"The abuse of tens of thousands of Irish children is perhaps the greatest human rights failure in the history of the state," Amnesty executive director Colm O'Gorman said at the launch of new research by the human rights watchdog.
"Children were tortured. They were brutalized; beaten, starved and abused. There has been little justice for these victims.
"Those who failed as guardians, civil servants, clergy, gardai (Irish police) and members of religious orders have avoided accountability," O'Gorman said.
Mainly Catholic Ireland has been rocked by a series of clerical child abuse scandals revealed by landmark judicial investigations that found horrific abuse had been covered up for decades.
O'Gorman, who was himself a clerical abuse victim, said the abuse described in a judicial report into childcare institutions from 1936 onwards meets "the legal definition of torture under international human rights law".
The Amnesty research document "In Plain Sight", which was launched by Children's Minister Frances Fitzgerald, was accompanied by a poll which showed the overwhelming majority of Irish people believe that wider society has a responsibility for what happened.
The watchdog's poll found that 85 percent of people believe "individual members of society should have done more to protect these children".
O'Gorman said the abuse investigations revealed what happened to children but not why.
"This abuse happened, not because we didn't know about it, but because many people across society turned a blind eye to it.
"The research reveals that the true scandal is not that the system failed these children; but that there was no functioning system.
"Instead children were abandoned to a chaotic, unregulated arrangement where no one was accountable for failures to protect and care for them," O'Gorman said.
The most recent judicial report in July sparked outrage in the Irish government and led to a clash with the Vatican.
The report into more than a decade of abuse by priests in the southern Cloyne diocese triggered an unprecedented attack by Prime Minister Enda Kenny who called the church's behaviour "absolutely disgraceful" in a parliamentary speech.
He said the church's inability to deal with the affair properly showed a culture of "dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism" at the Vatican.
Earlier this month the Vatican denied it had tried to block inquiries into alleged abuses by clerics in Cloyne.
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