That inquiry was prompted by another RTÉ documentary, Blackrock Boys, broadcast in 2022, in which David and the late Mark Ryan spoke courageously, and selflessly, about the sexual abuse they suffered during the 1970s at Blackrock College, run by the Spiritans. Some 2,395 people came forward with allegations of sexual abuse after it was shown.

In the same way, Leathered is likely to embolden others to talk about the cruelties meted out in an education system that failed to offer any protection to children.

Two of the contributors to the documentary, poet Theo Dorgan and his friend and schoolmate, film festival co-director Mick Hannigan, will touch so many when they relive their painful experiences at the North Monastery School in Cork in the 1960s. They are real changemakers.

It will also be salutary to hear from Frank Crummey and Martin Reynolds, founder members of Reform, which faced such resistance from Church and State when it campaigned to have corporal punishment banned in the 1960s and ’70s.

It is important to remember that the issues were known at the time — and were vehemently swept under the carpet.

Though, none of this is new. While recent revelations help us to establish a more complete picture of the extent of abuse, we have known about it for some time. There has been forthright condemnation of it, too, though not necessarily at home.

It was left to the European Court of Human Rights to establish in law, in 2014, that the Irish State failed to provide any effective child protection mechanism in Irish schools before the introduction of school guidelines on abuse in 1992.

The woman at the centre of that case, the singular Louise O’Keeffe, had a gargantuan battle to get that far, yet the Department of Education has still to fully implement the O’Keeffe judgment. While Louise O’Keeffe was awarded damages, many others were excluded under a scheme that was revised as recently as 2021. It imposed the same kind of arbitrary restrictions that we have seen more recently in the redress scheme for those who suffered forced family separation in mother and baby institutions.

The recent scoping inquiry recommended that the Government consider a redress scheme for survivors of sexual abuse in schools, and that relevant religious orders be compelled to contribute to it. Up to now, the Government has failed utterly to do either of these things.

Tonight, we will hear how corporal punishment in Irish schools left lasting physical and mental scars. The survivors of that abuse also deserve redress. Let us hope that in calling out the wrongdoing, the Government will find it increasingly difficult to go on with its eyes wide shut.

Chopin waltz a happy find 

There is something magical about the discovery of lost treasures. We saw that recently when Brian Cleary unearthed a new Bram Stoker story, which was read in public for the first time last weekend during the festival dedicated to the famous author of Dracula.

Now comes news that an unknown waltz by Polish composer Frederic Chopin has been discovered nearly 200 years after it was written.

Curator Robinson McClellan was working on a collection in the vault of the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan, New York, when he found a small manuscript with the name ‘Chopin’ written on the corner. After a thorough authentication process, the museum confirmed that the manuscript, dated between 1830 and 1835, was indeed by Chopin and that it represented a once-in-a-century discovery. The waltz, about 80 seconds long, has now been recorded by pianist Lang Lang, giving us a new glimpse in to the composer’s early work.

Both finds remind us of the importance of archives: Those ever-enlightening repositories that constantly show us that there is always more to know.