Oh please. Not another reprise of State/religious-sponsored child abuse in the hungry 1940s and 1950s. Not another series of stomach-churning stories and grainy images, distinguished only by their dreary sameness. Not another hatchet job on priests, brothers and nuns by bitter old lefties and articulate ingrates.

Sure, abuse of all kinds went on. Even the die-hards admit that now. But what were we to do? We didn't know a thing about it. And anyway, who else was prepared to take in these delinquents and charity cases, feed them and educate them them to be good, productive citizens - and without a penny from the State?

Archbishop Connell says as much. Here he is, addressing a roomful of graduates: "The church - utterly dependent on the support of a largely impoverished Catholic community - cared for the poor. And the State was content to leave it so. Nobody, in so far as I am aware, has analysed the annual budgets over the last 50 years to help us to guess how much support the State was able to provide for the caring of the destitute. And that task was accepted by generations of religious."

Up to now, this has been the standard view, the "context" for the horror stories seeping into the public consciousness and now limping, weeping and screaming, into courtrooms across the land.

The true value of Mary Raftery's TV documentary series, States of Fear, which starts on RTE 1 tonight, is that she has begun that analysis referred to by the archbishop. And all is not as it seemed. Focusing on the thorny end of that "task" taken on by generations of religious - the industrial schools or, as they were mistakenly called, "orphanages" - she has diligently unravelled fact from myth. Working from contemporary Department of Education files, two conclusions present themselves: the State knew a great deal about the systematic physical and emotional abuse within the system, but chose for the most part to ignore it; and not only did the State ignore it, it funded that same system and continued to fund it, quite generously.

For many, the extent of State funding for these institutions will be the most startling revelation. That amid first-hand reports of hungry children reduced to eating pig-swill and grass and stealing Communion wafers to ease hunger pangs, amid official reports of "gross malnutrition", semi-starvation and children reduced to half their normal body weight, comes the news that far from relying solely on the charity of impoverished Irish Catholics, the orders who ran these institutions received a grant for each child that was just below the average wage of a farm labourer (and on which the labourer would probably have been expected to support a large family).

So, for example, Artane with its 800 boys would have received an annual grant equal to around a million pounds in today's money. Not wildly generous, to be sure, but these institutions were ruthlessly self-sufficient industries in which the inmates were an endless source of free labour. The children performed most of the cleaning and maintenance work and the labouring on the attached farms. They made their own shoes and boots as well as other leather items and furniture which were sold outside. The State, in addition, paid the salaries of the religious who worked as teachers in these schools.

It is clear from the files, furthermore, that the State would have given even more had the religious orders been open in their accounting. Although the latter constantly pleaded poverty, they refused to provide detailed accounts to support their case. It's hardly surprising then that a degree of scepticism runs through official deliberations on the subject.

So, denied an increase in the grant per head, the religious orders applied themselves to getting more heads. They were so assiduous in this that, in the 1940s, one Department official described them as "touting" for children. Figures show that the Republic had more children in industrial schools then, than all of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together. To avail of State grants, the system required that children be committed by the courts - usually for "having a guardian who did not exercise proper guardianship".

This was open to broad interpretation. Mary, one of the seven people who give testimony for this series, recalls how her Co Kerry parish priest decided her widowed mother was "unfit" because she was seeing another man. Her voice cracking, Mary remembers that her mother was breast-feeding the baby when a garda and ISPCC inspector arrived and how she and her seven siblings were "walked through the village" up to the courthouse, where the boys were ordered to be detained in Tralee and the girls in Killarney. At this time, judges were committing 1,000 children a year, some as young as seven, and Mary's case was typical of 80 per cent of them (and of the fact that, contrary to common perception, there were many more girls than boys in the Irish system). Of the remainder, a tiny percentage were in for "criminal" behaviour and the rest for mitching school. All of them were poor. Home contact was discouraged and thousands never saw their siblings again.

Thus did a church and a state dedicated to the service of family and the sacredness of family life preside over and intervene directly in breaking up families forever. And they did it knowing that it was not in the children's interest. Ignorance, for example, is not a plea open to State officials and politicians, who must have been aware of the endless, public opposition by their own Department of Health to the concept of locking up children. From the 1920s up to the 1950s, says Raftery, Health Department files reflected the consistent view that big institutions were bad for children and fostering the way forward.

