THE CATHOLIC hierarchy won't get away for much longer with its lack of response to the rush of revelations about physical, sexual and psychological abuse done to children placed in its care.

We are dealing here with the most serious scandal to emerge in Southern Ireland for many years, more important for what it tells us about the nature of Catholic Irish society than the business shenanigans which gave rise to the Beef Tribunal, or the Nicky Kelly affair, Eamon Casey's affair, or any of the other causes celebre which litter the history of the last couple of decades.

It is a measure of the lingering arrogance of the chiefs of the Catholic Church, and of their isolation from the thinking of the people around them, that they seem to assume they can continue to sit tight and sing dumb.

Last year, Julian Vignoles' RTE Radio documentary on the Magdalen Laundries brought to the surface a sudden stream from Ireland's vast reservoir of hidden misery. Since then, a number of publications - most prominently the Sunday Tribune, the Irish Times, and Hot Press - have carried series of articles detailing the abominable treatment over many, many years of thousands of Irish children in schools, orphanages and other Catholic Church-run institutions.

The reaction of the Catholic authorities came through harsh and clear in Gerry McGovern's heart-wrenching summation of the Magdalen story so far in the second-last issue of Hot Press. He had spoken with members of the Magdalen Memorial Committee - the group set up to lobby for some official acknowledgement of the wrong done to women incarcerated as slaves under the Sisters of Charity for having broken some of Catholic Ireland's brutal rules as to how women ought to behave.

The MMC was established after it emerged that the bodies of 132 of the Magdalen women were to be dug up from their graves at High Park convent in Drumcondra and cremated and reburied in Glasnevin Cemetery so that their original resting place could be sold off by the nuns for property development. None of the relatives of the women was told what was happening or invited to the mass re-burial.

The MMC wrote to the Archbishop of Dublin, Desmond Connell, making three requests: that a public funeral for the women be held; that the burial ground be used as a garden or shrubbery, not sold off as a building site; and that the Church help fund a memorial which would act as a reminder of this sort of injustice.

The dignified restraint of the Memorial Committee was evident from the nature of these proposals. But Connell didn't deign to respond to them directly. Instead, the answer came from a Catholic Church press officer in an RTE exchange with a member of the committee. The answer was: No, no, no.

This is in line with the official Church response to a story I wrote in the Tribune in July about the transportation to Australia of hundreds of "orphan" Irish children between the late thirties and the early sixties. I put "orphan" in inverted commas because many of the children, although living for various reasons in Church institutions, had families still living in Ireland.

The families were not told that the children were being shipped to the other side of the world. On their arrival in Australia many of the children were given new names, then allowed no contact with their relatives back home. They were dispersed around Western Australia to be brutalised and exploited - some were literally worked to death - in "homes" and work-camps run by mainly-Irish Christian Brothers. Their story is now a major scandal in Australia, where the Catholic Church, and the Christian Brothers in particular, have been forced to acknowledge and apologise publicly for their crimes.

After the Tribune piece was published I wrote to a former Australian Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby, who when he came into office in the sixties had put a stop to the mass importation of children by the Catholic Church. I asked him how it had come about that the practice had been tolerated in the first place.

How come children as young as five and six had been admitted as immigrants without their families in Ireland being aware that this was happening? How come many of the children, when they grew up and set about trying to find their own identities, discovered that the civil authorities held no papers relating to them?

Mr. Grassby has now written back explaining that a succession of Australian Federal Governments had, in effect, sub-contracted control over aspects of immigration to "trusted" institutions - like the Catholic Church. The government wanted healthy, white children from English-speaking backgrounds to people and develop the country. The Catholic Church wanted to boost the numbers of Catholics in the country so as to secure its influence for the future. So the Catholic Church was licensed to import orphans from Ireland and Britain, no questions asked.

As I say, this story is now very well-known in Australia, where scores of compensation cases are being prepared. Argument continues about whether the State as well as the Church should contribute to the damages which will eventually, assuredly be awarded. The identities of some of the senior Christian Brothers and of others implicated in the scandal are being unearthed and publicised by journalists and campaigners.

But the Church here in Ireland, which organised the other phase of the operation, selecting and processing the children for shipment, appears to feel under no pressure at all to explain itself in public, much less apologise. It's regarded as having all been par-for-the-course, run-of-the-mill, not worth bothering about.

Another strand of the story which I helped to tug out into the open concerns children who remained in Church institutions in Ireland but who suffered from abuse and from being denied their own identities just as terribly as the "orphans" sent into exile.

In the Tribune a few weeks ago I retold one man's account of life in an orphanage in Derry run by the Sisters of Nazareth and later in a Christian Brothers' Industrial School in Galway. He described the relentless brutality of the nuns and Brothers, which was scarifying enough. More appalling was his memory of sitting in an orphanage school in Bishop Street in Derry in a class which he now knows included a number of his sisters. But nobody ever told him, this is your sister, this is another sister. Or told them either that he was their brother. They parted without ever having acknowledged one another.

This from people who never give over about the sanctity of "family values."

The piece ended with an appeal to Cathal Daly to admit that a great wrong had been done to innocent children. I have reason to believe that Daly was made aware of the article, and of the man's plea for a response from the Cardinal. But of course there hasn't been a cheep out of him.

One reason Church chiefs feels no need to respond is, maybe, that they are perplexed by the furore. After all, none of it will have come as a surprise to them: they've known all along.

Of course, up to a point, we've all known all along. When I was growing up in the Bogside people talked in whispers about the suffering of the "home boys" - the "orphans" held in St. Joseph's Home, Termonbacca, overlooking the Brandywell - and of the savagery being meted out to them day in and day out by the Christian Brothers. I remember a decade of the rosary being offered up in our house for God to take pity on "the home boys."

This must have been true all over Ireland. People knew, sort of, what was happening, but also knew clearly that it would be impermissible to make a public issue of it. The prevailing atmosphere would have choked controversy off in an instant.

That's what's changed. For the first time in a century it is possible to talk freely and in public in Ireland about the real role of the Catholic Church.

The economic changes of the last three decades, and the consequent ideological transformation, have provided a context in which the suppressed memories of masses of people can at last be freed for expression. It is for this reason that, almost every week now, somebody else stands forward to tell a terrible story.

Once you write about this area of Irish life you hear from others anxious to release their own experiences. Some say that things weren't as bad as all that, others complain that you haven't told the half of it. We all remember things differently. But there's no denying the vivid reality of the stories which tumble out.

In the past few weeks I have listened to a woman who had been taken as an unmarried teenager into a "home" run by nuns in the fifties when it was discovered she was pregnant. She recalled how, as she screamed in agony feeling herself being ripped asunder as she gave birth, a nun stood at the side of the bed cackling, "Now you feel the pain of your sin, slut, go on, scream with your pain, filthy slut . . ."

I have spoken with a woman who remembers with a shudder being punished in an orphanage for having sicked up her dinner. A nun stood over her and forced her repeatedly to spoon the vomit back into her mouth and swallow it, and keep it down.

On the phone to Australia I have listened to a man in his fifties taken from this country as a small child, the sobs overwhelming him as he tried to explain the bleakness which has hollowed him out from inside as he has tried and, so far, failed to find out who his parents were, and whether they are alive, and if he has any brothers or sisters.

Add to all that the various casual cruelties which were part of the pattern of life in scores of Catholic institutions for generations and we have some measure of the vast criminality of the Church in its treatment of children.

What has been happening in recent months is that some of this evil has begun to ooze up through cracks and fine fissures caused by deep shifts in Irish society. I'm an optimist despite all, and believe that soon enough will come the earthquake.