RAPE VICTIM'S HORROR STORY
'To outsiders we were the perfect family ..but what my brother did to me at night was worse than hell'
A COURAGEOUS rape victim who watched a judge set her attacker free before getting a landmark payout from a jury this week today breaks her silence on her horror ordeal.
'Mary' is lifting the lid on a shocking childhood incest story to encourage other victims to speak out, and to expose a justice system in shambles.
The 32-year-old softly-spoken Dubliner was forced to sue her brother, she says, because a criminal court judge suspended every day of the evil paedophile's three-year sentence after a jury found him guilty of raping her over eight years.
This week she was vindicated when she was awarded a record payout for sexual abuse of €2.5 million, money she knows she will never see.
"The judge said my brother wouldn't have to serve any time in prison because he was an 'upstanding member of the community'," Mary says.
"It was never about money. I know I'll never see a penny of it."
Mary is the third youngest of a large family who grew up in a three bedroom council house in leafy suburb in south Dublin.
"To outsiders we were the perfect family. We were clean, we were fed, we were well spoken, we had manners. But what went on inside the walls of that house was worse than hell."
Mary was being raped by a brother eight years older than her in a tip-of-the-iceberg horror story that cannot be fully exposed for legal reasons.
Another brother has been convicted of raping a neighbour's child, and given a nine-year sentence.
Mary's abuse lasted until she was 12 or 13.
In that time, she says it was an open secret among her parents, a teacher, and even social workers, who were all made aware of the abuse. But nobody did anything to stop it.
"My mother's solution was to put a bolt on the girls' bedroom door," Mary explains.
"She stood by her boys through everything. I loved my mother. Maybe it's the Stockholm syndrome or whatever, but I hated her as well."
At 13, social workers called to the house after a sister tipped them off.
"They wanted me to tell them what was happening with my brother standing outside the sitting room door listening. I couldn't talk, I was so stressed, I was terrified of him."
At 15, Mary told a nun in the school she was being abused, but still nothing happened.
"The bell went. She had another class and she said she'd talk to me again and that was it. I thought it was all about to end but nothing happened.
"I didn't know if she'd gone to the gardai, and if my brother knew, and what was going to happen. I was a nervous wreck."
Her school copies were also full of poetry that revealed a childhood in turmoil. One line of a poem read: "What I thought was my brother was nothing but a monster, breaking my baby dreams, making them nightmare screams."
At 17, Mary went to the gardai herself and made a statement. It has taken 15 years to finally get some kind of recognition from the courts.
She can recall first being raped at the age of four in 1982 when she was changing out of her school uniform. The abuse happened twice to three times a week in the bedroom and in her brothers' bedroom.
"I used to sleep in the bottom bunk...The other girls would be in bed asleep when he came in. He'd just get into bed beside me, take off my PJs and my pants so I'd wake up in the morning practically naked in the bed. He'd be wearing maybe only a t-shirt and no pants."
"I'd be crying and it would hurt. I remember afterwards always feeling sore and uncomfortable and dirty."
Mary was also petrified of her brother's violence towards her.
"He'd punch me in the face in the chest. I remember one time an ambulance came and took away my dad because my brother had split my dad's head open, my mother had to be carted off too because she had palpitations, my sister had to go to hospital because she was fainting after what had happened.
"I stayed home and cleaned my father's blood off the walls. That was how violent my brother was."
Harming
By the age of 12, or 13, when she had sex education classes, and she realised "the gravity" of what was going on, what was right and what was wrong, and the abuse finally stopped.
But the mental toll has continued.
Mary's arms are covered in scars caused by self harming - "Cutting myself gave me a sense of relief," she explains.
She has made multiple suicide attempts - attempting to overdose, hang herself, and slit her wrists.
"When I was 18 I tried to jump off Dun Laoghaire pier, I just couldn't cope with the thoughts, the flashbacks. I was rescued by the lifeguards and sent to a psychiatric unit. I've had 11 admissions over the years.
"From the age of four or five I started having these nightmares about death. The nightmares were sometimes about three men being hanged, sometimes about me being shot and buried and rotting away. I'd have dreams about seeing maggots over my bones and me rotting away."
Mary does not believe she will ever be able to work, or have a relationship with a man because of the legacy of the abuse.
"I'm too busy trying to survive to work, or do a course, just getting from one day to the next takes up every waking minute. I've had a few boyfriends, but when it comes to sex, all I can see is my brother's face. I can't have sex, I'm too ashamed, embarrassed and guilty about what should be the most natural thing in the world."
Mary wants to encourage other victims to come forward, but says it is not easy.
"The justice system is completely backwards. In court my brother had the right to refuse to get up in the stand and answer anything. But I had to get up so many times, I've lost count, to tell a room full of strangers exactly what he did to me.
"The hardest part was having him found guilty but not have to spend a day in prison because the judge said he was an upstanding member of the community.
"I was so shocked I actually spat at the judge. I regret that now, it was vulgar, but I can't even put words to what it felt like."
Mary says she cannot understand how the same justice system can regard the same crime so differently.
"A judge in the criminal court decides my brother doesn't have to spend a day in prison, but a jury in the High Court makes my case a landmark one in legal history."
Mary, who is now on paper a millionaire, spent years sleeping rough when her case was going on in the criminal court.
On the streets she found shelter in phone boxes and on public benches because she was too scared to stay in the homeless hostels.
"I was afraid to sleep there because of the junkies and the drunks," she says.
"I was happier on the streets. I have great friends but I couldn't abuse their friendship by staying too long."
Her big regret is that she never sat the Leaving Cert because she was homeless by her final year of school. She is completely estranged from all of her family, except for one sister.
"Every time I had a court date, my family would come to sit alongside him taking his side, eyeballing me. Brothers, sisters, parents, nieces, cousins - the whole shebang, they'd all turn up on his side.
"Everyone hated me.The worst part is that my family know what he's capable of - one of my sisters actually walked in on him one time abusing me, but they have all stood by him, and what haunts me most is they let him near my nieces and nephews."
Her brother is now 40 years old, but what worries her most is that he is around children.
"I saw him throw his own son across the kitchen. He should not be allowed near children after what he did to me.
"I lost my education, my family, everything. Every gap in the system you can think of I fell through."
She says she has had to come to regard her parents as dead through therapy because it's easier to deal with those emotions than accept they could have let her suffer the way they did.
"I don't even have a copy of my Victim Impact Statement from the time of the criminal case because I don't have any possessions from that time, I'd have had to carry everything around with me.
Defence
"The only good thing is I don't take drink or drugs because I was too scared of the problems I had."
In the High Court last week, she reacted to the news that she had just been awarded the highest compensation payout in the history of the State for an abuse survivor with "a fit of the giggles" she admits.
"I thought I'd get €10 to €15,000. It doesn't matter. I don't even know where my brother lives. He knows where I live though."
And for the first time in years, none of my family were in court. "My brother didn't even put up a defence. It was the easiest of all my court appearances.There was no defence so I wasn't even cross-examined."
Even if any members of her family wanted to apologise for the crimes they turned a blind eye to when she was a child, she couldn't accept one after everything she's been through she says.
"It would never happen anyway," she says. "I just hope for future generations that it has stopped."
"I was let down by the Eastern Health Board, by the State, by the school. The victims of the Church, the institutions, are offered counselling and compensation, but within the family you're still isolated as a victim in this country.
But Mary says she's not interested in suing the State. "I've had 15 years of court appearances. I'm just so relieved it's over."