To my daughters, Madeleine and Caitlin, and to Sophia’s son, Gavin
Cover
Title page
Dedication
Preface to the 2004 edition
‘Honour thy father and thy mother.’
Introduction
Chapter 1: ‘What’s all the fuss about?’
Chapter 2: ‘I felt so loved …’
Chapter 3: Stolen childhood
Chapter 4: ‘Dallas’
Chapter 5: ‘You are all mine’
Chapter 6: ‘I was so, so different’
Chapter 7: ‘I was like Alice in Wonderland’
Chapter 8: ‘Pure determined’
Chapter 9: ‘I saw this morning Sophia smiling’
Chapter 10: ‘A box to which I didn’t know I had the key’
Chapter 11: ‘A notorious villain altogether’
Chapter 12: ‘Trapped in a system’
Chapter 13: ‘How are you?’
Endnotes
Photos
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Author
About Gill & Macmillan
‘For her remarkable courage in exposing the serious deficiencies of a system that failed her and her family, so that others might be spared the suffering she endured.’ This was the citation for Sophia McColgan when she was made Irish Person of the Year in 1998, the year Sophia’s Story was first published. She accepted the honour on behalf of her mother, brothers and sisters. Sophia’s brilliant smile lit up the country. Her great spirit touched many people.
The Taoiseach praised this woman who, with her brothers and her sister, had taken the state to court. Government ministers met her to discuss her views on how the victims of child abuse and domestic violence might best be helped. These were the people with the power to change a system that Sophia and her family had proved deficient. They listened, had their photographs taken with her, nodded, promised action.
‘All the talk was that what happened to us should never be able to happen in Ireland again,’ she says. Six years later, she wonders if very much has changed. ‘At the end of our High Court case against the North Western Health Board, the judge said we were all leaving the courtroom sadder but wiser. I’m not sure, though, if Ireland really learned a lot from our story.’
There is no doubt that Sophia’s Story inspired many people to acts of bravery they had, perhaps, not previously even dared to contemplate. The McColgan siblings proved that the most violent, manipulative and powerful tyrant can be defeated. That his victims can escape and move on to lives in which there is happiness and fulfilment. They also showed that those who collude with abusers can be exposed. That those professionals who are employed to protect the most vulnerable people in society can be made to account for their failure to do so.
The book became a bestseller, and Sophia is proud of the response it received from readers. ‘It has been really wonderful the way the story of this family has helped hundreds of others trapped in dysfunctional families to feel that escape is possible from the very worst of situations,’ she says. ‘We know it has done this because we have had countless letters from other victims. Our hearts go out to all of them. Those who have succeeded, and those who have had setbacks.’
I have also received many letters and phone calls. Some of those who contacted us told how they had been inspired and strengthened by Sophia’s courage, to make brave and successful changes in their lives. Others were contemplating such changes, with a mixture of fearfulness and exhilaration.
Other people found that Sophia’s honest and unsparing account of her life forced open doors they’d long kept closed. They were no longer able to avoid facing into the damage done to them, or to others they loved, by emotional, physical and sexual abuses such as Sophia describes in her account of her early life. Some told us the book had given them insight into the suicide of someone they cared about.
‘No one knows how deep or severe the effects of abuse are,’ says Sophia. ‘We are all unique and special as individuals. Some people have been traumatised by reading about what happened to me and to my family. Some have ended their lives over just being inappropriately touched. Others have survived extreme abuse.’
Others who made contact were, sadly, people who were too afraid to move, even though their lives were a hell of physical or sexual abuse. These were cries of desolation, but at least represented a start to reaching out for help. Some were people whose experiences of seeking help or seeking justice had been bruising and unsuccessful. Many had huge needs. Sophia, by telling her story, had provided a light that many people dared to hope would see them through dark and scary places.
‘This book is a truthful account of my life,’ says Sophia. ‘But it is also meant to help other people and to encourage them to persist, even if no one seems at first to be listening. It is also meant to make the professionals wake up, and listen. Listen, especially, to what children are telling them.’
Sophia has left Ireland, and lives now in Britain with her partner and their young family. She has trained and qualified as a teacher, and has been given a new perspective on responses to child abuse by this experience. ‘I know that awful things can and do happen in the United Kingdom, and that the systems there can also fail people terribly,’ she says. ‘But it does seem to me that the system in the UK is more capable of being responsive.’
