Paul McCabe died four years ago this month. "Paul who?" is the likely response, even if I had called him by his nickname, Pablo. Paul was a homeless man who had been reared in industrial homes, a recidivist petty criminal who suffered from schizophrenia, writes Breda O'Brien.
Of course he was more than that bleak description. He thought deeply about life and liked to paint and write poetry. Yet if he is remembered at all, it will be as the co-accused in the Nora Wall case. Both were victims of a shameful miscarriage of justice that has never been properly investigated or explained.
Wall, formerly Sr Dominic, spent 16 years in selfless service of children in a group home. Such was the revulsion felt following the revelations of the States of Fear programmes broadcast shortly before the trial that people were willing to believe a nun was capable of anything, including holding a child by the ankles while a man raped her.
Most people remember that Wall received a life sentence, that a witness was called in the case who should never have been called, and that the conviction was sensationally quashed only days after the sentencing.
Yet there are questions that have never been answered. Attention at the time was focused on why Patricia Phelan, the alleged eye-witness, was called despite the DPP's instruction not to do so.
A much more important unanswered question is why the DPP decided to take the highly unusual step of not calling an alleged eye-witness in the first place.
Moreover, if Phelan was so obviously unreliable, why did it not cast grave doubt on the veracity of the alleged victim, Regina Walsh? Phelan could only have known about the allegations through collusion with Walsh, or worse, through the gardaí who questioned her.
Why did McCabe sign a confession to raping Walsh on her 12th birthday? After his confession, gardaí found documentary evidence that he could not possibly have been in the group home on that date. They informed Walsh, who changed her statement from the alleged rape having happened on her birthday, to happening "around" her birthday.
McCabe was in Mountjoy for a long spell almost immediately after her birthday. The jury obviously did not believe her, because it did not convict on the "birthday party" rape. Incredibly, though, it still found them guilty of a different rape charge, about which neither of the accused was ever questioned, or gave a statement about.
Compare how the potential miscarriage of justice involving Dean Lyons was handled. The late Lyons confessed to the Grangegorman murders.
When it emerged that he had made a false confession, the Department of Justice first set up an independent review, and then a commission of investigation conducted by George Birmingham SC.
An expert group was also established to assess the "adequacy of Garda training, protocols, regulations and procedures" in relation to, among other things, "assessing the fitness of persons to be interviewed" and "avoiding the use of leading questions with vulnerable suspects".
While the unfortunate Lyons had a well-established record of Walter Mitty-type fantasies, and was eager to confess to anything, McCabe had no such record.
Why no investigation for McCabe? In many ways, probably because he was more vulnerable, McCabe was treated worse than Wall.
The gardaí involved in questioning her at least took notes of the questions and answers asked, as is required in the Criminal Justice Regulations (1987). She refused to sign them because they did not include statements such as, "We will see that you get 14 years in Limerick," made to her by gardaí.
In clear breach of regulations, no notes were taken of McCabe's interviews. He made two statements, both quite odd, in which he confessed to the rape, and in the second he implicated Wall. For example, he said that when he told Wall that he had sexual relations with Walsh, her only response was to comment that he was like St Augustine.
A medical doctor who examined McCabe while he was in custody was asked during the court hearings whether such a statement would have alerted him to McCabe's fragile mental state. He agreed that it would, but one of the investigating gardaí stated in evidence that not only did he not know McCabe suffered from schizophrenia, but he did not see what difference it would have made if he had.
Birmingham cleared the gardaí of wrongdoing in the Lyons case, but said that there was evidence of leading questions from which Lyons gleaned information even in the first video-taped interview.
In the case of McCabe, at the hearings the gardaí admitted that McCabe did not dictate a statement as they originally suggested, but responded to questions. This, again, is in breach of regulations.
They also admitted that they edited his statement to remove long rambling references to St Augustine. Was this because McCabe's precarious mental state would have been obvious had they been left in?
There were glaring inconsistencies in the young women's evidence, and much of Walsh's relied upon the now discredited phenomenon where, during therapy, someone "recovers" memories of traumas of which they were previously unaware.
Walsh claimed she had been raped twice, some two years apart, in practically identical circumstances. She had no recollection of Phelan's presence. Phelan claimed that there were two rapes, both of which she interrupted by entering the room, but they were only months apart, when Walsh would still have been only nine. Both young women were subsequently found to have made previous false claims of sexual assault.
In the miscarriage of justice judgment, Justice Kearns pointed out that a garda who took the statements from Phelan regarding Walsh was also involved in two other cases where Phelan had made false allegations.
Yet the case proceeded.
I have covered the case in more depth than this column permits in the current edition of Studies. I wonder whether this man who was so failed as a child by Irish society will continue to be failed in death because no one will be held to account for what happened to him. Will Wall ever receive recognition of the depth of the harm done to her and her family?