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OPINION:RESERVING TO itself vast resources of power, the State tends towards evil. It cannot really be “good”, and even with eternal watchfulness and openness does well to avoid outright corruption, writes JOHN WATERS

The Ryan report describes a wholesale State-driven system of child abuse. The Catholic Church was up to its dog-collar in it, but with the collusion of the Department of Education, An Garda Síochána and the courts. State-run systems operate on a reflex impulse of denial, at the heart of which is a knot of ideological rationalisation called upon by each component to justify its own role. In the case of the horrors set forth in the Ryan report, the dominant ideological proposition was that troublesome children were a threat to public order, so any means were justifiable in their subjugation. Such children were beyond the human embrace.