Totals on the victims’ lists reached 2,500 individuals and more than 900 businesses.

Having apologised to all of those victims — some of whom might now be thinking about civil actions against the police and the State — Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has to tackle the issue that we now know to be a toxic problem endemic in the running of Government departments: Accountability.

As we noted earlier this month: “Our failure to meet climate obligations, the unsatisfactory departure of two Garda commissioners, the persistent disappointment of our health service, and, especially, the huge overruns in the national children’s hospital are symptoms of a culture where systems fail but people, no matter how indifferent, survive.”

What will accountability for the huge holes in the YDP look like?

Mr Harris told the Oireachtas justice committee that 3,414 gardaí were associated with the failure to prosecute juvenile offenders and that of those, 184 officers were no longer in the force.

Divisional officers, says Mr Harris, will now consider what disciplinary proceedings might or might not be warranted for the more than 3,000 gardaí who are still serving.

Ordering disciplinary examinations of this scale, he rightly says, is an “extraordinary step”, but it is clearly the consequence of an extraordinary failure and therefore unavoidable if public confidence in the police service is to be restored.

The Garda Representative Association has lost no time in putting down a familiar marker about accountability.

It would be wrong to punish individual officers, since “systemic failings” were to blame.

This has been heard many times when flaws in both public and private organisations are revealed, and in some cases it would be a reasonable response.

But systems are designed, approved, operated, and scrutinised by people, so when the buck stops being passed, responsibility rests with the people, not a system that we are expected to believe invented itself and functioned untouched by human hand.

What is obvious is that the commissioner cannot be expected to lose almost a quarter of a force that is already severely stretched and, in any event, such a mass sacking would be unjustified.

In many cases, a slap on the wrists and a cooling of promotion prospects would be sufficient.

Police officers, like all of us, are not infallible.

Mistakes are made, paperwork vanishes, judgements can be shaky, and given the nature of the YDP, some factors will be well beyond the control of individual officers.

The public, however, will expect to see the errors that led to the most serious consequences for victims punished with the loss of jobs.

Accountability, like justice, must — at long last — be seen to be done.