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Following publication of the Ryan report "we all emerge.....somewhat lost, unbalanced, the touchstone of our former beliefs and certainties cast adrift", the Ombudsman Emily O'Reilly has said.

In a personal response to the report, she observed that, after six years as Ombudsman, she had come to the view "that public bodies and agencies begin to go bad when they begin to sight of why they are there in the first place".

And Ms O'Reilly warned, on the last day of the Combat Poverty agency's independent existence that it must remain "free from political and bureaucratic pressures" as it is absorbed into the Department of Social and Family Affairs.

Speaking at the Sisters of Charity `Justice and the Downturn' conference in Dublin Ms O'Reilly said the Ryan report had brought with it "the shattering of so many lazy, unexplored assumptions about our past, about how we had imagined ourselves to be as a society.

"We stood exposed, not as an island of charming saints and chatty, avuncular scholars but as a repressed, cold hearted, fearful, smugly pious, sexually ignorant and vengeful race of self styled Christians," she said.

Noting that the religious congregations had borne the brunt of criticism following publication of the report, she said this was "no surprise".

"The hands and fists that descended on the bodies of the children were those of the people who worked in or who had access to the religious run institutions, yet the forces that enabled the abuse or turned blind, indifferent eyes to it ranged way beyond the institutions' walls, present within the plusher offices of State, and the boardrooms of so called charitable institutions as well as within the dank, depressing, and frequently terrifying dormitories of the institutions themselves," she said.

She continued: "We didn't know, is the constant refrain. Certainly, very few knew of the systemic nature of the abuse, of the near unbelievable extent and depravity of the sexual abuse in particular, of the political, bureaucratic and clerical cover ups but no adult living in Ireland throughout the period in question did not, in broad terms, know.

"If things were hidden, they were hidden in clear sight, the crocodile lines of boys and girls that streamed out of the institutions, the certain knowledge that corporal punishment at the very least was practised therein, the incarcerated Magdalene women in their Madonna blues and whites who walked the open streets of towns and villages in church processions. Judges knew, lawyers knew, teachers knew, civil servants knew, childcare workers knew, Gardaí knew. Not to know was not an option."