There are few happy endings on Parkgate Street in Dublin where the country’s worst sex crimes are dealt with in the sterile surrounds of the Criminal Courts of Justice.
The Waterford case involving a man raping his son from the age of six is no different, but it could have been. Teachers and social workers were quick to act when the boy came to school crying one day in 2011, just before his eighth birthday.
He had been upset before but this time he was inconsolable. His father had hit him again and the child could not take any more.
The social services were already monitoring the family; the boy’s four step-siblings were in care. But until now there had been no allegations of abuse against him.
He never went home again. Instead, he immediately followed two of his step-siblings into a foster home in the southeast. But the foster home itself was a dangerous place.
During his time there, he was sexually abused by another child while staying with a relative of the foster mother. This child later admitted the abuse but was too young to be prosecuted.
The boy at the centre of the Waterford case was already damaged when he arrived at the home. He was behind in school and required a special needs assistant, despite displaying a sharp intellect.
Bouts of aggression
Videoed Garda interviews from the time showed he could not sit still for more than a few seconds and was prone to bouts of aggression. But, in Mr Justice Robert Eagar’s view, it was clear his time in the foster home made him worse.
A form of salvation came in March 2012 when he was moved to another foster home. He later said it was here that his childhood started. His new foster mother was a kind, caring woman and the child grew to trust her. Most nights they would talk about his feelings and experiences which the woman wrote down verbatim and stored in carefully organised files.
From the start, the boy required a lot of attention. “He always worried if he told me something I would stop loving him,” his foster mother said.
However, he also began to display more disturbing characteristics. He would spy on his foster mother in the shower and was found interfering with the family pets. He was also obsessed with faeces.
Heartbreaking moments
This reached a point where the woman could no longer care for him. In one of the most heartbreaking moments of the trial, the foster mother described how the boy had to leave the only place he ever felt safe. He was sent to Britain to receive specialised care as there was no such service available in Ireland.
His last words to her before leaving were: “I feel like a dog that nobody wants”.
The now 13-year-old boy continues to struggle. His psychiatrist has warned he will bear the marks of the abuse for many years into adulthood. There may be no happy ending, but he is showing some improvement. His sexualised behaviour has abated somewhat and he talks about returning to Ireland someday to be a policeman.