She describes the attitude in schools, for example. ‘In Britain, parents are encouraged to come into the classroom, and welcomed. In Ireland, the attitude seems to be that they have no place there and will only be a nuisance… . We owe it to our children and to future generations to make school not just a place to learn. It also has the potential to be a place for personal, social and emotional development. Education should prepare children to be strong against abusers in our society.’
She returns to Ireland frequently to visit her family, and has had the experience of trying to help a friend convince a head teacher that a child’s allegation about bullying at school should be fully investigated. ‘The school had handled the situation in a half-hearted way. The head’s attitude was very defensive,’ she says. ‘I asked to see the school’s guidelines on abuse. The advice given was vague. Then I checked the recommended reading, and the report into our case – the West of Ireland farmer case, as it was known – was top of the list! In the UK, there are clear guidelines about who a concerned person should approach if they need to report abuse or suspicions of it.’
Kieran McGrath, an expert in child protection policy, said that in the aftermath of the McColgan case, in 1999, the government introduced new guidelines which demanded higher standards and were good in principle. However, he added: ‘In some ways the system is even less effective than before, because the new guidelines are not being implemented.’
There is a crisis in social work, he said, with large numbers of workers leaving, burned out or disillusioned. ‘It is commonplace for social work teams to be down forty per cent on their complement,’ he said. ‘People are struggling to provide a basic service.
‘You have children on long waiting lists to be assessed in cases of suspected abuse. You have difficult cases being allocated to inexperienced workers just out of college. You have homeless children being managed on a crisis basis by duty social workers. You have children in care who don’t have an allocated social worker. No one could say it is good practice.’
In one respect, Sophia says, Ireland has services that are better than those she has found to be available in the UK. ‘Our Rape Crisis Centres and Women’s Aid services are brilliant,’ she says. When she first met Dorothy Morrissey of the Limerick Rape Crisis Centre in 1993, she said, ‘for the first time in my life I found somebody who believed me and who understood.’
‘Phenomenal’ is the word chosen by Fiona Neary, the co-ordinator of the Network of Rape Crisis Centres, to describe the impact Sophia, and Sophia’s Story, have had on raising awareness about rape, child abuse and domestic violence in the family. ‘We owe her a great debt,’ she says. ‘Unfortunately, Rape Crisis Centres are so grossly underfunded that we can’t cope with the demand for our services.’ Most centres have waiting lists of several months, and some don’t advertise because they don’t want to disappoint. The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre periodically has to close down its waiting lists.
The Sexual Assault and Violence in Ireland report of 2002 showed a huge incidence of sexual violence. It revealed that half of those who had been abused didn’t disclose it, and that most didn’t contact any support agency. Out of those who go to Rape Crisis Centres, just twenty per cent will report to the Gardaí. Other studies show that only one per cent of those reported will result in a conviction – the lowest rate out of twenty-one EU countries. ‘As a country, we have a long way to go,’ says Neary.
Sophia’s mother, Patsy, tried to escape from Joseph McColgan with her children back in 1979, but felt there was nowhere she could go. Although there is now a network of Women’s Aid refuges, according to Rachel Mullen of Women’s Aid, the numbers of women fleeing violent men is constantly increasing, and there is still nowhere to go for too many women.
‘In 1999, in the Eastern Region, two out of every three women seeking a space in a refuge were refused,’ she says. ‘The housing shortage is even more acute now, so the situation is actually getting worse.’ She also says that legal protections for women and children are still ‘totally inadequate’, and that there was a ‘lack of commitment’ to the regional steering committees set up to work towards preparing a strategic plan on tackling domestic violence and rape.
The statute of limitations over which the McColgans had to struggle with the state remains in place for cases of physical abuse, though the government was forced to lift it temporarily in cases of sexual abuse in 1999. This was because the McColgan case was followed by the revelations in Mary Raftery’s States of Fear documentary into institutional abuse. The Taoiseach apologised to victims of child sexual abuse, set up the Laffoy Tribunal and then denied Miss Justice Laffoy the co-operation and the funding she needed. She resigned in protest.
We now have our first Ombudsman for children, appointed in 2003, but her budget is tiny compared with that provided for the equivalent office in the North, which has a much smaller population.
