The Residential Institutions Redress Bill provides for a scheme of compensation in very particular circumstances. It applies to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatory schools. It is on these institutions that for most of the past three years attention has been focused because most allegations, and the most disturbing allegations, have been made about conditions in them up to the late 1960s. In addition, there is also the case that the Irish State generally and public institutions, in particular, carried a significant share of the responsibility, at least for a failure to detect abuse and to act. In the case of residential institutions of the kind referred to, publicly funded authorities had formal, and in most cases statutory responsibility, both for the placing of the children in the institutions and in regulating all aspects of the operation of the institutions. The State, through these public bodies, to a significant degree, replaced parents as the natural protector and care giver of the children concerned. This conferred on the State a special legal and moral responsibility for the welfare of those children. A similar responsibility did not apply in the case of children who continued to live in their homes and community.