Beatings, humiliation and sexual assaults on children by a small number of staff are revealed in the sections of the Madonna House report which the Rainbow Coalition refused to publish in 1996. The contents of the suppressed sections remained unknown until they were obtained by the RTE team which produced the States of Fear series.
Mr Michael Noonan, minister for health at the time the Madonna House report was completed, says he wanted to publish it in full but received legal advice against doing so.
The detailed sections, seen by The Irish Times, show that management at Madonna House failed to take any effective action over staff concerns and children's complaints.
One man, who kept children in his quarters until 2 o'clock some mornings watching videos, and who was regarded as having an "inappropriate" relationship with a young girl, was paid £10,000 when he agreed to live outside Madonna House - but kept his job there.
The report was published in 1996 without the most damning sections. "My instructions to officials were to publish the lot," Mr Michael Noonan told The Irish Times yesterday. "Then the advice came back that we could not, and I said to publish what we can."
The report was not a Departmental report, but had been commissioned by the order which ran Madonna House, the Sisters of Charity, according to Mr Noonan.
There were three considerations involved in the decision not to publish the full report, according to a briefing document seen by The Irish Times. These were not to compromise pending prosecutions, not to identify children and not to commit contempt or defamation.
The inquiry was chaired by the late Mr Fred Donohoe, a former senior executive of the Eastern Health Board, which financed Madonna House.
Sister Stanislaus Kennedy yesterday repeated that she had known nothing about sexual abuse at St Joseph's home in Kilkenny in the late 1970s, when she worked for Kilkenny Social Services.
When details of the abuse later emerged, "I was really, really upset, sorry and angry about what happened to the children."