For his horrific crimes, Joseph McColgan was given a cumulative total of 238 years in prison, the longest in Irish legal history. He was directed to serve them concurrently, meaning he was sentenced to twelve years. With remission, he is to be released this year, 2004. His name will go on the register of sex offenders, a measure described by McGrath as ‘weak’.
‘He has no power over me any more,’ says Sophia. ‘I do not fear him. But this is a man who almost murdered children. We, his family, know how dangerous he is. I just hope others do as well.’
Susan McKay
January 2004
‘Honour thy father and thy mother.’
‘It was a beautiful sunny day. The sun was pouring through the leaves, sparkling off the leaves. I can see it. It was up in the woods at Derreen Bog. His face was above me. He threw me on the ground. All I remember is the pain. Excruciating pain. I was bleeding. There was slimy stuff.
When we got home, he said, “Sophia saw frogspawn in the woods today and she didn’t know what it was.” Everyone laughed. I suppose he really wanted to get me under his grip of fear quickly and that he did very effectively and in a most cruel manner. It was so horrific to me that I was petrified. I couldn’t talk.
That was a short while before I made my First Holy Communion. I was very shocked and confused. Distraught really. In preparation, we had been taught, “Honour thy father and thy mother.” We were taught that we should love and adore them. I loved my parents. Well, I loved my mother anyway. I thought I would be a bad girl if I hated my father.
I remember going into the chapel. There was a moment to make a prayer for the future. I wished and wished that this would end and I could be happy. I was six.’
On 4 December 1997, Senior Counsel James Nugent stood up in Court Number One in Dublin’s Four Courts and addressed Mr Justice Johnson and the High Court:
My Lord, Sophia McColgan is now twenty-seven years of age. She is a laboratory technician and she is the mother of a son. She has a relationship with the father of her son. The fact that she is all of that is a remarkable feat, because between the years of 1978 and the end of the Eighties or the start of the Nineties, she was the subject of a sustained savage and brutal assault, both physical and sexual, by her father. The details of it are horrific …
The case is, of course, not against her father, Joseph McColgan, because he was tried for the offences and he pleaded guilty to twenty-six token charges and he is currently in jail. The case is against the North Western Health Board and against the general practitioner, Dr Moran …
Sophia is the second of six children. Her elder brother Gerard, herself and her younger sister Michelle were born in England and were sent home to Sligo to live with their maternal grandparents. For the first few years of their lives they had a happy and balanced existence, but from the time their parents came home from England and went to look after their children, their lives turned into a living hell. This was the mid-Seventies. This was at a time when there was significant publicity in the UK and in this country on child abuse. The Department of Health here was circulating the health boards with guidelines as to how suspected cases of child abuse might be dealt with …
Mr Nugent went on to describe how Sophia had been sent to Sligo General Hospital after ‘she had clearly been physically abused’. The doctor who referred her, Dr Doreen Dunleavy, described her as a ‘battered child’. Mr Nugent said that Sophia’s mother, Patsy McColgan, had told the people in the Health Board that her husband was physically abusive not just to Sophia, but to her other daughter, Michelle, her son Gerry, and herself.
The authorities seemed to hold case conferences. Sophia was held in hospital until the end of August 1979 and then she was returned home. There seems to have been vague good intentions, vague worry … When she went home, Sophia and her mother were subjected to horrendous physical abuse. Sophia at this stage was a nine-year-old girl and it had the effect of silencing her for a very long time.
Mr Nugent described how Gerry, then ten, was soon afterwards sent to Sligo Hospital by the same doctor, who once again used the words ‘battered child’ in her note of referral. There was another case conference. ‘I am not saying people were not concerned,’ said Mr Nugent. He said, however, that they did not act effectively: ‘Gerry was returned to the family home and savagely assaulted.’ Mr Nugent described a series of communications between doctors and psychiatrists, culminating in a plan that the whole family was to be seen by a child guidance clinic. ‘Mr McColgan, who was known at this stage to be a violent, abusive man, would not agree to that and therefore it was dropped as an idea. Instead there was a second case conference,’ Mr Nugent said. At this conference, Dr Moran described Gerry as a manipulative boy. (Dr Moran said after the court case that his comment had been taken out of context.) He and the public health nurse were given responsibility for monitoring the family, but there appeared to be little communication between Dr Moran and the Health Board arising from that. Mr Nugent then said that as well as the physical violence, the children were being sexually abused, though this was not revealed at this stage to any of the health professionals. At this time, one thousand copies of the Department of Health’s guidelines were sent to the North Western Health Board (NWHB).
