Abuses of human right sounds so weak these days, as if they prevented them from having an umbrella in a rain storm. What happened in Ireland was that the church and the state were providing children to peadophile priests. Both institutions, as well as many senior officials in the church, were moving priests around to prevent them being exposed and to allow the abuse of children to continue.

By allowing the priests to move from one home to another and spread their network, this was a criminal conspiracy to rape and indecently assault hundreds, possibly thousands, of vunerable children. And a deliberate conspiracy to silence any individuals who raised complaints. The scale of the abuse and the cover up make it one of the worst systematic abuses of children in Europe in the later half of the 20th century. These are real issues that the entire Catholic church needs to take extremely seriously.

That said, it is completely unfair to link Catholic schools in London today to this abuse in Ireland. You might as well accuse the schools of torturing Galileo and hundreds of thousands of others in the Inquision. Catholic schools in London do not allow this type of behaviour and I am sure they, and every Catholic in London, would condemn the actions of the Irish church (not that they should feel that they must apologise for anything as they are not individually to blame). In the same way I think most people understand that the vast majority of Muslim schools do not automatically support terrorism and Jihad in the UK, nor does every Muslim or Islamic institution need to apologise for the London bombs.