News, views and top stories in your inbox. Don't miss our must-read newsletter Sign up Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

How many childhoods were exterminated in the church-run schools and orphanages of Ireland?

A report to shatter your faith in God reveals how for six sickening decades, Roman Catholic priests and nuns presided over a culture of institutionalised child abuse.

Rapes, beatings and every kind of humiliation of children was commonplace in Catholic homes, the majority run by the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy.

And they ran them like concentration camps. It was a Holocaust of childhoods.

True, there were no gas chambers. True, there were no piles of human remains. But what they exterminated – those pious Christian Brothers, those devout Sisters of Mercy – was innocence.

The report by Ireland’s Commission To Inquire Into Child Abuse took nine years to compile and runs to 2,600 pages.

It reveals how child rapists were protected by the church. How sadism was in the air these children breathed.

How every kind of child-abusing creep imaginable was clutched to the bosom of the church, and given full protection.

When reports of rape and molestation emerged, the paedophile priest responsible was invariably moved to another parish, where he was often back abusing children within days.

The report documents 2,000 stories of ritualised abuse, 2,000 stories of vulnerable children who were wickedly tortured and exploited by the very people meant to be protecting them.

But more than 20 times that number of children passed through these hells on Earth, and many of their horror stories will go to the grave with the victims, just as we do not know the stories of everyone who died in the the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

Let one story speak for them all.

When Thomas Wall was orphaned, he was sent to a home run by the Christian Brothers.

“From the age of eight I was sexually abused,” says Thomas. “They had access to you 24 hours a day.”

Was there ever an institution more grotesquely named than the Christian Brothers, a gang of rapists and bullies who appear to embody the exact opposite of Christian compassion?

And was there ever a bunch of hags more venal and cruel than the Sisters of Mercy, who showed little mercy to thousands of Irish girls unfortunate enough to fall into their clutches?

And the children who passed through these Catholic homes from the 30s to the 90s have been betrayed twice. They were betrayed when subjected to the sexual attentions and sadism of priests and nuns. And they have been betrayed again now.

Legal action by the Christian Brothers frightened the Commission that compiled the report into censoring abusers’ names.

It is insane. Even now, more than 60 years after the Holocaust, old Nazis are dragged into the light to face justice – as they should be. But the Roman Catholic Church still protects the tormentors of children.

Catholic head Cardinal Sean Brady says, “I am profoundly sorry and deeply ashamed.”

It’s not good enough.

Many victims of the paedophile paradises only gave evidence because they believed justice would be done.

Says John Kelly, of the Survivors of Child Abuse campaign group, “Victims feel that wounds have been reopened for nothing.”

Thousands were abused by priests and nuns but we do not know the names of the abusers.

They are still being protected.

And it stinks to high heaven.