And to let Mr. Carroll finally get to rest, let me say that I agree that it would be totally wrong to bury anyone in a container that had been used as a septic tank. I'm truly sorry if he misunderstood me.

But a concrete vault, is a concrete vault. Such vaults can be used for many things - bomb shelters, burial places, vaults for storing and preserving things, and septic tanks.

Could it be, Mr. Carroll, that in your vast experience, you have never seen a concrete septic tank? It looks just like a concrete burial vault,, and it usually has no label on it specifying what it is to be used for. It doesn't become a septic tank until the plumbing is added.

What's my point, Jim? Let me repeat: I will continue to think that 50-year-old crimes are a matter for sociologists and historians, not for prosecutors. It's too late for any effective or reasonable punishment, but there are still many lessons to be learned from such crimes that have a wide effect. I think a fifty-year statute of limitations is reasonable for any crime, no matter how serious - and even that is too long to allow for a truly fair trial.

And while I know that the Ryan Report focused primarily on the industrial schools, it also covered the Magdalene Laundries and the mother-and-baby homes. And the mother-and-baby homes were covered in the Philomena book and movie, and the Magdalene Laundries in Magdalene Sisters. That makes all this stuff about the Tuam home a recycled scandal - one based on a distorted story that kept getting more and more twisted until it became an international outcry about babies being dumped in a septic tank.
No doubt that conditions in these institutions were bad, but the outrage about this Tuam thing is simply yet another recycling of a story that has been known for a long, long time. It's time to stop the screaming and the self-righteous and the blanket declarations. It's time to study this whole system of institutions and abuse, and learn the lessons they have to teach us.

-Joe Offer-