Mr Nugent said that by this time, Patsy McColgan had been battered into silence. ‘The unfortunate Mrs McColgan had literally been beaten out of the picture. She said whatever her husband wanted her to say … although she was physically present, she had just opted out. ‘It is not something anyone could condemn her for, as she lived a life of hell.’ Mr Nugent spoke about Gerry’s admission to hospital in 1981 with a broken arm. A failed court case followed, at which no information appears to have been presented about previous acts of violence. ‘Nothing happened. Nothing was done. There was no effort to take the children into care.’ Mr Nugent went on to describe the violence which had led to Gerry running away and being taken into care. At a case conference, Dr Moran said he would not recommend the ‘soft option’; what the boy needed was ‘hard discipline’. In care, Gerry disclosed that he and Sophia had been sexually abused. ‘He gave them graphic details of what happened,’ said Mr Nugent. ‘Someone suggested Sophia should be looked at. Dr Moran suggested it to the mother and she told the father immediately and any such examination was refused by them. Again, nothing was done.’ (Dr Moran’s Counsel would tell the court that this examination did take place.)
Mr Nugent then read from a report written in April 1984 by social worker Val O’Kelly, who described ‘a pathological family’ within which ‘the degree of abuse both physical and sexual is at an extraordinary level’. She said that in the family, ‘abuse is the norm’ and that Mrs McColgan colluded with her husband in the violence ‘to the detriment of their children’. She described Joseph McColgan as ‘very sick’ and ‘seriously perverted’. Ms O’Kelly added that Sophia should be spoken to.
It might be expected, commented Mr Nugent, that after such a report, something would be done. ‘Something was done,’ he said. It appeared that, after consideration, the file on the family was closed. He said Gerry left care, lived with his maternal grandparents for a time, and then went to England to try to build a life. ‘Sophia, Michelle and Keith were left. The abuse went on and on and on, year in, year out. Not a finger was raised to help them. Sophia as she grew older began to stand up for herself, but as she resisted her father’s perverse attentions, Michelle and Keith came into the firing line.’
Mr Nugent said that by 1991, when Sophia left home, ‘The father must by this stage have felt that he was untouchable.’ However, he said, after an incident in which he ran Michelle down with his motorbike, she told a friend and the friend brought her to Dr Jane Dorman, a Sligo GP. The doctor contacted social workers, who contacted the Gardaí. ‘After that, events moved quickly. The father was charged with a litany of horrendous offences with physical and sexual abuse,’ Mr Nugent said. ‘Obviously it seems clear from a recitation of the facts what the case against both the Health Board and Dr Moran is. A reply, by way of defence, my Lord, is, in the circumstances of this case, staggering.’
Mr Nugent said the NWHB was claiming that there was no statable cause of action, that the action was barred by the provisions of the Statute of Limitations, and that it was not negligent. The Board was also claiming that there was contributory negligence on the part of Sophia.
‘The defence of Dr Moran is even more extraordinary in that they deny, or do not admit, notwithstanding that ultimately the father pleaded guilty to these offences — they do not admit that Sophia was ever assaulted physically or sexually,’ Mr Nugent said. Dr Moran denied negligence, and said that the plaintiff had failed to inform her mother that she was being sexually assaulted and abused and that she had failed to inform the Gardaí.
‘On the question of how all this affected Sophia, I think the coward in me would like to tell your Lordship that you could just go to the end of the scale and mark this down as a little bit worse because then we would not have to consider what was done and what the effect of it was. I don’t think that form of hiding is open to me.’ He went on to say that from around the time of Sophia’s First Holy Communion, when her teachers were telling her to ‘love, honour and particularly obey’ her parents, her father was subjecting her to repeated sexual and physical assaults. Mr Nugent said he would not go into graphic detail. It would suffice to say that, ‘every orifice of her body was invaded’.
In the hushed courtroom, many people were in tears. Mr Nugent was himself visibly moved. ‘How she coped with that, I suppose no one will ever know.’ He told Mr Justice Johnson that, as a result of what had happened, Sophia and her family did not trust people. ‘They do not trust your Lordship, they do not trust me and they do not trust their solicitor. They do not really trust anyone. For any trust they should have had was betrayed.’
