How much longer do we have to wait for the government to banish the religious congregations?

The Catholic has failed us in Ireland. Members of the church have perpetrated horrific crimes on vulnerable children and have done everything to avoid paying compensation and even owning up to their crimes.

It now emerges that we exported our child abusers. Where Irish religious orders went, child abuse followed. It is clearly that something is rotten in the church. It is time to disband the corrupt institution to protect our children.

Tardun was one of the more notorious of Australia's 500 or so children's institutions. It had all sorts of Irish connections. It was one of four such institutions run by the Christian Brothers, who were tightly controlled by their Irish leadership, based at the Dublin headquarters in Marino. They even named another of their western Australian institutions Clontarf - it is to be found in Waterford, a suburb of Perth.

Many of the brothers working in the Australian institutions were first generation Irish. These included Br Paul Keaney, the infamous resident manager of Bindoon (another Christian Brothers-run boys' orphanage) up to the 1950s, who was born in Rossinver, Co Leitrim.

Thousands of boys passed through these institutions. Most were Australian, who, like so many Irish children, ended up in care during the middle decades of the 20th century for reasons of poverty and disadvantage.

Why are these people still permitted in education in Ireland? I suppose it is the tarring brush but there were those who knew and did nothing. They are complicit. The percentage of child abusers, torturers and rapists in the church far exceeded population statistics.

Get them out of education, out of hospitals and out of this country.