She has a lot on her hands. Yet she appears more interested in pursuing a vendetta against the Catholic Church, in which she once worked as a theologian and presumably fully engaged member.

Life experience has led Zappone to adopt positions far removed from what she once presumably supported and taught. She has many issues with the Church and she is not slow to air them when opportunity presents.

The Tuam mother and baby home controversy was the issue she chose to air during her encounter with Pope Francis last weekend. A sad and emotive subject that resonates deeply with so many people, whose families’ oral archives may hold stories of aunts or grand-aunts abandoned to such institutions until their unwanted babies were taken from them for adoption to which they gave, at best, constrained consent.

I know of one such story in its details, timeline, and consequences. I know also that wider interests often capitalise on private tragedies to pursue specific agendas of their own — political, ideological or, frankly, with compensation in mind.

If Katherine Zappone and others, who have tried to refocus a pastoral, family-themed papal visit exclusively on the abuse issue, really care so much about victims of abuse, they would be addressing the needs of the vastly greater number of victims who suffer within their own homes with at least the same vigour as they bring to cases involving clergy and religious.

The vast majority of abuse victims, and by that I mean a figure frequently given as 97%, suffer at the hands of family members and close friends, not infrequently underage molesters.

Abuse is abuse and its effects are not worse because the perpetrator is a cleric. If protecting children begins, as it should, with identifying risk, then Catholic priests are among the cohorts of least risk to children in today’s Ireland.

For two reasons. Firstly, there are robust safeguarding measures in operation across all dioceses and parishes in the country and secondly there is the false perception that priests are more likely to be sexually predatory than other cohorts of adults likely to have contact with children and this creates heightened parental wariness.

Zappone should focus instead on the tragic stories of children such as ‘Grace’ and ‘Mark’, fostered children who, despite “credible stories of abuse”, according to Hiqa, were forced by child protection agency Tusla to stay in unsafe accommodation.

Where is the justice for them and other victims of domestic abuse? They may get justice eventually through the courts through their own exertions. Justice not necessarily redress. That’s how it is.

On the other hand, the Church can be pursued at various levels for compensation. Along with the State, the Church has resources so this particular inequity can’t be mended. As one victim wryly put it: “I was unfortunate enough to be abused but not fortunate enough to be abused by a priest.”

That means that a minister for children should prioritise appropriate and early interventions when problems are flagged and ensure the State provides the means by which to do so effectively.

There are some 7,000 children currently waiting for psychological appointments. What is she doing about this? What is she doing to address the underlying causes? Do the children living, year after year, in direct provision keep her awake at night?

What is she doing to remedy the shortcomings of Tusla, the child protection agency? In investigations into the false abuse charges against Sergeant Maurice McCabe, Hiqa found evidence of “inadequate management oversight” and “poor record-keeping”.

What are the implications of that for vulnerable children? More pointedly, in relation to Zappone’s words to the Pope, where is accountability?

Strictures from Hiqa or programmes such as RTÉ Investigates don’t materialise into any exaction of justice. Inquires don’t ask for heads. They usually indicate that the problem is systemic and recommendations usually mean more staff, not better ones.

And when the minister is challenged, she tells us it is a matter for Tusla itself or that she can’t comment on individual cases. Where is her own sense of responsibility and accountability as minister for children?

How odd that the children she most wants to talk about are dead children? Children apparently buried without dignity or ceremony. It touches a nerve.

The kind of thing that points beyond itself to a sad and bleak social landscape of poverty and heartbreak. A social landscape not unique to Ireland. A social landscape that belongs more to a time than a place.

Other countries went through it. In our nearest neighbour, Britain, who gave us the workhouses that became the mother and baby homes in towns such as Tuam, those things were already passing into the history of the Victorian era.

A heart-jerking disclosure that tiny infants, some premature, and toddlers, who presumably had no one to adopt them, were laid to rest without the presence of their traumatised mothers in ad hoc graves is deeply affecting.

They were the victims of tuberculosis and whooping cough, measles and meningitis, which took children from many families in early 20th-century Ireland. In towns and villages, these illnesses spread with devastating effect.

In institutions, the effect was catastrophic. This was the era of sequestered tuberculosis infirmaries, of decimating epidemics, a pre-vaccine era.

This was an era when stillborn, unbaptised babies were buried on family land or in ‘cillins’ which were common plots of unmarked burial ground perhaps not very unlike the Tuam enclosure.

Katherine Zappone wants the Pope to offer redress for Tuam. The order that ran the Tuam home was the Bons Secours and while answerable to the bishop as a religious congregation, they were answerable to the State as providers of maternal peri-natal care.

Tuam, like Bessborough in Cork and Castlepollard in Westmeath, is of its time and era. They belong to our history now, not our present.

Like our famine graveyards, they should be marked and remembered because cruelty and poverty are not pegged to any time or place. These places are our Dachaus, our dungeons, the dark places that find a form in every age. We forget them at our peril.

Katherine Zappone wants the Pope to pay for a fitting memorial for the Tuam site. Not as a gesture but as a moral obligation. He is going to reflect on what she said to him.

There is a lot he needs to reflect on, but someone needs to give him a history lesson first. And the facts. Contrary to what a columnist in another newspaper wrote in an opinion piece the day after the Pope’s visit, there is no “proof that 700 babies were buried in a septic tank”.

The septic tank in question was decommissioned in 1935 and filled with rubble. An unspecified number of tiny skeletons were found in another buried container with individual chambers.

There is no evidence that that container, which appeared to be intended for disposal of waste water or sewage, was ever used for that or any other purpose. Until it became a tomb.

The Tuam inquiry left other unanswered questions. There was no definitive dating of the remains. This is significant on a site with a long history.

If Katherine Zappone can get the Pope to fund a memorial, it may be regarded as an implicit acceptance of liability and, then, as she has already indicated on radio, that opens the way for further redress for survivors.

In legal monetary terms, the Vatican is no ‘straw man’, but, in personal terms, neither is this Pope. It will be interesting to see what he does next.