“This brother beat me and raped me until there was blood everywhere,” says Michael. When the crimson flow could not be stemmed, Michael was taken to the order’s private infirmary. No questions were asked about his appalling injuries, and when he was healed it was only so that he could be abused again. Over the next five years, he says, he was raped and sexually assaulted by seven Christian brothers.
As Michael tells his story, the faces of four elderly men flicker on to the television set.

Four Christian brothers, aged 59 to 81, the newscaster announces, have just been charged with 55 sexual abuse crimes between 1952 and 1970 at another industrial school, St Joseph’s in Tralee.The current shaming of the Catholic Church is relentless, and seems continuous, with former residents queuing up to describe the brutality of the religiously run schools. Last week, Nora Wall, formerly Sister Dominic, became the first nun to be convicted of child sex abuse. Wall, 51, was found guilty of raping a 10-year-old girl in her care in 1988. She pinned the girl by the ankles while a homeless schizophrenic raped her at St Michael’s, a home run by the Sisters of Mercy in Waterford.

Wall was its director.The girl had been sent to St Michael’s when she was six, following allegations that her father had sexually abused her. Wall began sexually abusing the child soon after she arrived. The rapist, Paul McCabe, 50, was a former resident who met Wall while looking for his mother, who had left him at St Michael’s as a child.Amazingly, what has been exposed so far is probably just the beginning. Hundreds of former residents of children’s homes are preparing to sue religious orders and the Catholic Church. A police investigation into abuse at Artane, for example, has received 230 complaints against 75 priests. More than 40,000 children passed through the industrial schools between 1950 and the Seventies and thousands more through the “enlightened” regimes that replaced them. Michael, it is now clear, was far from alone.Christine Buckley was the first to break the silence in the mid-Nineties when she exposed the horror of her years in Goldenbridge orphanage in Dublin, run by the Sisters of Mercy in the Fifties.

Miss Buckley says children were subjected to hard labour and beaten every day. The nuns stole their names from them on entry and gave them a number. Miss Buckley remembers babies strapped to potties and girls not knowing their names or the day they were born Not that it mattered Birthdays were not celebrated. Bernadette Fahy, 45, also a Goldenbridge pupil, says: “It was just like a concentration camp. That is no insult to people sent to real concentration camps.

The only thing they did not do to us was send us to the gas chambers.”The avalanche of abuse allegations has forced Church and state into a corner And there is hard cash at stake, as well as reputations Which may explain the current vogue for saying sorry. Over the past two years the Sisters of Mercy, the Christian Brothers and the De La Salle Brothers have gone so far as to make public apologies to those who “may” have been abused.Last month, propelled partly by States of Fear – a three-part television expose of the industrial schools – the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, offered a surprise “sincere and long overdue” apology to the victims of abuse, and for “a collective failure to intervene” He was not being magnanimous. States of Fear exposed official files that proved that the state had known about, and ignored, allegations of abuse.Ahern also announced an independent commission into abuse, the primary focus of which would be to provide a forum for victims to tell their stories. Interestingly, both Church and government claim that recognition, not compensation, is the victims’ main concern. That looks like being wishful thinking.Josephine Baker, who runs a support group for 200 male supporters of the industrial schools, snorts.