Of the tens of thousands of words in the six-volume Farrelly commission report, it would be easy to miss the short paragraph buried away in volume 4, under the heading: Grace’s attachment to her plastic keys and the question of punishment or discipline.

Amid the more than 2,000 pages of dense legalese, expository who-said-what-to-whom narrative and Beckettian obsession with process, it offers a rare and almost painfully fleeting glimpse of the humanity of the girl whose story has come to symbolise Ireland’s failings towards some of its most vulnerable citizens.

“When Grace came to live with Family X in February, 1989, aged ten, she came in the clothes she wore, holding a set of plastic play keys. Twenty years later, when Grace was moved ... into a residential placement at the age of 30, she was holding a similar set of keys. Over the intervening period, Grace was rarely parted from her plastic keys.”

Elsewhere in the chapter, a nephew of the X family says simply that her toy keys “were everything to her”. The nephew remembered how “she would take a little fit of laughing for no reason”.

“Grace” is the pseudonym given to a child with profound intellectual and physical disabilities who was placed in an unvetted foster home at 10 and remained there for 20 years, to all intents and purposes forgotten about by State services. No social worker saw her for six years. She stopped going to school. She only went to her day-care centre sporadically.

A commission of inquiry into what happened to her,

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