Chapter 2 addresses early Christian justifications for organised violence and demonstrates the inherent risk of links between religion, politics, and violence. It then examines early justifications for colonisation, where conceptions of non-Christian inferiority justified expansion and transatlantic slavery. In that context, the chapter assesses the emergence of closed institutions run by church and state actors as a key development in how social orders responded to those individuals and groups that were deemed a problem, based on religious and secular motivations. The chapter concludes by documenting the available evidence and estimates of historical abuses available for harms that can today be recognised, if controversially, as gross violations of human rights.

The three Irish monetary redress programmes this chapter explores are a study in contrasts. The industrial schools programme (the RIRB) began in 2003. The cost of that large programme prompted the 2014 advent of Caranua, an ancillary programme redressing the consequences of injurious care. Caranua was preceded in 2013 by a programme responding to structural injuries suffered by survivors of the Magdalene laundries. The differences in costs and size, and the difficulties confronted in delivering these Irish programmes provide valuable evidence for comparative analysis.