Mr Nugent concluded by telling the judge that he might be surprised to learn that he would not be asking him to instruct the media to protect Sophia’s anonymity. The family had decided to go public. The ‘West of Ireland Farmer’, as Sophia’s father had been dubbed in media reports of his trial in the criminal courts in 1995, was Joseph McColgan. The health professionals were the North Western Health Board and Dr Desmond Moran, the county coroner.
Sophia had nothing to hide. Her days of silence were over. She and her family had got her father jailed; now they needed to know why the professional people they believed could have helped them when they were children in need, had so obviously not done so.
The case which followed lasted thirteen long days, spread over eight long weeks. Every aspect of Sophia’s life was exposed, including her most intimate relationships. She sat, day after day, on the public benches of Court One, where she had sat during the criminal trial of her father two years previously. She spent two days in the witness box. ‘I did get very angry and frustrated sometimes, because I wanted to get it across that this was a child they were talking about, a child whose father was a monster,’ she said. ‘But cross-examination was nothing compared with the kind of interrogations my father used to put me through. I was not afraid. I knew I was telling the truth.’
However, it was a stressful time, and it had its bizarre moments. Sophia was staying in a bed and breakfast not far from the courts. One night, she was woken by a crash, to find that part of the ceiling of her room had cracked from end to end. The landlady explained to her anxious guests that the wall of Arbour Hill prison next door had collapsed in the night. ‘I hadn’t known we were even near the prison,’ said Sophia. (Joseph McColgan was initially held at Arbour Hill but has since been transferred to the Curragh prison in Co. Kildare.) And there were bright moments. Another day a bunch of yellow roses arrived from the women who run the Wexford Rape Crisis Centre. At weekends, Sophia would go home to her child who would jump into her arms for the happiness of seeing his mother.
At one stage of the proceedings, Sophia rejected an offer of £250,000, offered on condition that she settle the case there and then. The catch was that there would be just £40,000 each for her siblings. ‘I didn’t yield,’ she said. ‘I thought of my Great-Granny, my mother’s Granny, and I knew she would say, “Go in there and fight for your brothers and sister.”’ So she did.
The intensive media interest in the case was daunting. Some of the reporting was, as in the criminal case, salacious. However, mostly Sophia was glad that the reporters were there. ‘I got dozens of cards and letters at Christmas, and so did my brothers and sister, from people all over the country,’ she said. ‘It was nice to know that people cared.’ There are cards from people who were themselves abused, including some from survivors of brutality at Goldenbridge Orphanage (children in care at this Dublin home, run by Sisters of Mercy, were cruelly maltreated from the 1930s to the Seventies). There are cards from mothers. There are many, many cards from people telling Sophia that she was one of the bravest people they had ever seen and that they were hoping and praying that she would get justice at last. One man sent a message of support through journalist Carol Coulter of The Irish Times. His wife had been a victim of child abuse and had committed suicide.
It was perhaps Dr Alice Swann who summed up best why people were so enthralled and moved by Sophia.
She is exceptional. In all my years of working with children, young people and adults who have been abused, there are, in my mind, three or four cases where the person has given all of us a window into what the world of the abused child is like, and she is one such person. There are very few that actually give you that window. Many give you glimpses, but very few actually have the capacity to show you exactly what it is like. I think we have to learn from her and her like.
On 23 January 1998 it ended. Senior Counsel Garret Cooney told Mr Justice Johnson that the case had been settled, adding that there had been no admission of liability by either the NWHB or Dr Moran. Mr Justice Johnson briefly addressed the court before he rose. He said he was delighted that the case was settled. ‘We cannot but leave this court sadder and wiser,’ he said. Sophia remained in the now quiet courtroom for a time, writing thank-you cards to her solicitor, Owen Carthy of Kevin Kilraine and Company, her barristers, James Nugent, Garret Cooney and Chris Meehan, and the judge, Mr Justice Johnson.
A short time later, she and her brothers, Gerry and Keith, pushed open the doors of the Four Courts and emerged, blinking in the winter sunlight, into a scrum of press photographers and reporters. Sophia and her family smiled and smiled and smiled. Then she read from a brief statement they had prepared together.
