A few commentators have suggested that because the MBHCI shared some staff with previous well-received investigations chaired by Yvonne Murphy, complaints about the MBHC must be exaggerated or unreasonable.

Murphy chaired investigations into child sex abuse in the Cloyne and Dublin archdioceses. (Ferns is a different Murphy).

Those investigations and this one are very different. Three big points, I think.

1) These inquiries were more limited than the MBHCI. They concerned much smaller populations, and one major form of abuse - child sex abuse. At the time, that abuse was clearly-defined, and well-recognised as a legal and moral wrong.

1) The Dublin Report, in particular, was completed after Ferns and against the backdrop of Ryan. It wasn't framing mass abuses for the first time.

1) By contrast, many of the abuses associated with the Homes are still not politically framed as such today- family separation, adoption under duress, obstetric violence, race discrimination, institutionalisation of disabled people and more.

1) In addition, other inquiries have actively undermined survivors who have complained of similar abuses e.g. people held in Magdalene laundries and women subjected to symphysiotomy.

---- All of point 1) above may go some way to explaining why the language used to describe survivors testimony in the Cloyne and Dublin reports is so different from the language in the MBHCI report. -----

2) Relatedly, Cloyne and Dublin, like MBHCI focused heavily on what was legal/illegal at particular times. Many harms against women and children have only recently been recognised as such in Irish law, so that approach was less appropriate to MBHCI.

2) Cloyne and Dubin were also about assessing whether particular responses to abuse were required by law, not about determining whether abuses had taken place. Again, a more law-focused approach made sense.

--- Now the big one --- 3)

3)Cloyne and Dublin were primarily about priests, internal responses within the Catholic Church and church disobedience around state law. That issue had appeared in similar ways in Catholic countries across the globe.

3) Remember Enda Kenny's big speeches, focusing on sovereignty and jurisdiction. It was easy to imagine a big church/state divide around this issue.

3) MBHCI is looking broadly at direct involvement in abuse by church, state and professional agents, and by families. Much more complex, much closer to the bone.

3) There was no good state precedent for analysing those issues. In seeking to shift the ‘blame’ to an amorphous notion of Society, this Report comes much closer to framings of religion in the reports into symphysiotomy and Magdalene laundries.

3) And perhaps crucially, and returning to 2) above, because MBHCI involves networked sites of state and social responsibility, it raises the issue of redress.

3) Cloyne and Dublin focused on prosecution (not a great record there either...) and compensation (though hard to get) was available from the church.

--- There is probably more to say, but even on those 3 points, the previous ‘Murphy reports’ and this Report were very different jobs. ---

Cloyne and Dublin were not perfect reports or perfect processes. Issues arose, for example, around the refusal to conduct public hearings. So I'm not necessarily contrasting 'good' with 'bad'. I'm saying these issues aren't the same.

In any event, I would encourage people to lay off the appeal to authority here. To quote from the Murphy Report on Dublin, “institutions and individuals, no matter how august, should never be considered to be immune from criticism or from external oversight of their actions”.