All the professionals who have come into contact with Sophia McColgan speak of her in terms approaching awe. While in the circumstances this might be unsurprising from the specialists in child sex abuse, it is more exceptional from lawyers hardened to the vicissitudes of human nature.
Yet even they describe her as a remarkable young woman. "We were vastly impressed by her," said one member of her legal team. "She's a very remarkable lady, and great dignity with it."
"A most impressive young girl," was the verdict of another.
"The most notable aspect of the girl was that her main concern was for everyone else," said Mr Owen Carty, her solicitor, who described how, in the heat of the most intensive negotiations about the settling of what was her case, her preoccupation was with equitable treatment for her siblings.
Dr Alice Swann, one of the child sex abuse experts, spoke in similar terms while giving evidence. "She's a most impressive lady," she said. "She has a lot of insight into her situation. She's exceptional.
"In all my years of dealing with abused children there are in my mind three or four cases who have given us a window into the world of the abused child. She is one. Many give us glimpses. We have to learn from her and her like."
Giving evidence about her psychiatric state, Prof Ivor Browne said the fact that she could manage her affairs to the extent that she did was the result of very courageous effort. Dr Suzanne Sgroi from the US also spoke of her courage.
A slight, soft-spoken woman, courteous to an exceptional degree, she gives credit for this courage to her maternal grandparents. "My granny Bereen is a very courageous lady," she said. "It's from her I have my courage. Her mother was buried in the Tricolour; she was a republican. The courage comes from that side of the family."
She thought constantly of her grandparents. "I love them to pieces," she told The Irish Times during the case. "I'm very happy for them," she said yesterday. "They saved us. We had a little thread all along of someone who loved us and cared about us. She tried edge by edge to help us as much as she could."
Her brother Gerry shares her attachment. "The first thing I'm doing is putting in a new bathroom for Granny Bereen," he said yesterday. "One she can walk into and sit down in. She's not well."
Neighbours of the Bereens also speak highly of them. "That man is a saint," said a local shopkeeper of Mr Bereen, describing both his religious devotion and his charity.
At the beginning of the trial Sophia described an idyllic childhood with her grandparents while her parents were living in England. The three eldest children were loved and well cared for. They had a puppy and played in the fields after school.
When their parents returned to Ireland and bought the farm and derelict cottage they lived for a time with the Bereens, and there was great tension between Joe McColgan and his in-laws. He started abusing the children at this time, using the need to renovate the cottage as an excuse to get them out of the house. They moved into the cottage in 1979.
But the children continued to visit their grandparents, sometimes staying with them. When Joe McColgan finally threw Sophia out of the house in the middle of the night in 1991 it was to her grandparents' house she fled across the fields in her nightdress, clutching her college books. It was from there that she completed her degree.
Clearly these grandparents provided the "little thread" of sanity which allowed her to cling to her commitment to finish her education and, in her own mind, acquire the status which would allow her to confront her father.
In college she is remembered as very quiet and conscientious. "She was a very nice gentle sort of girl, a very angelic sort of girl. She was very quietly spoken, very pleasant. No one imagined what was going on," said one teacher.
Another remembers that her father always collected her from college on a motorcycle. "In retrospect, it was a bit odd, but at the time it just seemed over-protective," he said. They could have had no idea that he would take her to his mountain farm and sexually abuse her.
In a conversation over lunch during the trial Dr Suzanne Sgroi tried to reassure her that her intense focus on her education as a mechanism to deal with the abuse was a valid one even if, as she said in evidence, it was the product of a "cognitive error".
"You dealt with it in a way which did not involve hurting anyone else," she told her.
This is in marked contrast to Joe McColgan, who used an allegation that he had been abused as a child as an excuse for his treatment of his own children.
In fact, if anything, Sophia has been made more sensitive to the suffering of others by her experience, and her preoccupation is that it should be turned to the benefit of other people.
"I hate all violence," she told The Irish Times during the trial. "When Dunblane happened I was so upset I cried every day for about three months."
She and her siblings could have pursued their case in private, but chose to do it in public and face all the publicity that would ensue out of an awareness that sexual abuse thrives on silence.
"The silence is gone, there is no more silence now," she said yesterday. "We did it for all the victims.
"I hope to help other people in the future, if people could even get a glimpse of one day of our lives. Maybe I'll do a psychology degree. I want to become a better person as a result of this."
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