For a long time, the Church was blamed for the sufferings of children in Irish industrial schools. The Irish State wanted it this way. This is because the State was culpable. Its exercise of control, through the Department of Education, was negligent to a criminal degree.  It has not been made answerable.

At the time of independence, the State inherited a country-wide network of industrial schools. These institutions were allowed to become a 'Gulag' or prison system for children.  The regimes were universally harsh.  Punishment was cruel and excessive.  The children were deprived of proper food, medical, and psychological care. They 'lost' their education, working much of their time instead as slave labour.  They were abused physically, mentally and sexually.

Their detention by the courts was unspeakably harsh, peremptory and unjust, the children rarely benefiting from defence or proper analysis of their circumstances.  Many of the children spent their whole childhood in industrial school detention, suffering unending trauma as a result.

In 1999, Bertie Ahern apologised on behalf of the State and set in place a reconciliation procedure, its methods secretive and flawed.  It did not reconcile.  This was the final betrayal of thousands of former inmates whose lives had been deeply affected, and in many cases ruined, by what had happened.

This is the story of how 'The Irish Gulag' came into existence, how it was exposed, how those who had suffered were paid off, in secret, and were yet denied proper public reconciliation. In a series of moves charted in this book, the State's main purpose is shown as self-protection, not recompense. Carried out in collaboration with the Church, this was at the heart of the betrayal of innocent children.