The settlement of these proceedings has resulted in the payment to each of us of a substantial six figure sum for damages, together with the payment of all our legal costs. We believe we have told the truth, that we have been listened to, and that justice has been done. We are very grateful to the very many people who have offered their support to us throughout the duration of the case. This was a source of great comfort to us. It is our earnest wish that this case will help other people who have been the victims of abuse to realise that there is no shame in having been abused.
This is Sophia’s story.
It was good fun in the hospital. There were lots of other little children in the ward, and, after a day or two, Sophia relaxed. They played and played, the children. The nurses would come round with the medicine trolley and the children would cluster around, as if it was a mobile sweet shop. It was warm, there were toys, there was food, and you could sleep at night. Sophia had a nice new nightdress that her Granny Sally had bought her in Sligo. It was pink with a lacy neck. When anyone asked, ‘What happened to your nose?’ she replied, ‘My father hit me.’ She told the doctors, the nurses, the visitors, the children. It was so simple. She was safe at last.
Sophia, then aged nine, had taken a huge risk. Her father had warned her that if she told on him, he would kill her. She had told on him. There was no going back. It happened on 25 July 1979. The middle of the International Year of the Child. The year the Pope came to Ireland. Nineteen years later, she remembers that terrifying morning.
We were up in Granny’s house and he ordered me to come down to the cottage with him. I knew in my heart and soul he was going to rape me because he was isolating me from the others. I was sick of the way he was abusing me and the way he was treating us. I decided in my mind I had had enough. I’d seen my brother Gerry running away and telling everyone about the beatings we were getting. I’d seen Gerry brought home time and again. Then he’d get ferocious beatings. He was made an example of, to terrify the rest of us.
I had made my mind up to defy my father on a particular occasion when there were other people present. I thought that if I came up with something to show what was happening to me too, then it would prove Gerry was telling the truth and they would help us and we would be saved.
That day, we were in Granny’s and I knew she’d do her best. I really trusted her to save me. I decided to defy him. I said, ‘No.’ I refused to go to the cottage. I refused to be raped. He just took me into this small bedroom and he locked the door and he beat me stupid. He thumped me and kicked me. I was like a ragdoll being belted and thumped around this room. I remember my ears were really ringing. I couldn’t hear anything. In the end he pushed me and I hit my nose on the handle of the door.
Sally, Sophia’s maternal grandmother, remembers that day vividly. She was serving in her small grocery shop beside her home at the top of Ballinacarrow village, a brief straggle of houses with a chapel at one end and a school at the other, situated on a slope in the road twelve miles from Sligo on the road to Galway. Sophia’s grandfather, Michael, a sacristan at the local chapel, was away on a pilgrimage to Lough Derg. It was pension day, and a few neighbours were in the shop for their messages. Sally was giving one of them, Joe Langan, his change, when her daughter Patsy threw open the door. Patsy, her husband Joe McColgan and their children, Gerry (ten), Sophia (nine), Michelle (seven) and Keith (four), were staying with Sally and Michael while they renovated the old cottage a mile and a half down the road, to which they were planning to move.
When Patsy burst into the shop, she was shouting for help and crying. ‘She said, “Come quick, he’s got Sophia in the back bedroom and he’s killing her,”’ recalled Sally. ‘There were some of the neighbours in the shop. One of them was Evelyn McBrien, God rest her, a teacher. She was there. She said she’d come with me, because she knew I wouldn’t be able to cope on my own. Joe Langan came as well, a very honest and decent man.’
Miss McBrien was a prominent person in the small village of Ballinacarrow. Her house was a place where people gathered to ceili, have a drink and a talk. Patsy McColgan went there as a child to watch ‘The Fugitive’ on TV, or to dress up in the kindly teacher’s high heels and dresses.
‘Evelyn McBrien shouted in for Joe McColgan to open the door. We could hear Sophia screaming and crying. Then a neighbour man shouted in at him, “Let out that child or I’ll kick the door down.” Next of all, we heard the door opening and Joe McColgan stuck his head out and said, as cool as anything, “What’s all the fuss about? There’s nothing wrong here.” Then we saw Sophia. There was blood all over her face and she was crying. Gerry ran off about a mile down the road to get my brother, because we didn’t know what Joe McColgan would do next,’ said Sally. ‘Evelyn McBrien ran down the road and rang the Gardaí. They were here within ten minutes. She rang Dr Dunleavy too. After we brought Sophia in to clean up her face at the next-door neighbour’s, we knew she was badly hurt.’
