Every time I try to think about this subject (and I’m afraid I’ve been this way for many years) I am filled with rage. I know this discussion needs focus and calmness, but the cruelty involved, the dishonesty involved, the appalling hypocrisy involved, makes me want to boil over. 

I wish I believed in the old-fashioned hell the Catholic Church invented for the rest of us, because there’s a side of me that believes it’s the only place the perpetrators of abuse against children deserve to rot when they die.

So, trying to stay calm, here are three things. The first is directed at survivors.

I took part in Joe Duffy’s Liveline on Tuesday, the day the scoping report into abuse in schools was published. By the time the programme was over, I could barely breathe. We had all listened to stories of amazing courage, told by men who had come as close to breaking as it is possible to get.

It wasn’t my first time. For years I have worked with survivors of abuse, and I know what they have endured in their lives. Two of the bravest people I’ve ever met have been Christine Buckley, who died a few years ago, and her friend Carmel McDonnell Byrne. 

They endured years of abuse together, they survived together, and together founded an organisation to help survivors put their lives back together and support them in all sorts of ways (It’s now called the Christine Buckley Centre, and by way of declaring an interest I’m on the board.) 

If you could get a peep inside the religious orders’ accounts, you’d be looking at billions

Every bit of that took different sorts of courage on their part. But above all, the bravest thing they did was tell the truth. And demand to be heard. They revealed intimate and painful details about themselves, and ultimately they confronted their abusers in front of a tribunal. I always remember Christine telling me how much she had longed for that day of reckoning, and how she turned to jelly when faced with Sister Xaviera. It was trauma piled upon trauma.

That is what lies ahead of survivors now. They have to be absolutely determined to see the truth come out. They have to know — and I’m sorry for saying this — that there is no lasting victory in money (although I hope they get every last penny the orders have). There is no victory in punishment, although punishment is richly deserved and must happen. The real, lasting victory is in having your truth accepted, believed, and respected.

I hope the survivors I listened to on the radio are halfway there already. Certainly I don’t believe anyone could have listened to them without enormous respect for what they have been through and how steadfast they have been.

The second thing I want to say is about impunity. It is the key to understanding all abuse. The more impunity there is, the more abuse there is. Because we are a country that offers virtually unlimited impunity to some organisations, we know in advance they will abuse our trust. It’s part of the DNA of these entities. And we never, never, do anything about it.

If we want to end the culture of impunity, a commission of inquiry would be our second line of attack. First we would be assembling the case for prosecution against the heads of the orders who shielded and protected their people, and whose only interest is the protection of corporate reputations. 

We would be seeing, on our televisions, senior clerics walking into Garda stations to be questioned under caution. What did you know? What actions did you take to protect the children in your care? how was it that you never reported anyone to the gardaí?

Two things we know at the moment. Their public relations companies are busy drafting apologies, but their legal teams are busy preparing to make any commission of inquiry as adversarial and as fearsome as possible. That’s how they do it, and so far no one has found a way to prevent it. That’s how they pile trauma on trauma.

That’s why I would strongly urge the Government, in establishing whatever form of inquiry it settles on, to include a Public Interest Observer, with a mandate to report regularly and in public on the degree to which a clearly defined public interest is being observed. 

The public interest will not be served by delay or delaying tactics, neither will it be served by an excessively adversarial approach or by terrorising witnesses. 

But they will be daily features of any inquiry unless they’re called out by someone with the authority to do so.

The final thing I want to say is about accountability. Let’s suppose for a second that one of these organisations was a large private commercial company, governed by company law. When a high level of wrongdoing is established in such an entity, directors can face imprisonment, they can be barred from being directors into the future, or they can face massive fines. When the wrongdoer — or the “director” who allows the wrongdoing or protects the wrongdoer — is a senior churchman, none of that applies.

But these people, governed by a vow of poverty, run immensely rich organisations. The Charities Regulator website, for instance, refers to the Spiritans as the Congregation of the Holy Spirit. The Register of Charities reveals it made a surplus last year of around €1.5m on income of just over €16m, and it has net assets of €157,431,449. Not a penny less.

And that’s only one of the orders. It’s much harder to get at data about some of the others – the Christian Brothers hide their enormous wealth in a secret trust named after a man raised to the status of Blessed in 1996. There’s little doubt that if you could get a peep inside all their combined accounts you’d be looking at billions in cash and assets.

Somewhere in the process – sooner rather than later, hopefully - there will be the question of redress. We all know how that will go, unless we act now. Survivors will – I hope – get the full measure of redress they should get. And the religious orders will do everything in their power to weasel out of making a reasonable contribution to the bill.

Fighting to protect enormous wealth, set alongside a vow of poverty, is incongruous to say the least. Using power and influence to protect enormous wealth, set alongside the moral obligations arising from their culpability in generations of abuse of children, is obscene.

Our government must resolve right now that this time, the orders must not be allowed to get away with protecting their assets while evading their responsibilities. If they do, it would be just one more, and completely unforgivable, example of their abuse.