During the last two centuries, the Irish Catholic Church expanded into a powerful socio-political-religious institution. It reached a peak of 34,000 religious personnel in 1967, supported each year by hundreds of millions of euros, in todays' values. Though already in decline, the church went into a preciptous collapse following reports between 2005 and 2010, from four Government inquiries which exposed extensive clerical and institutional child abuse and its cover-up by bishops and religious leaders.

This book argues that the abuse would have been exposed and the collapse avoided, if the church had practised public accountability.