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No subterfuge is required.
There is no need to lie or deny.
Everything is conducted as if the law is being rigorously applied while, in reality, it is being used as a weapon.
And then, when somebody has to answer for what’s going on, they can plausibly claim ignorance.
The case of the Dunderrow women that has been in the news recently is a perfect example of the cover-up in plain sight. There are 19 women on either side of the pension age who are being told that logic and reason don’t apply to their case.
They were sexually abused, sometimes routinely, by a teacher, Leo Hickey, in the West Cork school to the point where some of them thought this was a normal part of schooling.
Two redress schemes were set up to compensate them for the failure of the State to protect their childhoods. Both determined they didn’t qualify for redress for the crimes.
There is no issue about what they suffered.
Nearly 30 years ago, they provided statements for the criminal case against Hickey. He pleaded guilty to 21 samples counts out of a total of 387, perpetrated against 21 girls in his charge.
Twenty years later, Hickey would be convicted for a second time for abusing a boy in another school.
Nobody could claim that the women weren’t entitled to redress, or that any of them were trying it on in pursuit of some easy money. Yet, the State has consistently put up barriers.
“It’s a continuation of the cover-up,” says Martha, one of the women who has thus far been denied redress for what she suffered.
“To me, it’s just continuing under a different guise.
"We should be learning from all of that by now. Something comes out and everybody is horrified. And then we all move on and the cover up continues.”
Taoiseach Micheál Martin isn’t culpable for how the schemes were set up, but last Wednesday on he felt compelled to defend the system.
“There has been a long journey in respect of this issue,” he said, adding that some of the women hadn’t been able to access redress “because of the parameters governing that".
The parameters governing the schemes were inserted by the State, and they have all the appearance of being done to frustrate applicants.
The reality is that the cover-up of child sexual abuse as a societal problem dates back nearly a century, and continues, as Martha points out, right up until today.
When complaints emanating from Dunderrow National School and others like it began surfacing in the 1970s, the official reaction was one of complete ignorance.
Nobody, in either the permanent or elected government, had any evidence to suggest that this kind of thing could and did happen. Such a positioning was entirely dishonest.
The State was officially aware of the prevalence of child sexual abuse since the completion of the Carrigan report in 1930.
The report was ostensibly into child prostitution and associated activity. It touched on the reality of the abortion boat to the UK and, crucially, that of child abuse. Its purpose was to examine whether laws in this area should be updated.
What emerges from Carrigan is the priorities that were in place when it came to protection and welfare of mothers and children.
“Illegitimacy” was not central to the terms of reference, but “we felt it necessary to make it a subject of enquiry, as illegitimacy must be regarded as one of the principal causes of the species of crime and vice".
That, rather than the fate of mothers giving birth outside the tight strictures of society at the time, was main concern.
After dealing at some length with the “dance hall craze” which was responsible for dealing a savage blow to general morality, the report got to the serious issue of child sexual abuse.
Specifically, “that there was an alarming amount of sexual crime increasing yearly, a feature of which was the large number of cases of criminal interference with girls and children from 16 years downwards, including many cases of children under 10 years".
The garda commissioner told the Carrigan committee that the force estimated that “not 15% of such cases were prosecuted”.
A number of reasons were given for this, including the reluctance of parents to pursue it or subject their children to a court appearance and the difficulty of acquiring proof of a sufficient standard.
The commissioner also pointed out, in relation to the “numerous case of outrage upon young females”, that the “children of poor classes are less protected than in Great Britain”.
Updates in the law were recommended, including raising the age of consent.
However, crucially, the report was never published. So the government of the day used it to update the law, which was as it should be, but all the disturbing evidence connected to child abuse was effectively buried.
A memorandum accompanying the report contained advice from the Department of Justice that it should not to be published.
The report was criticised in several respects, including that “the obvious conclusion to be drawn from it was that the ordinary feelings of decency and the influence of religion had failed in Ireland and that the only remedy was by way of police action”.
So evidence that child sexual abuse was a serious and growing problem was kept secret within the government on the basis that it might suggest the Catholic Church had failed in its mission to impose strict sexual morality on the population.
Everything was simply swept under the carpet to maintain a facade.
Carrigan was thus buried for decades, and it was only officially explored again in the late 2000s.
When Louise O’Keeffe, who had been abused as a child in Dunderrow, brought an action against the State in 1998 for its failure to protect her, the State’s response was to contest her claim as if the issue of child sexual abuse was something that had been alien until allegations emerged in the 1970s.
O’Keeffe was fought all the way to the Supreme Court on that basis. It was only when she went to the European Court of Human Rights that the truth emerged.
In the court’s ruling in her favour in 2014, the Carrigan report is mentioned 11 times. This was, in effect, exhibit A for the case that the State had known for decades of the prevalence of child abuse and that it was a serious problem.
Once that was established, a glaring question is why no safeguards were put in place in the one location where children spent a large part of their days.
By then, the significance of Carrigan had been exposed in the Ryan report into clerical abuse in the Dublin diocese, published in 2009.
Despite all that, the State continued to, in effect, cover up by denying the rock solid case of the Dunderrow women for redress.
Martha, like many of the others, attempted to get on with her life after having her childhood devastated.
“I would never have taken a case, but then I got a phone call from another pupil, and then I knew straight away what it was about," she said.
Out of that meeting came the criminal prosecution of Hickey in 1997. After that, they saw Louise O’Keeffe fight her 16 year battle for justice.
“She was amazing,” Martha says. “We watched her go through it and, out of that, the government was forced to set up the redress scheme.
"That was all over 10 years ago and here we still are, at a late stage in life, and they are still trying to make out that there was no responsibility for what was done to us.”
It is all being done out in the open, legally, with the tacit backing of the elected government of the day.
However, the morality of using the law to deny the State’s culpability and its duty to do right by citizens who were wronged cannot be glossed over.