There is a seamless quality about government policies regarding problem children and, in turn, attitudes on refugees. I can well remember, in 1943, day pupils of St Vincent's CBS in Glasnevin, Dublin, parading down Botanic Road shouting (in German!) "To hell with the Jews".

For me then, and now, it displayed the Christian Brothers' stance towards certain problems.

We have so concentrated for years on getting political history in the correct order that it has cost us the neglect of social history. But we did know how to hide a problem. From the foundation of the State, good men thought that the best method of ridding us of juvenile problems was to hand it all over to brothers and nuns.

The State provided the money and felt the problems were solved. Behind the walls of the institutions, hideous things were happening. One has, however, to place matters in the climate of the 1920s and 1930s. We believed nuns and brothers were kind, and indeed most were.

Of course, there were rumours about Artane Industrial School, but there was at that time no education, training or belief that the good brothers were behaving with such dreadful malice to the boys under their command. That nuns could be brutal was beyond rational thinking.

Did the State know what was going on? I have a belief that it did. Official inspection teams came to such as Artane and Letterfrack, but the staffs knew the day and times of the examinations and so all was bright from the linen tablecloths to the food. Once the inspectors went it was back to the abnormal.

In the years between 1932 and 1972 the Irish Catholic Church had awesome authority. A distressing aspect of the child abuse is that decent nuns and brothers have been daubed by the activities of foul-minded members of their communities.

But there is another alarming side to this. Mary Raftery's last programme seemed to me to denote that there is abuse even now in certain institutions.

As for journalists, we failed in our basic duties in the 1940s and 1950s. We allowed a strident Christian Brother to burst into the office of the manager to demand that a District Court case involving Artane be "spiked" and not used in the Evening Herald. He would also invade the editorial room to announce the manager's decision. He got away with that one more time.

Brian Quinn was editor of the Evening Herald from 1969 to 1976. He is chairman of the Ireland-Israel Friendship League, and a board member of the Irish-Jewish Museum