THE child in the corridor rocked back and forth, banging his head off the wall.

I wasn’t much older than him, yet I could feel his distress acutely, and I can still see him clearly now. We were visiting a friend. Muckamore was not a happy place.

Everyone knew.

My own relative was autistic and blind. When her mother became too frail to care for her at home, the family refused to let her go to one place: Muckamore. She went instead to a facility in Dublin and lived there happily until she died in 2015.

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In a former job working with adults with learning disabilities, I met some of the most resilient people imaginable, each facing challenges most of us will never understand.

The state, therefore, has an extra duty of care to ensure that their vulnerability does not become a licence to abuse.

Some time before The Irish News broke the scandal (all credit to them), a distraught parent contacted me.

She had been battling the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust (BHSCT) for years, begging them to take her concerns seriously. She felt dismissed, ignored and treated as if she were the problem. Her child deteriorated quickly.

I passed her to a reporter who couldn’t get the........

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