with a state that brazenly discriminates against half the population?
The Vatican state - as distinct from the Holy See, a bishopric - is run by men for men. Its senior functionaries are men. So are all its ambassadors. Its laws are devised by men. Eighty percent of its 600 population are clergy; men by definition. Some 18% are members of the Swiss Guard; men by definition. When women visit its 44 hectares at the side of the Tiber, they must cover their knees, shoulders, arms and heads in black cloth.
If it was Iran or North Korea or some state governed by Sharia law, there would be protests in Ireland's streets until all official ties were severed. How can we claim to care about equality when we kowtow to the robed centurions of institutionalised woman-hatred? The papal nuncio's bad manners in ignoring the Dublin commission's correspondence is a venial sin compared with the Vatican's oppression of the female sex. That state stands sentry for an organised religion that would rather see empty churches than a woman on the altar. Its doctrine preaches that women may not be priests because the 12 apostles were men, but it does not continue to the logical conclusion that only unmarried females may get pregnant, following the precedent of the Blessed Virgin.
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Last April, Rome rejected America's nominee as ambassador to the Holy See because Caroline Kennedy, daughter of America's first Catholic president, has espoused the case for abortion. What memories that evokes of Mary Robinson, on her presidential visit to St Peter's Square, sporting a sprig of yellow mimosa in her lapel and being castigated as the devil incarnate. To think the Dublin archdiocese was harbouring priests who committed unspeakable crimes against children at the same time that anyone who spoke in defence of Robinson was scorned as an "Aras-licker".
Brian Cowen's implicit siding with the papal nuncio in his disagreement with the Dublin commission is not just supine. It is disgusting. It evokes the cosiness between Dev's Ireland and the Holy See when some 2,200 babies were exported to the US in 20 years.
Many members of the Catholic church have to make the distinction between the institution and their faith in order to deal with the constant revelations of unreported crimes against children. Yet the Irish state is incapable of recognising that politicians' personal religious beliefs are separate and distinct from the inter-state relations between this country and the Vatican.
It is a matter for the individual consciences of men and women if they subscribe to an organisation that outlaws birth control, assisted fertility, divorce, amniocentesis, stem-cell treatments and tubal ligation. The taoiseach, however, should remember he is the leader of this country. When a commission appointed by his government is snubbed by a state which is defined by its policy of marginalising one of the world's largest "minorities", it is time the taoiseach stood up to it.
Why doesn't Cowen take a trip over there to talk mano a mano with the robed gentlemen who behave as if they are the ones who really rule Ireland?