GERALDINE Gilligan sat at her dining room table yesterday wearing her jacket and smoking Silk Cut Purple with a steady hand as she talked about her relationship with her husband from whom she is separated.
"All this is after making us closer," she said, smiling. "When you feel the whole country is against you it brings you closer to each other."
On her right was a photograph "of a younger John Gilligan, his hair still black, with his eldest daughter in her confirmation outfit. On her left a mirror inscribed with the couple's names, "John and Ger".
There are empty spaces where appliances used to be in the seven bedroom house at Jessbrook, near the Kildare village of Enfield. The sheriffs left her with "the bare essentials", she said. A mobile phone was on the table in front of her and before we sat down she pointedly turned some legal documents face down.
She allowed a reporter and photographer from The Irish Times through the CCTV controlled gates of Jessbrook, saying afterwards that she did so only because we rang the bell instead of scaling the wall.
In the room, a black and white screen shows the front gate, the picture swaying slightly as the camera moves in the wind. "This is my home and I'm staying put," she said.
"I don't do anything for income at the moment," she said when asked what she was living on. But she was not claiming dole. Was she living on her savings? "No comment."
She heard news of yesterday's High Court judgment after a phone call from her cousin. "I didn't know it was on." She said she was "very happy, obviously", but she thought she might "have a problem getting my stuff back".
Last July, members of the Garda National Drugs Unit and the Garda Bureau of fraud Investigations seized financial records from the house. Events planned for the brand new £3 million equestrian centre were cancelled.
John Gilligan phones her fairly regularly from prison, she said. "He knows he didn't do anything wrong. I believe it's just a holding charge." She has not been to see him and does not intend to visit him in Britain. "He asks how am I. Am I getting any roughing and how are the children?"
She said she believed her husband will return to Ireland, "As soon as he's out, he'll be straight over to sort out his own affairs." She does not know if John Gilligan is following events in his absence, but thinks his brother sends him copies of Irish newspapers.
She said she was in the house the day the murdered journalist Veronica Guerin called to talk to her husband.
Ms Guerin afterwards alleged that John Gilligan assaulted her punching her in the face and tearing her shirt to see if she was wired. After her murder, the assault case against Mr Gilligan was thrown out.
Asked yesterday whether she had ever seen or spoken to Ms Guerin, Geraldine Gilligan said she had not. She gets threats, she said. "Cowards - they write to you, tell you your water's poisoned and your dogs are gonna be poisoned. They tell me I'm gonna be shot if I'm in the wrong place. Do you think the police would help me?"
She refused to be photographed. "No photographs of me. There's enough of them out there."
Her daughter's social welfare was stopped before Christmas, she said. "She's a lone parent. They stopped her book. It's under appeal at the moment."
She said she lives in the house alone with the blinds down and the CCTV system on. Her daughter stays with her about four days a week.
Asked what she does all day she said: "I walk the land and think about my horses."
Her house stands on a 60 acre site, including an indoor arena, an outdoor paddock and fields.
In the indoor arena, the red and blue plastic chairs are covered in dust sheets. In a building beside the stables, there are two sockets where the washing machine and dryer for the horse blankets used to be.
All her stable boys, except for one, left after the events of last summer, she said. In the four bedroom apartment above the stables a woman sat reading a book in the kitchen, a large gap where the fridge freezer used to be.
The lock has seized on the heavy chain around the door of the indoor arena. Mrs Gilligan said she did not go in there very often. Asked whether it was not difficult to believe all this came from gambling profits, she said: "There's more to it than that."
What did that mean? "We have the bill," she said. "We have to pay for the money." She spoke about a loan, but would not go into details.
A few tonnes of sand and the 3,200 square metre arena would be ready to host a dressage display or a gymkhana. The VIP boxes have been completed, the lighting is in place. Apart from the missing sand there is one other final job to complete. "The judges box is not finished."
