The year 1985 was a memorable one for the 41-year-old, part-time postman, Michael Boyce. Not only did he indecently assault the 10-year-old daughter of a friend; he carried out an attempted rape of such brutality on a 57-year-old woman she was hospitalised for 12 days.

It was not his first assault on the older woman, but on the scale of savagery perpetrated on her over 11 years, it was probably the worst. At 2.00 a.m. on a January morning, alone but for her "pussy cats", she heard him trying to kick the door in. After escaping through a window, she started to run but he caught her and after dragging her some 50 yards through muck and cow dung back to the house, attempted to rape her in the little porch. When gardai arrived, she was standing there filthy and barefoot, her nylon stockings in her hand.

For 11 years from 1983 - the first offence for which Boyce was charged - until she was 65, he carried out a reign of terror on this vulnerable, rather simple woman who lived alone in a house hardly fit for human habitation. After attacks that left her with cuts, missing clumps of her hair and covered in mud, she would run to her close neighbours, appearing on one occasion with a slipper on one foot and a wellington boot on the other.

Although her police statements were sometimes rambling and confused, she was always adamant it was the same man who carried out the attacks. She focused on his voice, "that squeaky voice" that roared and shouted at her, a voice that reassured her one moment - "he said he didn't want to hurt me and wanted to keep me young" - and threatened to smash her brains out the next.

Ultimately Boyce would be convicted on six charges, including rape, attempted rape, indecent and sexual assault, carried out at one-, two-, three- and even four-year intervals. But the gaps in between were by no means oases of peace for the woman, who for nearly 17 years, was too frightened to sleep at night. The silence was constantly shattered by an intruder. One of the cats was hanged with wire on a tree in front of the house. All the windows were smashed, as well as the front door, the outside lights, even the slates on the roof.

Supportive neighbours had installed the outside lights for her and fitted iron bars on the downstairs windows. Some of them would spend the night in the house or stay out in the fields to try to trap the intruder. Telephones being scarce, they gave her a Citizens Band radio, later upgraded by gardai to a two-way intercom system. There were joint Garda and community patrols. For six months in 1992, gardai were stationed around the house during the hours of darkness. Searches that continued for hours yielded nothing.

Local people themselves were terrified, too fearful to go out walking after dark, careful never to leave children alone in their homes. A neighbour's windscreen was smashed with a rock and three men (two of whom fitted the profile of lonely bachelors and another who has since been charged with an unrelated offence) were pulled in for questioning.

AND ALL this time, Michael Boyce kept his nerve. Quietspoken and inoffensive to the point of invisibility, married with three children in an orderly household, it simply never occurred to gardai to place him under suspicion. He played Gaelic football for a local club, went on wholesome weekly bingo outings, and proved himself a satisfactory worker on the social employment scheme at a neighbouring church.

A priest who appeared twice as both support and character witness for Boyce, (once when the young girl, now 21, finally brought charges against him and again this week, when Boyce was up for sentencing on his latest convictions), noted that he was tidy in his work and was not the type to start rows or use bad language.

Boyce held his nerve to the point where it would be another 11 years after the brutal 1985 assaults before he would come to Garda attention and another three before he would see the inside of a prison cell.

In the end, it was his arrest in June 1996, on foot of the assault on the 10-year-old girl that first drew Garda interest. While in custody, he agreed to give a blood sample which was subsequently matched with semen taken from the older woman's body after more sophisticated tests in an English lab had shortened the odds against him - along with neighbours' evidence which contributed to his downfall.

Because he was still serving out a three-year term for the assault on the 10-year-old girl, observers confidently predicted that the previous conviction allied to his failure to plead guilty and his obvious lack of remorse along with the nature and duration of the attacks, meant he would get a further 15 years.

Instead, Mr Justice Quirke sentenced him to eight, backdating that to February 1999, despite the prosecuting counsel George Bermingham's contention that time already served was not in respect of these new convictions.

Indeed, far from demonstrating a desire to ease the ordeal for the victim, now aged 72, Boyce remained true to form by taking the fight to the bitter end once they came to court last October. (His previous conviction had gone all the way to the Court of Criminal Appeal, which upheld it.)

Though predicted to last a fortnight, the case took more than double that, the longest trial ever to emerge from the midlands. Dogged by bad weather and allegations of police misconduct, it is believed to be the first case in an Irish court where a major challenge was mounted to DNA evidence.

On top of that, some five days of the hearing were conducted in absence of the jury, arguing about the admissibility of evidence (subsequently thrown out amid allegations of assault by a garda) obtained while Boyce was in police custody.

A flavour of the exchanges can be gleaned from a scathing suggestion by defence counsel that a neighbour (one who had been particularly supportive and vigilant) fancied himself as "something of a snoop" or "an investigator". A flavour of the victim's circumstances can be gleaned from the suggestion in court that the owner of the house where she lived in appalling conditions, might have been involved in the attacks. He replied that he did have arguments with the woman who, he claimed, had no right to reside in the house. She had been living in a shed when she had been invited by his family to stay on a temporary basis at the house.

"She took it into her head she owned the house," he said.

In the end, for many, this is nothing less than the tragic story of a woman who simply never got a break, a woman whose entire life resurrects the horror of an Irish "golden age" when those who were "different" were simply put away in institutions or treated as little better than animals.

This is a woman who was just seven when her mother died and whose only other sibling, a boy, died in infancy. She was 21 when her father died in 1949, and she was sent - inexplicably - to a home for unmarried mothers to work as a domestic servant. From there she was taken out by a family with whom she remained for 15 years, as an unpaid general farm and domestic factotum and recipient of casual physical abuse.

Her next job was picking stones for another employer, who for six months, would drop her "home" to a shed, where she lived unbeknown to the property owner. Six months later, she started to live and work in the house, doing domestic chores for the owner, a man she described as the first person to show her any respect.

By now, she was 38 years old. Ten years later, when he died in the mid 1970s, she was alone and unprotected again.

By all accounts, she then became something of a recluse, lucky in her close neighbours, unlucky in the broader society's perception of her as quarrelsome and unreasonably happy to continue living in what many perceived as unhygienic conditions. One local man noted regretfully that gardai had considerable difficulty finding bed-and-breakfast accommodation for her in a nearby town during the trial, once her identity was revealed.

There is no doubt her initial allegations of rape in the early 1980s met with scepticism in some quarters. Some wondered that she was not more "distressed". She herself told the court of her anger at claims by some that she had been "a willing victim" of Michael Boyce and felt obliged to add that she "never encouraged him".

Some who have come to know her note she has "come out of her box" in recent times. For example, she was overheard tackling the priest who served as a character witness for Boyce, demanding to know why he felt Boyce needed support when he had a junior and senior counsel: "Why didn't you turn up to give character evidence for me?"

Such stories are told with affection. The fact is that for all the flinching and the scepticism, she has also found considerable support, not just from her own community where among certain families, a dinner place is automatically set for her when she calls. Individual gardai, politicians and taxi-drivers are also said to have given above and beyond the call of duty.

After a change of ownership of the property she occupied caused profound anxiety and resistance to change for several years, she has now settled into a bright little local authority house, well suited to her needs on the edge of town.

Whether she has found her niche just yet or the peace that has eluded her for most of her life, remains to be seen.