Victim of IRA attack takes first steps towards recovery

JUDITH BOYLAN was proud of her long hair. Now it's shorter than the style of Dolores O'Riordan of the Cranberries but longer than that of Sinead O'Connor in her skinhead days.

As well as cutting her hair and daubing her with paint the five male members of the IRA who abducted her from a taxi depot in Armagh where she had begun work on Wednesday night slapped her about. They hurt her and humiliated her.

At one stage of her ordeal she thought she was going to be killed. I asked them where they were taking me and one of them slapped me on the face and told me to shut up. He also put his knuckle to the side of my face, making me think it was a gun.

The men who tied her to a lamp-post at Mullacreevie Park also threatened an elderly man who wanted to come to her aid with an iron bar, she recounted.

Alter completing their business the five masked men stood back in bushes and observed their modern variation of tarring and feathering, as Judith cried in hysterics. When they left a young man untied her and phoned her father.

Yesterday Judith took the first steps to recover from her humiliation and hurt. "I went into town with some friends to have my ears pierced so I wouldn't look like a boy. My friends say I don't look like a boy, but I don't know.

"I had each ear pierced twice, and put silver studs and silver hoops in them."

The tight hair-cut to try and camouflage the bald patches on her scalp, the ear-piercing and the simple fact of walking into town were Judith's way of proving she wouldn't be cowed by five grown men.

"They think they can humiliate me, beating me like that and cutting my hair, well, I won't give them that pleasure."

Still, she says, she wouldn't walk into town unaccompanied. She had planned to celebrate a girlfriend's birthday at a disco tonight but that's been called off as well.

Judith says she was attacked because of a personal grudge against her by the IRA members. "It goes back a couple of years. They didn't like the company I keep but I've never been in trouble and they had no reason to beat me like that.

"They think they can choose who I hang about with, well, they can't," she added.

Her father, Martin, said that his daughter had the strength of character not to let anyone terrorise or "trample all over her".

"They can say anything about you, and you can't challenge them. They are right, and that's it," said Mr Boylan. He felt for his daughter, for her trauma, and for the fact that he knew she loved her long tresses. "My hair won't be long growing," Judith reassured him.