It must be likely that when the social history of our times is written, the early months of 1996 will figure as a period of stark revelation, a final drawing away of the veils from a darker, hidden Ireland. These days and weeks have marked a convergence of suppressed grief, of buried secrets and of enduring pain.
And yet, little enough has emerged that was not already widely known and understood, at least subliminally. The existence of the orphanages was no secret. Neither was the fact concealed that babies were exported through religious networks and with the approval of the State. And it was certainly not hidden knowledge that physical and psychological cruelty were almost defining characteristics of our society.
What has happened in recent weeks is that for the first time, human faces and names have been attached to these chronicles of sadness. The orphans of Goldenbridge and elsewhere, the babies flown out through Shannon, the single mothers consigned to the laundries, have cast off their anonymity and come into our homes, through TV, radio and the print media as real flesh and blood. And they are confronting Irish society with its own legacy.
How ought that society react? The past is past and cannot be undone. We can try to comprehend it and analyse it. Historians and sociologists can detail the post famine conditions of economic insecurity that created a country fixated on property rights, in turn embracing a Jansenistic moral code and an authoritarian Church. But it is too easy to blame the nuns or the brothers or the priests. They carried out the latrine tasks, while the community at large preferred not to know about it in too much detail.
Everything possible must now be done for those who have suffered in the past. For a start that suffering has to be acknowledged. And such practical assistance as can be put in place must be activated, whether this comprises assistance in tracing records, with counselling, or with financial recompense where appropriate. But it would be an obscene parody of restoration if every effort were not made simultaneously to address the shameful and continuing shortcomings in today's policies for children in Ireland.
The scandal of young Kelly Fitzgerald's life of abuse and needless death is not a historic throwback to the 1940s. It is a scandal of Ireland of the 1990s. And the failures and shortcomings which it revealed are the failures and shortcomings of current practice in Ireland of the 1990s. Worse, officialdom invokes utterly unacceptable arguments to justify suppression of the report into her death while even at this late stage, it appears, neither of the relevant Ministers has even seen it.
Past evils rightly sear our consciences. But will future generations be able to look to the Ireland of the 1990s and adjudge that it responded with sufficient urgency and priority to what it knew had to be done?
The unfulfilled recommendations of the Kilkenny Incest inquiry, the dithering over reporting requirements in suspected cases of sex abuse, the official instinct to bury bad news, the ambivalence on the creation of a national register for the identification of children at risk all these will surely tell against us in history's adjudication.