The wife of Patrick Naughton said yesterday that she stayed with her husband who beat her badly because he would not let her take the children.
Mrs Naughton, on RTÉ's Liveline, said she did not know the full detail of what her daughter went through until the day the judge was explaining about it and going over the story for the jury in October.
Asked if she ever suspected that her husband was interfering with her daughter, she said if a mother could not go out to work and trust her children with their father, who else could she trust. It was the last thing that would go through her mind.
After she was married she found herself in hospital badly beaten by him. She was in and out of hospital and they knew there but there was not much support. "I was living in fear," she said.
Local people thought he was a nice man and a real gentleman, but some knew what was going on, Mrs Naughton said.
Asked if she could have escaped earlier from him, she said she could not because she had nobody to turn to. She said she was going to enter a home for battered wives in Galway but her husband wouldn't allow her to take the children. "I couldn't go without my kids so I said I'll wait until they're old enough. I put up with everything and anything. All I cared about was that they would be all right."