I think the child abuse scandal and the fallout from it has changed and is continuing to change everything about who and what we are and think we are as Irish people or people of Irish extraction. What strikes me is that we still haven't come to terms with what all this means to us about what sort of nation and what sort of community we have created in the years since the largest part of Ireland has been self-governing.

It's my own view that this will (or should) come to be seen as the worst and darkest episode in Irish history. Worse than Cromwell, worse than the famine, worse than the Black and Tans or Bloody Sunday.   Why? Because we've done it to ourselves - and to our children. The British didn't do it and no matter what political and intellectual gymnastics we try to perform we can't portray the Irish nation as the victims here because it's the Irish nation that is responsible - not just the Catholic church. The church couldn't have gotten away with it if the country, the state and the vast majority of the people hadn't turned a blind eye and colluded in the systematic rape and brutalisation of the most vulnerable members of the nation - it's own children.

Jim quotes from the lady's letter where she talks of the Sin of Omission.   Generations of Irish parents committed the same sin by ignoring what was happening to their own children at the hands of these men whom they allowed unfettered access to the people who looked to their parents for protection. I and many thousands of second-generation Irish people are fortunate in that my parents came to Britain and raised me there where these men didn't have the same power to do what they wanted with impunity - and where they didn't command the same craven, unquestioning, slavish deference from politicians, policemen, teachers, social workers and doctors. Though even in Britain, I'm sure many Irish and other Catholic parents would not have wanted to believe this was happening if they were told about it.

The roots of what has happened to these children lie in the very origins of the Irish state and the sectarian Catholic nationalism that gave rise to that state. And if it hadn't been for emigration, even more Irish children would have been exposed to it.

Even a cursory reading of the government report shows how reluctant and half-hearted the response of the Irish State continues to be. Even at the beginning the report refers to the 'Charitable Work' of the Christian Brothers and other religious orders. They still don't want to confront the extent to which the culture of abuse is woven into the fabric of the state.

To be sure, neither the Irish nation nor the Catholic church have a monopoly on child abuse. And it can't be ignored that partition has played a part in this by creating not one but two corrupt sectarian states. But the fact that partition helped create the problem doesn't mean that the removal of partition would be any kind of solution. Too much damage has probably been done in the meantime.

It's probably too much to hope for to expect that the Irish nation and the Irish community (at least the current generation) will learn from this and start to think differently about the assumptions and myths we have nurtured for so long about who we are and what our history has been but in the long run, perhaps we'll at least learn to take responsibility for our own history and stop thinking like victims. Because it is clear that in the last 90 years, the greatest oppression against Irish people has been committed by other Irish people.