Are the children of today at last safe in the care of the State?

These were the words of the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, in the Dail on the day following the broadcast of the first instalment of States of Fear.

The Taoiseach might be interested in the contents of the final programme in the series, to be broadcast this evening. By examining the legacy today of the industrial schools, it presents a picture of abuse, secrecy and cover-up which will not remain safely corralled in the past.

In the same statement to the Dail, the Taoiseach mentioned that a former Fianna Fail education minister "closed those institutions based on the Kennedy Report in 1970." However, this is not entirely true. Many of them in fact remained open throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and some remain open even today.

In the programme this evening we tell the story of one such industrial school which did not close in the 1970s. Rather it increased its activities, taking in boys as well as girls. Many of the boys experienced an appalling litany of abuse, which for some lasted almost 10 years. Three of the paedophiles responsible have been convicted only within the past 18 months, and the gardai are still searching for others.

Viewed in this context, these issues begin to strike much closer to home. For instance, in the Dail the Labour Party leader, Mr Ruairi Quinn, called for an apology to the victims of industrial schools. But the fact remains that he was a minister in the government that suppressed large sections of the Madonna House Report in 1996.

That report was produced by a committee of inquiry established to investigate the operation of the largest residential childcare facility in the Leinster region. This was in the aftermath of the discovery that maintenance man Frank Griffin had been sexually abusing several of the children living in Madonna House.

The then government's refusal - for legal reasons, it said - to publish the entire report caused a huge scandal at the time. Only a portion of the report was allowed into the public domain - and that decision was taken by the rainbow coalition government of Fine Gael, Labour and Democratic Left.

States of Fear tonight reveals for the first time the contents of the suppressed sections of the Madonna House Report. The censored chapters make for horrifying reading, describing as they do an institution operating in the 1990s which owed more to the industrial school legacy than to any modern childcare practices.

Most crucially, what the government suppressed was the detailed information identifying who exactly knew about the abuse of children in Madonna House. Many of the children sexually and physically abused reported the abuse to staff members, who in turn reported it to the management of the home.

Despite this extensive knowledge, the sexual abuse continued for a further eight years after the first disclosure was made by a child.

This is the information which the government suppressed in 1996. As Trinity College academic Eoin O'Sullivan says in tonight's programme, "these are not events from our dark and distant past. All of this happened a bare three years ago."

The entire, unexpurgated Madonna House Report is a remarkable document, a painstaking exercise in dissecting what exactly can (and did) go wrong in a residential children's home - failure which inevitably led to the abuse of these most vulnerable children. The report, if published in full, should become mandatory reading for everyone involved in residential childcare in Ireland.

In the Dail, Mr Quinn said: "Let the House give a public apology for things that should not have happened and which will never happen again." He was referring to abuse in State-funded industrial schools during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

However, could one of those "things" to apologise for include the blatant censorship of the Madonna House report?

The issue now is whether the opposition will press for publication of the report in full. This would constitute a serious and valuable contribution to ensuring that child abuse on this scale might indeed be prevented from ever happening again.

When the current Government responds as promised to the issues raised by the programme, and by all the other revelations of child abuse over the years, will it confine that response to the past? Or will it tackle the secrecy today within residential childcare, a problem which extends beyond Madonna House?

The shocking fact is that abuse within residential childcare has remained a substantial problem throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but this information has effectively been suppressed by a State which clearly remains in denial about the issue.

All of this is the essence of tonight's States of Fear. The series never intended to remain in the past - the crucial legacy of that past was always within our sights during the making of all three documentaries.

Researcher Sheila Ahern and I essentially set out to define as comprehensively as possible the nature of that past. The analysis of the industrial schools system and of institutions for sick and disabled children, the horrendous abuse and the responsibility for that abuse, is essential if society is to be in a position to learn from that past.

It is only when that past, in all its ugliness and horror, is not only exposed but also accepted by us as a society that we can begin to learn from it.

There are indications from the Government that it may now offer some kind of public apology on behalf of the State to the victims of abuse within industrial schools. Sources also indicate that a public Commission on Childhood Abuse will be created, and that there is to be a proposal to amend the statute of limitations for civil actions against religious orders and the State.

All of this may provide a useful basis for acknowledging that there is within our society the potential for terrible abuse and exploitation of children.

These initiatives from the Government, which are due to be discussed by Cabinet this morning, may provide some comfort for the many callers to me and Sheila Ahern after the broadcast of States of Fear. The vast majority confirmed, from their own direct personal experience, the accounts of abuse given in the programmes.

However, there were some who complained that we had not told the full truth, that we had shirked the real horror stories. These calls were particularly distressing.

One man told us how he witnessed three boys having their index fingers chopped off as punishment in an industrial school in the southern part of the State. Another wrote in a letter how he was savagely beaten for stealing a set of rosary beads, which had in fact been given to him as a gift by his dying friend - the boy in the next bed.

It is vital to provide a forum in which this testimony can now be heard publicly. It will not be easy to listen to these experiences, but it is a necessary catharsis for a society which has raised denial to a fine art when confronted over the years with revelations of child abuse.

The response to States of Fear has confirmed that people in Ireland really did know, or at least suspected, that children were suffering behind the high walls of the institutions.

Many people have called radio phone-ins, or have spoken to our office, wondering how they could have been so blind. These children were not invisible - people saw them going for their walks, they took them out for the odd weekend or summer holiday, they employed them as servants or farm hands.

Many wondered why they hadn't looked more deeply, or probed beyond the shy, fearful boy or girl they encountered.

It was precisely because these questions were not asked that the abuse of children remained so widespread for so long. And the crucial question remains: are we so confident today that we are vigorous enough in asking the right questions, and insisting on the kind of openness and transparency that will prove to us that children today are at last safe in the care of the State?

The final programme of the documentary series States of Fear will be broadcast tonight at 10.10 on RTE1.