A 57-YEAR-OLD labourer will be sentenced later at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court for sexually abusing his youngest sister several times a week between 1976 and 1982.
Christine Roche addressed her brother, Patrick Fitzgerald, in court, saying: “You took everything away from me. You shattered my innocence by teaching me things no child should ever have to know.”
She said she would no longer “keep quiet about the wrong” he inflicted on her “behind closed doors” in the three-bedroom family home of 14 people when she was aged between eight and 15 years.
Prosecution counsel Tara Burns told Judge Frank O’Donnell that Ms Roche wished to waive her right to anonymity and give her account of the abuse and its effects on her.
Ms Roche recalled a typical scenario where Fitzgerald signalled her with his eyes to follow him upstairs to his bedroom as she sat at the kitchen table knitting her doll a jumper.
The 41-year-old mother said she remembered he would look at pornographic magazines as she was being abused and sometimes show her the contents, before telling her to wash her hands and go downstairs when “he was done”.
She told Judge O’Donnell that as she got older, her brother would touch parts of her developing body and that she still struggles to have a normal intimate relationship with her husband of 20 years or show her children love and affection because of this past abuse.
She said: “Affection and love don’t come naturally to me. He [Fitzgerald] shut down my feelings because of what he did to me.”
She told the judge she was a practical mother who could feed and clothe her children but couldn’t show them love properly, adding that their laughter “unnerved” her.
She hoped she wouldn’t have to look at her brother’s face again, telling the court: “I will never be the person I was put on this earth to be.”
Fitzgerald, of Cleggan Road, Ballyfermot, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting her from 1976 to 1982.
Fitzgerald’s sister, who supported him in court with other siblings, told Judge O’Donnell that their father was “a domineering man who ruled the house with an iron fist” and she went on to make other allegations against her father.
She said she and her other siblings would support their brother whatever the outcome of the case and handed a letter into court detailing the extent of physical and sexual abuse in the family, adding that she dealt with her suffering in her own way.
Fitzgerald acknowledged to his counsel, Sean Gillane, that he “wasn’t a very pleasant young fella at the time”, due to what he claimed was his violent father and a sexually abusive Christian Brother at school.
He said he was sorry for what he did to his sister, that he had waited years for this court case and that his own history of suffering abuse left him “mentally scarred”, with a stammer and a heavy drinking problem.
Mr Gillane appealed to the judge to consider the “daily litany of horror visited on the children of the house” by their abusive father, which led to “warping and retardation of empathy and feeling” among all members of the household.
He described his client as both “abuser and abused” and stressed that Fitzgerald was not “set upon visiting horror on another for his own gratification”.
Judge O’Donnell told Mr Gillane he would resist temptation to remand his client in custody to reflect on the case “coldly and calculatedly”.
He added he couldn’t understand how Ms Roche was “made to feel isolated, made to feel different” by other members of her family.