By contrast, in a document from the 1950s the Catholic Church was seen to be categorically opposed to fostering and entirely in favour of industrial schools - all of which were run by religious orders.

Meanwhile, reports from official inspectors of the State's 52 industrial schools were throwing up words such as "sadism" and "starvation" and "Dickensian conditions". This, in spite of the fact that schools knew weeks in advance when inspectors were coming. One such report, on Daingean industrial school, run by the Oblates, contrasted the "excellent" conditions for the cows in the milking parlours to those endured by the boys. The Oblates complained about officials "taking the good points for granted and stressing the weaknesses" and stepped up their complaints about a drop in income, blaming the courts for being too lenient and not sending them enough boys for long enough sentences. It seemed to work. The boys and money continued to flow to Co Offaly.

Under the headline, "Sadism", another official in the 1940s referred to the practice of publicly shaving the heads of those boys and girls who were recaptured after escaping. Although the practice remained widespread up to the 1960s, it is never again referred to in Department correspondence. On the odd occasion, however, righteous outrage did erupt. In the 1940s, two nuns in Cappoquin, Co Waterford, so overstepped the mark that they were fired.

Nor could the hierarchy claim ignorance. In 1962, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid received an indictment on Artane in Dublin from its chaplain, Father Moore. This also referred to malnourished, poorly clothed boys and asked for visiting committees to be appointed to Artane and other industrial schools. Nothing happened.

But how much was known by the general public? Some older people still remember the dust-up caused by the visit to the Republic of the real Father Flanagan - the prototype for the priestly role played by Spencer Tracy in the film Boystown. Father Flanagan was no soft touch. He was an emissary for Roosevelt, commissioned to report on the treatment of children in Europe. When he declared after a visit to institutions all over the Republic that they were a disgrace to the nation, his remarks made all the papers.

What he and the inspectors and the general public were not allowed to see, of course - but must have suspected - were the ceaseless acts of sadism that marked virtually all these institutions, forming such a pattern right across the system and the State, says Raftery, that the perpetrators might have met to compare notes. Girls dragged out of the bath for flogging by leather on delicate wet flesh or - naked to the waist - forced to crawl on all fours while their peers were lined up and urged by a nun to hit them hard as they passed; boys reduced to gibbering simpletons by constant beatings or stripped naked and spread-eagled over steps to be flogged. One man says he witnessed a boy fall to his death in "very, very, very suspicious circumstances. . . He touched me as he fell."

Among the most haunting in States of Fear are the testimonies of those once condemned as "defective" children because they were blind or deaf or had learning difficulties. They grew up in special residential schools, objects apparently of charity, never made aware the State paid for most of their care. Parents - persuaded by their betters that these schools were their children's only chance of an education - sent infants as young as five. For Christy McEvoy, who attended the School for the Blind run by the Rosminians in Drumcondra, Dublin, the screams of the children being flogged continued to echo in his dreams for many years.

There was worse. According to Raftery: "Virtually no industrial school where there were boys over 10 has not had or is not having a Garda investigation into sexual abuse and this includes the schools for the blind, the deaf, the mildly handicapped." Alan Carroll, sent to Lota in Cork, a school for boys with learning disabilities, describes one brother in particular: "He was never satisfied. . . if he'd done it to a dozen boys." This gentle man asks God for the strength to forgive them. "If I don't forgive them, I'm just as bad as them".

Raftery estimates there are 40,000 people still living who have been through the industrial school system. From the testimonies of more than 100 of those, she believes Sister Xaviera of Goldenbridge in Dublin was just one of many who worked in the system. "Every place had one, two or three Xavieras. The brothers had hundreds."

What of the many good people who worked in the system and did nothing? Raftery reckons they remained silent because "the vow of obedience seemed to supersede any real concept of individual conscience. This is what allowed individuals who were by nature cruel and nasty to do what they did. The good ones never objected, never interfered. The nasty ones were the ones who ran the places."

But that's all history, now. Right? Not so, says Raftery. Programme three, which goes out on May 11th, looks at the legacy of the system. For that, she and the series researcher, Sheila Ahern, examined more recent cases: "Really what became apparent is that the lessons of the industrial schools have not been learnt and that secrecy still underlines much of what is done. And it's secrecy that allowed so much to happen in previous generations".

States of Fear is on RTE 1 tonight at 9.30 p.m.