"The sheer scale and longevity of the torment inflected on defenceless children—over 800 known abusers in over 200 Catholic institutions during a period of 35 years—should alone make it clear that it was not accidental or opportunistic but systematic," the Irish Times wrote upon reviewing the Ryan Report. "Abuse was not a failure of the system. It was the system."

At age 15, Sinead O'Connor was caught shoplifting and was sent to an institution much like those investigated in the Commission Report, a Magdalene laundry full of teenage girls who had been judged too promiscuous or uncooperative for civil society. "We worked in the basement, washing priests' clothes in sinks with cold water and bars of soap," O'Connor has written of her experience. "We studied math and typing. We had limited contact with our families. We earned no wages. One of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar." On the grounds of one Dublin Magdalene laundry, a mass grave was uncovered which included 22 unidentified bodies. These institutions have since caught the eye of the United Nations Committee against Torture.

After 18 months, with the help of her father, O'Connor escaped from this brutal system. Very quickly, her voice carried her to stardom. Her former captors were the "enemy" O'Connor spoke of when, as a 25-year-old with a once-in-a-lifetime live television audience, she tore the picture of the Pope and exhorted her viewers to "fight" him. The picture she tore, in fact, had belonged to her abusive mother, then already dead. "The photo itself had been on my mother's bedroom wall since the day the fucker was enthroned in 1978," she told the Irish magazine Hot Press in 2010.

It was a symbol of O'Connor's own personal history of abuse and the unspoken culture of abuse that still held sway in her home country. In the weeks after her SNL appearance, she released a public letter urging her fellow Irish to pursue truth and reconciliation with the Church:

The only hope for me as an abused child was to look back into my childhood and face some very difficult memories and some desperately painful feelings and a lot of very tricky conversations! I had to have it acknowledged what was done to me so that I could forgive and be free. So, it has occurred to me that the only hope of recovery for my people is to look back into our history. Face some very difficult truths and some very frightening feelings. It must be acknowledged what was done to us so we can forgive and be free. If the truth remains hidden then the brutality under which I grew up will continue for thousands of Irish children.

These paragraphs were skimmed over by critics like DeCurtis, who could only make sense of passages about abortion and the Holy Roman Empire.

"It's very understandable that the American people did not know what I was going on about," a more serene O'Connor reflected in 2002, in an interview with Salon. "But outside of America, people did really know and it was quite supported and I think very well understood."