McColgan strode out past his injured daughter, got onto his tractor and ordered the children up. Patsy pulled Michelle and Keith back. Joe Langan remonstrated with McColgan, who told him to mind his own business, because, he said, ‘This is a family matter.’ Cursing them all, McColgan then took off on his own. Patsy spoke with the Gardaí in her mother’s kitchen. She shakes her head at the memory of that day nearly twenty years ago. ‘A Garda told me I could sign him into the mental hospital, but he could be out in three days,’ she said. She left the house, distraught.
When the doctor, Doreen Dunleavy, arrived she found Sophia in a terrified state. ‘She said, “I’m afraid this child seems to have a broken nose; you’ll have to take her to hospital,”’ said Sally. Dr Dunleavy, who did not know the family and had never met Sophia, questioned Sally and made a swift assessment of the situation. She scribbled a note for the admitting staff at casualty: ‘Please see this battered child. Beaten by father this a.m. while in a raged state. He does not drink. Took child to sitting room, caught her neck with his hands, locked the door. This history has been related to me by wife’s mother. The parents have been married ten years, have four children. Lived in England … came home to Ballinacarrow, building a home there. The four kids have been beaten many times as has his wife. Observed and examined very frightened child, obvious injury to nasal bone. Bruising under upper lip … this family would need to be seen by a social worker.’ Dr Dunleavy would later phone the hospital to reinforce her concern, and her husband, also a doctor, would contact the North Western Health Board.
Joe Langan took Sophia and her grandmother to the General Hospital in Sligo. As they passed the gloomy roadside cottage to which her father had demanded she accompany him that morning, and to which he intended them to move permanently, Sophia pressed her bloodied bandage to her face and dared to think, ‘Never again’.
There was much that nine-year-old Sophia did not know about events in her family during those few days in the summer of 1979. She did not know that the night before she resolved to stand up to her father, her mother had also decided she could not take any more. Speaking to me in 1998, Patsy said, ‘The physical and mental abuse was awful.’ She ran her finger along her nose. ‘He gave me a broken nose too one time.’ That night in 1979, the family was down working at the wretched cottage. Its squalor was proving resistant to the hard labour that had gone into it. Patsy had, by this time, four children under the age of ten, and was pregnant again. She cannot remember what the particular act of violence was that precipitated it, but she left the house and thumbed a lift into Sligo. She went to the home of her husband’s mother and asked for help.
The late Mrs McColgan senior was a stern and forbidding person. She disapproved of Patsy and encouraged her son to regard her as an unfit mother for his children. The McColgan parents of Circular Road, Sligo saw themselves as a family of consequence. McColgan senior was a rate collector, and latterly a lollipop man at a local school. Circular Road would be known, in class-conscious Sligo, as ‘a good address’. The McColgan parents looked down on Joseph, who had palpably not come to much. ‘There was a terrible lack of love,’ Patsy said.
Joe McColgan’s parents encouraged him to blame his problems with the children on Patsy and her parents. ‘They thought I was an unfit mother because I gave my three eldest children to my mother to rear while we were in England,’ said Patsy. ‘They blamed me. I had created them.’ Patsy said her husband often told her that it would be better for everyone if she died, since he was the only fit parent in the family. The children had often heard Grandmother McColgan say, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child.’ Sophia remembers journeys in Grandfather McColgan’s old Volkswagen, when he would make the children repeat incessantly, ‘Blessed Lord Jesus, grant us eternal rest …’
That night, Joe McColgan’s parents drove Patsy back to the cottage at Cloonacurra. There they collected the children, who were locked out and had been standing in the field beside the house, waiting. They drove their son’s family to Sally and Michael’s house, where everyone sat down to await McColgan’s return. ‘But when he came in, they just sat there like zombies and said nothing to him,’ said Patsy. The following morning, McColgan went off at 6.00 a.m., returning ‘in a foul mood’ at 9.00. That was when he demanded of Sophia that she accompany him to the cottage. That was when Sophia said, ‘No.’
It was nineteen years later, on 21 December 1997, in the High Court in Dublin, when Sophia learned something else about that brutal day in 1979. Garret Cooney, along with James Nugent, was Sophia’Á‘’‘’