And the award for joined-up thinking goes to…

…The Vatican.

Specifically, for putting Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor (an Englishman, despite his name) in charge of their inquiry into the Irish church's institutional facilitating of clerical child abuse.

Yes, that is the Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor who ignored warnings that Father Michael Hill was a danger to children, didn't report him, and moved him to a different post, where he abused more children.

The Irish situation is part of the postcolonial legacy (I knew I could blame the British somehow). The Catholic church never supported Irish independence as an institution, though many priests did so individually. When the Church was illegal, rebels and clerics made common cause and identified the fight for religious freedom with that for national freedom, which suited both sides down to the ground. When the British bowed to pressure and legalised  Catholicism in 1829, the Church swapped sides because it always sticks like glue to power. Some say that's where it went wrong in 312AD, when Christianity was legalised in the Roman Empire, eventually becoming the official religion: a persecuted Church will be sympathetic to the persecuted - a state church will cling to power however evilly it is wielded.

That's what happened in Ireland. The Church had the nationalist movement in its pocket, because rebels fully identified being Catholic with being Irish. As services were in Latin, Irish withered away in one of the places it could have thrived (Welsh, banned in most areas of life, was saved by its use in Chapel). The Church preached reactionary messages which became the core of Irish nationalism whereas other countries' nationalists incorporated class politics too. Meanwhile, the Church itself, gradually gaining control of education at most levels, preached against Irish independence.

When Independence came about, the Church was sanctified at the heart of the new state. In particular, it had total control of the educational system - partly from religious devotion, partly because a poor new country had no funds and energy to start from scratch. Allowing the Church to carry on meant one less thing to worry about.

It simply handed the country's children over to a church which had no concern for local situations, the rights of the individual, the needs of the state and a conscious rejection of democracy and oversight. The Church's priority was the maintenance of its own hegemony. Almost every single politician, businessman, local government official, doctor, dentist, teacher and policeman was educated by the Catholic church from a toddler to a graduate.

Very few, therefore, were capable of conceptualising the country, the people or the state other than as Catholic entities above all: the demands of the Church were paramount. So it was easy to develop the mindset that complaints were automatically groundless or isolated aberrance. The state and the tiny elite that ran education, the justice system, the civil service and the business class were captured by the Church and that was the end of it.

What changed this situation? The gradual onset of European secularism, I guess. The growing body of evidence that hegemony had warped the national consciousness. Perhaps the example of emigrants who'd thrived in a more open society. The sharper conflicts in the North, possibly. There was a 60s moment in Ireland, but it was short and muted - contraception and divorce were only fully legalised in the 1990s.

Maybe the parallels should be with Albania, or Romania - states founded and moulded in the weird grip of a single vision, now blinking in the sunlight of ideological diversity.