AS the New Year approaches, the Island can prepare itself to make a fresh start and to make a fresh assault on the problems which beset it. It should come as a substantial relief that those problems no longer include the historical child abuse investigation – in the sense that it has been declared closed.

However, grateful as the Island should be that such an unpleasant, regrettable and utterly extraordinary episode has officially ended, no one should imagine that it can be forgotten or that the record has been magically expunged.
First and foremost, the victims of proven abuse must remain in all our minds. Closing the files will not have wiped awful memories.

Secondly, there is another category of victim whose members have been denied what is now called closure. These are the complainants who have not had the satisfaction of seeing anyone brought to book because the available evidence was highly unlikely to lead to successful prosecutions.

The anger of these people is understandable and will not be slow to abate, though it is impossible to resist the conclusion that their hopes were raised to impossibly high levels by a police investigation which, on many levels, was fatally flawed.

We now know that as well as misleading many who complained of having been abused, the investigation developed along lines which ultimately proved to be absurd. It is also evident that the media strategy adopted led to a feeding frenzy by reckless elements of the national and international press and to the Island’s reputation being unjustly dragged through the mire.

Just in case anyone requires reminding, although crimes were most certainly perpetrated at Haut de la Garenne, there was no murder and there were no buried bodies, let alone a shred of evidence for satanic abuse or top-level conspiracy. This, alas, did not prevent the publication in the UK and elsewhere of the wildest fictions fuelled by lurid speculation encouraged by inflammatory press briefings.

In monetary terms, the cost of the investigation already stands at many millions of pounds and will undoubtedly rise.

That said, cash is a side issue. The truly serious damage occasioned by this distressing and unsavoury chapter in our history has been suffered by people – the many residents whose good names were so spectacularly traduced along with the Island’s, and the victims of abuse, both those who have seen justice done and those who, it must now be recognised, are most unlikely to share that experience.