THE woman whose uncle spent five months in prison after admitting years of sexual abuse has spoken of a nightmare of rape and coercion when she was a young teenager.
She has also spoken of years of beatings from her mother after she revealed abuse by her uncle - her mother's brother - when she was just six years.
She says she is angry and dismayed at how the legal system dealt with her case, first in charging her uncle with indecent assault instead of rape and, secondly, in reducing his sentence on appeal last week from five years to six months.
"How would judges and barristers feel if it was their daughters or granddaughters who had been abused for years and whose abusers ended up with a six month sentence?" she asked.
Her ordeal occurred in a town in the south east when she was six years old and her uncle, then aged 14, began to take her into the fields to abuse her.
When she told her family what was happening the abuse stopped, but she paid a price for telling.
"I remember going to bed feeling, it's going to stop, everything's going to be OK again. From that day on my mother started beating me. My life became hell."
As time went on, she herself became disruptive. This alienated her further from people. "The message I got was, you are not worth anything." Nobody ever mentioned the abuse.
When she was 12, her uncle began to rape her. Sometimes this would happen in his car and sometimes in her bedroom while her mother and her uncle's girlfriend were downstairs. She was raped, buggered and orally assaulted, often after the others came in from the pub and her uncle excused himself and went upstairs to her room.
If she did not go out to the car to him or was not in her room when he went up to her, he was extra rough and made the assaults extra painful, she says. When she heard his car pulling up outside in the afternoons she would run all over the house but realise there was nowhere to hide.
She also says she believes her mother must have known that her uncle was doing something to her, given his previous history and his habit of going upstairs for 15 minutes at a time.
On one occasion she decided to stay up in the hope of avoiding being raped "because I thought that if I stayed downstairs near my mother I'd be safe." Her mother told her to go to bed but instead she went into the living room. Her uncle followed her in and raped her. She could hear her mother laughing with his girlfriend in the kitchen. She wanted to scream but she was afraid she would be blamed.
"The message I seemed to get was, shut up about it, we just don't want to know, and that if I did come out and say he's doing it again, that they would say I provoked it in some way.
After the rapes, she would have to get up in the morning and go to school. She remembers having a panic attack on the way to school on one occasion.
After four years of abuse she began to lock the bedroom door because she could no longer stand the pain or the distress and was afraid she would kill herself. Her uncle got married shortly afterwards and left the district.
But the effects of the abuse and its circumstances - in her room, late at night when she should have been safe and asleep - stayed with her. "I never felt safe with people. I was afraid of the dark. Getting into a shower I would close my eyes afraid that when I opened them there would be somebody there. At night I would be in sheer terror. I would wake up suddenly, thinking there was somebody at the end of my bed, waiting to rape me.
She began to drink heavily. She thought she was worth nothing, she says. She believed that if her mother had not intervened she must not have loved her and that if that was so, then she could not be worth loving.
She had a baby when she was 21. Suddenly, she says, she found herself with a human being whom she loved and would die for, something which she did not feel she had ever experienced herself. But she also found herself pushing the baby away, and drinking.
After two years of this, she decided to try to make a new life. Because of continuing problems in her relationship with her child, she went to see a social worker.
Her dealings with the social worker had an extraordinary effect on her. "It was the first time ever that anyone had said, `How are you? How do you feel?' He was the first person who ever cared, about what my life was like.
She decided to go to the Garda about what had been done to her. She found gardai extremely helpful. "I made a statement, he was arrested and he admitted most of what I said in the statement and some things I hadn't remembered." She was dismayed that the Director of Public Prosecutions decided the man should be charged with indecent assault instead of rape.
When she had to make her first court appearance she was afraid she would go to pieces when she saw her uncle. But that feeling disappeared when he walked into the courtroom holding his infant child. "I just looked at him and thought, he's using kids again to protect him. It just gave me the courage to do what I had to do."
When the trial came up in June, she was asked to make a victim impact statement. Making, that statement helped her.
"I remember him sitting in the, court and the judge asking for him to be taken into custody. I, remember the handcuffs clicking on him and I was really proud of myself because of what I had done against the odds, the family and the system."
When he appealed the sentence, and got it reduced from five years to six months, and was freed, initially I just went into shock about it. The next morning I remember getting up for breakfast and I remember sitting there at the table with my son and the tears running down my face".
Going to the Garda has cost her and her son their relationship with her family, who preferred to believe her uncle's story that she, a 12 year old girl, was having an affair with him.
This, she says, has been traumatic for her son who cannot understand why they no longer see his relatives.
Nevertheless, she is glad that she made the complaint and stood over it. She had to do this - she believes, to be able to rescue her life. She is now going to college and looking forward to building a good future for herself and her child.
She also hopes the case might lead to changes in the system, including a right to legal representation for abuse victims from the time they make a statement. Such a representative, she says, should be able to challenge the basis on which decisions are made by the DPP.