"She was viewed as the guilty party by church and state," Walsh says. "My father denounced her because she wanted a divorce, which was illegal. We were put in the dock, charged and sentenced for 'having a parent who does not exercise proper guardianship'."

With that decision, Walsh lost his childhood. His memories of the next 14 years are of physical and sexual assault, hunger, fear and privation at the Artane Boys School near Dublin run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, a Catholic organisation.

The full horror of children's lives destroyed by sexual, physical and emotional abuse meted out by Catholic religious orders for decades in Ireland was revealed yesterday in an official five-volume report.

A nine-year investigation by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse concluded that the Irish government colluded in a conspiracy of silence as no action was taken to prevent the sexual abuse of thousands of children who passed through Catholic-run institutions, even though the abuse was known to be endemic.

More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families - a category that often included unmarried mothers - were sent to Ireland's austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last church-run facilities shut in the'90s.

"In some schools a high level of ritualised beating was routine. Girls were struck with implements designed to maximise pain and were struck on all parts of the body," the report says. "Personal and family denigration was widespread."

The Irish Times newspaper, in a scathing editorial, says the report "is the map of an Irish hell".

"It defines the contours of a dark hinterland of the state, a parallel country whose existence we have long known but never fully acknowledged. It is a land of pain and shame, of savage cruelty and callous indifference," the newspaper says.

"With a calm but relentless accumulation of facts, the report blows away all the denials and obfuscations, all the moral equivocations and evasions that we have heard from some of the religious orders and their apologists.

"Abuse was not a failure of the system. It was the system. Terror was both the point of these institutions and their standard operating procedure. Their function in Irish society was to impose social control, particularly on the poor, by acting as a threat."

Walsh remembers: "They (the Christian Brothers) were men of real violence. When I arrived in Artane in 1963, there were 450 boys and it had a stench of violence about it. The home was also used as a detention centre for young offenders, so we were preyed upon not just by the Brothers but by feral gangs."

He says he was also sexually abused twice by one Christian Brother. His mother's repeated efforts to free her children were unjustly refused by the authorities.

"For years we wouldn't believe that she had tried to get us out but she made numerous attempts and was told it was impossible. She had to go back to her husband if she wanted her children."

Throughout his incarceration in Ireland, he saw his mother only once, in 1959. The next time they met was in Blackpool in 1966 when he was playing in the Artane Boys Band.

"I remember seeing this woman staring up at me from the audience, smiling. It sent a cold shiver up my spine and I asked my brother, who was also in the band, who was the woman who stared so intensely at us," he says. "After the concert we were introduced backstage."

Walsh, 53, describes the system that abused him as a marriage of convenience between church and state. "Ireland was a theocratic state," he says. "The church received grants, which were the lifeblood of the religious orders, and the children were used as the means to fill their pockets with cash.

"I learned in later years that Artane would get a cheque, say for pound stg. 10,000, every month from the government.

"Artane would send pound stg. 8000 to Rome. As a consequence we were badly fed and we worked 12-hour days in the fields and workshops. I was put to work in the shoe shop. Hunger was a constant companion. We were child slaves."

Tom Hayes, 63, was committed into the care system at age two because he was born out of wedlock. He, too, suffered at the hands of the Christian Brothers.

"I was told my mother had died when I was born, but in fact she went to England. I didn't discover the truth until 2003," Hayes says. "Sexual abuse took place on a large scale, operated by gangs who had the protection of the Christian Brothers. After I complained to a priest outside the school about it, I was threatened with being sent to a reformatory school in Letterfrack, which had an even more notorious reputation."

Both men hope the report brings out the whole truth. "Ultimately the bishops, the government and the cardinals in the Vatican knew what was going on. It's an opportunity for the hierarchy to make (an) apology for their failure to put an end to the suffering of the children," Walsh says.

On the release of the report, the church in Ireland issued an apology, through Irish primate Sean Brady, its most senior cleric: "I am profoundly sorry and deeply ashamed that children suffered in such awful ways in theseinstitutions."

The report's publication was delayed by several years after the Christian Brothers sued successfully in 2004 to withhold the names of all its members, dead or alive.

More than 1000 witnesses testified to abuse in 216 schools and residential settings across Ireland during a period from 1914 to 2000. More than 800 individuals were identified as physical or sexual abusers, an extraordinary number compared with the handful of prosecutions and convictions. Ninety per cent of witnesses reported physical abuse and half reported sexual abuse.

"Acute and chronic contact and non-contact sexual abuse was reported, including vaginal and anal rape, molestation and voyeurism in both isolated cases and on a regular basis over long periods," the document states.

Sexual abuse was carried out by religious and lay staff, co-residents and professionals "both within and external to the institutions", as well as members of the public, volunteer workers, visitors and foster parents.

"Female witnesses in particular described, at times, being told they were responsible for the sexual abuse they experienced, by both their abuser and those to whom they disclosed abuse," the report says.