Posing for a group photograph inside Dublin’s Buswells Hotel, survivors of child sexual abuse inflicted by Bill Kenneally look sombre.“Smile lads,” a relative says to them, lightheartedly.“Oh,” says Paul Walsh, one of those abused as a child by the Waterford basketball coach. “We forget this is a happy day.”Walsh was among a small group of Kenneally’s many victims, now adults, who pushed heavily for an inquiry into what they alleged was a cover-up of the sex abuser’s crimes. A commission of investigation chaired by Judge Michael White was established in July 2018.In a long-awaited report published on Tuesday, the judge found a serious dereliction of duty by senior Garda officers who had learned Kenneally sexually abused a boy in the late 1980s. White also criticised the South Eastern Health Board’s failure to follow through on abuse complaints.“Vindication” was the primary sentiment expressed by survivors Walsh, Jason Clancy, Colin Power, Barry Murphy, Kevin Keating and Simon O’Toole, who gathered before the media at the Dublin city hotel following the report’s publication.They had already seen Kenneally, a member of a well-known Fianna Fáil family, convicted for the crimes against them and others between 1979 and 1990. But they discovered through the court process that gardaí knew about the abuse as far back as the mid 1980s.“We knew there was so much more to this than just Bill Kenneally on his own,” said Clancy, whose 2012 complaint to gardaí of abuse between 1984 and 1988 triggered an investigation. Clancy said his name was among seven Kenneally gave to gardaí in 1987 on a list of boys he admitted abusing. His abuse of Clancy continued for another six months after that.Power, who was abused during the 1980s, said all of the men’s fears arising from the 2016 prosecution have been proven true by the report. It has been a “traumatic” experience for the men and their families to get to this point in their fight. Now, he feels vindicated and relieved to have these findings in the open.“This guy was left to abuse children even though people went to the gardaí about him,” he said, referencing a boy’s 1985 report to gardaí of abuse by Kenneally. “When we set out to do this [inquiry] it was to find the truth: who knew what when – and why they did nothing. We know that now, so there is no doubt [it is] vindication,” he said.Keating, who was sexually assaulted as a teen by Kenneally in 1987, said it was difficult to once again listen to “all the wrongs” that have occurred. But the publication of the report marks an “extremely happy day”. “For me, with the vindication, it is a happy day. It is now finished. The monster which is Bill Kenneally is in prison,” he said.But alongside the relief expressed, there was anger over the short time frame between the survivors seeing the report on Monday and it being published the following day.O’Toole commended the commission chair for doing a “fantastic job”. White told them he would secure justice for them, he said, and “he did in all fairness to him”.Giving a sense of the trauma many of the survivors have endured, O’Toole said he has had nervous breakdowns and been admitted to mental health institutions and addiction centres.Clancy said survivors struggled through the inquiry, during which they had to relive their abuse. “With me it was about 350 sexual assaults,” he said, adding that he has spent months of the last couple of years in a mental health institution having suffered breakdowns. “It took 8½ years to drag the truth out ... There is a human side behind this. Our childhoods were absolutely destroyed and taken from us,” he said.The State and the Fianna Fáil party should apologise to victims, he said. “We are owed an apology. We want an apology.”