We must stop claiming that ‘we never knew’ about child abuse at Catholic institutions. Over the past two decades the issue of child abuse has dominated the
Irish political agenda. Harrowing as the various reports have been Irish
society has yet to deal with one of the most challenging and complex
aspects of the abuse; how much did wider society in Ireland know? A frequent response to this question has been that the vast majority
of people never knew about child abuse until the 1990s. This does not
hold up to scrutiny. Historians such as Diarmaid Ferriter have have
pointed out that evidence in newspapers, court reports and government
files indicate many people on all levels of society had varying degrees
of knowledge of the abuse of children.
