Cruelty case: Eldest daughter says was told to ‘go back’ to mother

The eldest daughter of a woman jailed in Galway for cruelty and neglect has said social services told her to “go back” to her mother.

In an interview on Classic Hits 4FM, the girl, whose mother was sentenced to four years in prison, told the Niall Boylan at Night Show the State did not act properly in her case. "They told me to go back."

She said the family was not originally from Galway and there had been problems in a previous location.

“Family people there reported it constantly to the social workers – my grandmother even did a few times. Social workers came out to the house, but my mother, being so convincing and vindictive, she just . . . I don’t know,” the 19-year-old said.

Recalling her mother’s temper, she said that when she was six years old, her mother had told her she wanted nothing to do with her, called her “the height of names”, and told her to pack her bag and go to the front door and wait for the social workers.

“Now we lived in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t even know what a social worker was, six years of age, that was the sort of thing she would have done.” She said the charges brought against her mother were only 42 out of thousands of things she had done.

“If we had to go all the way back to where we are from, we would be doing this court hearing for years,” she said.

Shocked

It was “so normal” to her and her siblings, she laughs that people are shocked at reports of it.

“To us it’s not that bad, she had us thinking all of that was normal, until I came to secondary school and I started saying things to my best friend.”

She said her mother could never admit to wrongdoing, has not attempted to talk to them, nor had anything to do with them for years. The sentence imposed on their mother gave her and her siblings justice, she said.

“If she didn’t get sentenced, basically, one of us would’ve killed her,” the teenager said.

“If I got a phone call tomorrow, saying that my mother committed suicide in prison, I wouldn’t shed a tear, that is how much I hate her.”

But, the teenager said, she thanked her mother for her cruelty in her victim impact statement and wouldn’t change what she did to her, because she had fantastic foster parents.

“As are the rest of the kids’ foster parents – I adore them,” she added.