People are rightly incensed at the Catholic Church , but it wasn't only the Catholic orders that abused children in their care . Ireland's protestant churches in the south also ran orphanages where children were sexually and physically abused.
A protestant friend of mine who was abused in a Dublin protestant orphanage in the nineteen-fifties and sixties told me that in many ways the abuse felt worse for protestant boys .They held ,he said ,a certain sense of outsiders' loyalty towards their co-religionists in a country where Protestantism and protestants were often blamed for British colonial oppression .
For a long time this sense of "sticking together" and "not letting the side down" stopped my friend from coming forward and claiming the compensation that both the state and the protestant church acknowledged he was entitled to. His wife eventually persuaded him to make a claim.