A jury has found a woman guilty of the attempted murder of her eight-year-old daughter four years ago.
The girl sustained more than 70 stab wounds during the attack by her mother, a Russian national, who also attempted to strangle her, the jury heard.
The woman, who cannot be named to protect her daughter’s right to anonymity, had denied the charge before the Central Criminal Court sitting in Limerick.
On Friday afternoon, a jury of seven men and five women told Judge Kerida Naidoo they all agreed the mother was “guilty” of the girl’s attempted murder.
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The woman cried in court as she was led into custody. She will be sentenced on March 2nd.
The trial heard the defendant had told gardaí following her arrest that she was “out of my mind” when she attacked her daughter.
The court was shown a DVD recording of the girl’s interview with gardaí in which she told them her mother had stood over her in her bed on the morning in question, and told her: “I’m going to kill you and then I’m going to kill myself, because that is what’s best.”
The girl said her mother used a “big kitchen knife”. She said her mother “dragged” her into an en suite bathroom and continued stabbing her in her stomach, chest, back and legs.
“When she was dragging me to the bathroom, I looked back and the bed was covered in blood,” the girl told gardaí.
The girl, who was not cross-examined by the accused’s defence barrister, said her mother told her she had feared people were going to take her away from her and that it was “best” if they both died.
A witness called by the prosecution, UK consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Richard Church, gave evidence last week saying, in his opinion, the defendant could not rely on a defence that she was insane at the time.
Dr Church said the defendant had allegedly concealed the knife used in the attack and had locked the door to the room where the attack occurred. These were, Dr Church said, “behaviours indicating that she knew that what she was about to do was wrong”.
The court heard the defendant had previously accessed psychiatric hospital services in her native Russia where she was diagnosed with bipolar active disorder.
In March 2022, six months before the attack on the girl, the defendant and her daughter fled the war in Ukraine to Ireland, where she stayed in a number of temporary accommodation premises.
Dr Church believed the defendant was suffering with an “adjustment disorder in addition to a personality disorder” at the time of the attack, which “manifested in a severe response to her circumstances”.
Following her arrest, the defendant told gardaí she stabbed her daughter multiple times with a kitchen knife and tried to strangle her. She said she had been having suicidal thoughts.
The defendant said she had become paranoid that others thought she was a poor mother and that Tusla, the child and family agency, would come and take her daughter.
“Chaos took over my mind,” she told gardaí.
Defence witness Dr Paul O’Connell, a consultant forensic psychiatrist at the Central Mental Hospital, told the court he believed the defendant was in the throes of a mental disorder at the time and that she was not aware that what she was doing was wrong.
The accused’s senior counsel, Mark Nicholas, told the jury that if it accepted the evidence of Dr O’Connell, they could consider that the accused was not guilty by reason of insanity.
The jury disagreed and took just more than eight hours to deliver its unanimous guilty verdict.
