A woman has told the Central Criminal Court she was raped and abused by three of her brothers at least three or four times a week from when she was around 12 years old until she was 18.
The woman, who is now 36 years old, also told the court her own father was the father of her eldest child.
The woman is one of four people who allege they were raped and sexually assaulted as children, by members of their extended family between 1999 and 2005.
Her three brothers, aged 37, 40 and 41 are each charged with multiple counts of raping the woman when she was a child. They deny the charges.
Warning: Some readers may find details in this report distressing
Her father who is 66, is charged with raping a different woman, his granddaughter, twice. He's also charged with raping one of his nephews 20 times and with assaulting the same nephew.
The woman’s 63-year-old mother is charged with assisting an offender and with assaulting two of the complainants.
There are a total of 126 charges before the court. All the defendants have pleaded not guilty to all the charges.
The jury has been told the accused and the complainants are all part of the same extended family, who are members of the travelling community.
The 36-year-old woman told the court her family had moved an awful lot when she was a child.
She said it was very rare for her to go to school and she could not read.
She said she did not know how old she was until she got her birth certificate in recent years.
She gave evidence about some of the locations where she had lived in caravans with her parents and her brothers and sisters over the years, mainly in locations on roadsides in the west and east of the country.
While identifying numerous locations in photographs compiled by gardaí, she told the court "my father and my brothers used to have sex with me there".
The woman said she was around seven or eight years when her father began touching her and around 11 when she said he began having sex with her.
It happened mostly every day she said, in a caravan or a car. She said "you’d be too afraid to say no", as "you’d get a beating".
She described being beaten with whatever her father had in his hands, mentioning a "machine stick" which she said was a stick used to clean chimneys.
She told the court her father was the father of her eldest child, born when the woman was 18.
She said she found out she was pregnant when she went to the doctor as she was very sick with the flu.
Her child was born about two months later she said and was raised by her mother.
She told prosecuting counsel, Shane Costelloe that she approached the gardaí in 2015 to make a statement about the circumstances of this child’s birth.
She said she did this as she "didn’t want the rest of the kids to go through what I went through".
Asked if her father was "the only one" who did this, the woman replied that she had "three more brothers that did the same – rape and abuse".
They had sex with her, she said, when she didn’t want it.
The woman said it was hard to put into words.
She said the incidents happened with her now 41-year-old brother when she was around 12 or 13, beginning when he went off in the car with her.
She said it happened on "loads of occasions", and could be three or four times a week. She said this went on until she turned 18.
She said her now 40-year-old brother then began doing the same things to her, followed by her now 37-year-old brother.
Asked if she ever tried to stop them, she said she did once with the youngest brother but she was beaten on the jaw, nose and eye. She agreed that this was the only time she tried to say no.
Under cross-examination from Senior Counsel, James McGowan on behalf of her 41-year-old brother, the woman agreed she knew that relatives of another extended family member who was in prison had made compensation claims.
The woman said she received compensation from the HSE about a year ago for her treatment down the years.
But she said no money in the world would bring back her childhood.
Her solicitor said the money would be for her kids’ future she told the court, and that is what she did it for.
Mr McGowan also suggested to her that she had given evidence that there was no one else present when her brothers had abused her but that in a statement she made in 2016, she had mentioned two of her sisters being in the caravan when it happened.
She said sometimes other people were there.
The woman agreed there had been a lot of violence in their home and that her father beat them like dogs.
Under cross-examination from Senior Counsel, Dominic McGinn for her 37-year-old brother, the woman denied that she had made up sexual abuse allegations against him because he had also been violent towards her.
When Mr McGinn suggested to her that this brother had never sexually abused her. She said he did do that to her.
The woman also denied a suggestion by Mr McGinn and by Defence counsel Ciaran O’Loughlin, acting for her 40-year-old brother, that she was making allegations against her brother as she had received a compensation payout from the HSE in relation to her father.
When Mr O’Loughlin suggested her 40-year-old brother could not have abused her as she alleged because he did not live with the family at that stage, she said he would always come back if he had a row with his partner.
She also denied that she had told the child and family agency Tusla that she wanted to sign over her eldest child to her mother.
The trial will resume before the jury next week.
Credit: RTE News
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