Contemporary narratives of the abuses suffered by generations of women and children in Irish institutions are often framed through a reductive language of media revelation and discovery. Politicians, academics and commentators often speak of these abuses as ‘secrets’ wrenched from a ‘dark’ and ‘hidden Ireland’ and revealed to an unknowing public by a dynamic Irish journalism in the 1990s. As a result, Ireland’s so-called ‘decade of scandal’ has been wrapped in a pervasive narrative mythology that simultaneously absolves Irish journalism for its failure to inquire—by describing these abuses and the institutions themselves as ‘hidden’—and Irish society, by claiming that ‘no one knew’. Using the Industrial and Reformatory School system and the Magdalene Laundry system as cases studies, this analysis directly challenges this conceptualisation, arguing that the institutions and their abusive and carceral nature were never hidden. An analysis of thousands of pieces of reportage in the pages of Ireland’s three main national newspapers—the Irish Times, Irish Independent and Irish Press—between 1920 and 2003 reveals that these institutional systems were normalised and legitimised through consensus narrative frames that presented abuse as charity and incarceration as moral rescue and a valued social service. Examining how these newspapers shaped, contested, and sustained the consensus institutional narrative it helped to embed is the primary goal of this study. This dissertation traces the evolution in reporting that shifted the above episodes of historical injustice from a legitimising consensus frame to one of controversy, ultimately facilitating their reporting as national ‘scandals’ in the 1990s. It examines this evolution and the journalistic practices that framed the public narrative around these issues across the twentieth century. Consequently, this is a study that integrates media history with media analysis.