"Is that a diesel thing?"

"We'll do our own jokes, thank you. Me kitchen, you TV. It's all lined up."

St. Jude's was one of three industrial schools Martha looked at in the documentary, which was called Say Nothing. It was the least severe case, in that nobody had actually been killed and anonymously buried there, say, but it wasn't easy viewing. The basic components were all in place: half-educated Christian Brothers, some of whom had themselves been physically and sexually abused, inflicting that abuse on others; abuse among the boys themselves, as the old turned on the young; a collective disbelief among the wider community, including priests, teachers, the Guards, a justice of the peace, and even journalists on the local paper, that amounted to denial; harrowing testimony from a man in his midforties who looked about sixty, red-faced and swollen, about the serial abuse he had suffered from the age of five, by religious brothers he named and others he said he never saw; a caption ran underneath his interview saying he had hanged himself before the program was shown; a bland nonapology apology from the archbishop of the diocese with a semolina face and a prissy, sibilant voice, who barely conceded that any abuse had been committed by priests or religious at all, in such a hurry was he to condemn "the wider decline in standards among society as a whole, particularly in the area of chastity"; a wheedling excursion in self-justification and evasion from the minister for something or other, keeping the shit from sticking to the government of the day, probably, that kept insisting, eventually in a rather menacing fashion, that what we had to remember was that these events, terrible though they were, all took place in a different time. The St. Jude's section ended with a bunch of apparently happy boys swarming around the front lawn with the river view, and the announcement that St. Jude's was now being run as a boys' home under the joint control of the departments of education, health, and social welfare.

I finished my drink by the window, looking out at the same river and wondering how many tales of ruined lives and broken hearts it carried from its source through the hard-knock city of Dublin to the sea. Martha joined me with a refill, which by now I badly needed, and a drink for herself, and I toasted her achievement in silence.

We ate mostly in silence, too. Martha had cooked pretty much everything you could: turkey, ham, roast potatoes, sprouts, bread and cranberry sauces, the lot; there was plenty of wine, and Christmas pudding to finish. It all tasted good, and I was glad to have it. But I didn't feel like celebrating, and Martha, usually relentlessly upbeat, didn't either. Maybe it was the documentary, maybe it was the case, maybe it was just that, when you're alone, you eat your Christmas dinner at a table full of empty chairs.

Afterward, Martha made some coffee and took out a red-and-black bound A4 notebook.

"Right, that's Christmas done," she said.

"Thanks for me dinner," I said.

"Easy for you, only have to eat it once. I'll have leftovers until February. Okay, Say Nothing covered the first incarnation of the school, ending in the late eighties. Subsequent to that, it reopened staffed by lay people, supervised by social workers, but there were two abusers among them, one from a care center in Wales where there had been systematic abuse."

"This would have been through the nineties."

"It finally closed in '98. That was to have been the second part of the film: how, when the Church's influence declined or was removed, the conditions in residential homes did not improve; in fact, in certain cases, they got worse."

"And why didn't you make that film?"

"Because people involved-doctors, civil servants, care workers and others-refused to cooperate, and in several cases threatened us with legal action. And there was a marked reluctance on the part of the national broadcaster, all of a sudden, to tangle with so many different forces. So what you get at the end of Say Nothing is basically this complete fucking lie, these happy boys gamboling about on a front lawn they were still forbidden to walk across. I could tell you three of those boys at least whose lives were ruined by the abuse they suffered during that time, after the Church had withdrawn from St. Jude's."

"Not completely though. I mean, there was still a chapel, it was still basically a Catholic institution. It had its own chaplain pretty much. Didn't it?"

Martha sat back and smiled.

"You tell me," she said.

"Father Vincent Tyrrell," I said. "But he says he had nothing to do with anything."

Martha poured herself another glass of red and looked through her notes.

"All right. The way it happened, the abusers in the nineties, they found a couple of older boys happy to serve as willing helpers. And they got to join in, too. But most importantly, they helped to conceal the identities of the chief perpetrators."

"Including people from outside the school."

Martha sat forward and looked at me keenly. "What makes you say that?"

"I don't know. Did you find people in the town would talk to you about it all?"

"No way. All they want to talk about is horses, or that fucking country club for rich Americans and golfers. It's like it never existed."

"Despite the fact that the casualties were wandering around Tyrrellscourt for years afterward, doped or smacked out of it, the walking wounded of the town."

"I know. They turn that into almost a badge of pride, you know, oh yeah, it's not just the Celtic Tiger down here, we have our share of Characters. And because a couple of burnt-out musicians from the sixties decamped there, they try and sell the whole package like, you know, Haight-Ashbury on the Liffey. A few of the people in McGoldrick's will talk, but more in general, and it always goes back to the Church, you know, it has to be some priest to blame. I mean, fair enough, the Church did its share, but it's a fraction of what went on."

"Was your film instrumental in getting St. Jude's closed down?"

"No, it was already shut. It might have thwarted any possibility of it ever opening again, but I don't know. What did you mean by the chief abusers being people outside the school?"

"Can I have a look at that last scene again, all the boys by the river?"

"I have an image of it here," Martha said, and showed me a scanned photograph of the boys of St. Jude's by the river.

"This would be about '92," she said. "And here's the legend-sorry, you have to keep turning over." On the next page, there was a pencil tracing of the photo with each face numbered, and a list of the names to match the numbers beneath it. I flicked back and forth, and quickly spotted Leo Halligan, who was fully grown then. Patrick Hutton's name was there, but his head was almost completely hidden behind another boy's: that boy had vivid eyes and blond hair, and his name was Terence Folan. And there was a fourth boy, whose face I had difficulty matching with the one I knew, but whose name rang a bell: Gerald Stenson.

"Did you come across this guy?" I said. "Steno?"

Martha nodded.

"The barman in McGoldrick's. He reminded me of a hippie from the first time 'round, actually, someone who you think must be really sweet and love and peace because he's got the hair, then you find out he deals bad acid, or he's a rapist."

"Anything concrete to base that on?"

"Nah. Except for extreme prejudice against guys with ponytails."

"Extreme prejudice means you kill them."

"What jury's gonna convict? What did you mean by abusers coming from outside the school that's the third time I've asked and I gave you your dinner so if you don't answer you can fuck away off with yourself."

"If you give me any more publicity, I won't be able to do my job."