Irish public life arrived this week at a point of no return: the final collapse of the Catholic Church's ability to set its own authority against that of the State. It is a point that has been reached in the worst possible way, amid appalling details of the violation of many boys and girls. It is, nevertheless, a watershed.
Independent Ireland was never the crude theocracy of liberal legend. Direct interference by bishops in the political process was rare. The array of repressive legislation put in place in the early decades of this State - ranging from literary censorship to the banning of contraceptives - owed as much to a militant Catholic laity and the prudishness of politicians as it did to episcopal diktat.
Yet the power of the institutional Church was arguably far greater than was evident in direct conflicts like the infamous Mother and Child controversy of the 1950s. It was a power so subtle and pervasive that it seldom had to be exercised explicitly. The Church set the moral limits and the State operated within them. Among those limits was the almost absolute assumption that huge areas of public policy, especially the education and care of the young, were the Church's private domain. The State looked on as Church institutions like the industrial schools and the Magdalen laundries indulged in gross abuses of human rights. Civil servants and politicians lacked the courage to protect the victims by holding the Church accountable.
The long process of secularisation in Irish society and the rapid decline of Church power in the 1990s has eroded the moral authority of the Hierarchy. But, the State's unwillingness to make the Church accountable for its treatment of vulnerable citizens lingered on. The last Government's extraordinary deal with the religious orders, severely limiting the amount of compensation to be paid to the victims of institutional abuse, was clear evidence of this continuing reluctance.
Last week's Prime Time programme must end this ambivalence once and for all. Despite the sickening succession of scandals, the Church authorities have seemed incapable of putting the protection of children before the protection of the institution. Cardinal Connell's weak response to the revelations and the apparent willingness of others to hide behind a smokescreen of Canon law have stretched public trust beyond breaking point.
The Government cannot leave the task of imposing accountability to a Church-appointed inquiry, however well-motivated. Neither can it be left to any form of private, non-statutory inquiry, lacking powers of compellability. The long history of the State's failure of nerve in the face of Church authority means that only a public statutory inquiry will suffice. Anything less will fail to get across the message that the victims, the public and the Church itself need to hear. There is but one set of laws, the laws of the State, to which all citizens owe their allegiance in a democracy.