Catholic Ireland has been forced to look at itself in the mirror, and does not much like what it sees. The report has been published of the official inquiry into the country’s mother and baby homes, and the scandals surrounding their treatment of single mothers and their children. It is shocking but not exactly a revelation, as the story of those homes is part of the history of Irish culture and morality – a particular type of Catholic culture and morality – with which all Irish people are familiar, even if unconsciously.

Those, including not a few clergy, who still argue that the invention of the contraceptive pill undermined traditional sexual morality, should read the final report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, just published, to see how that morality was enforced in practice. Shame and disgrace was at the heart of it. Lives were wilfully ruined by regimes calculated to punish any young woman who fell pregnant outside marriage. There was sexual abuse inside mother and baby homes, for sure, but by far the greater abuse was emotional. This was the very negation of any genuine Christian morality, which looks with compassion on human weakness, and sees vulnerability rather than sin.