My daughter is that age. What do I tell her?

APPALLED. Disgusted. Sickened. Take your pick. I am on a train to Cork when I hear the verdict and while part of me wants to transfer to a train to Belfast to firebomb the courts, the more law-abiding, rational, bigger part just wants to go home.

I want to go home to my two daughters. To hold them close while we try to make sense of this, while we talk about the indisputable fact now that if, God forbid, they are ever raped, that they would be crazy to report it. I want to try to explain to them why the world is this way, why it so weighted against women.

My eldest daughter is the same age as the girl in the Belfast court room. For nine weeks, I have thought about that almost every day and I have hoped that if ever anything awful happened, God forbid, that my own daughter would be as brave as the complainant in the rape trial.

For nine weeks I have wondered about that girl’s mother, her parents, and have hoped that they have supported her and loved her as she deserved to be supported and loved. She was cross-examined for eight days. Eight days. A girl the same age as my little girl. I thought she was brave, articulate and brilliant.

Here’s what has changed. I will never advise my daughters to report sexual crimes. I will never advise any woman to go to gardaí over sexual crimes. I could not, in all conscience, point anyone towards a system where women are treated as this young woman was in Laganside Court. ‘Did any sluts get f **** d?’ No verdict will ever change that.

I have to accept that the jury did believe Paddy Jackson, Stuart Olding, Blane McIlroy and Rory Harrison, and that they didn’t believe the victim. I have to accept that it only took them three hours and 45 minutes to reach their conclusion.

I have had lunches in the past nine weeks that have lasted longer than that, and that had the same single topic of conversation on the menu.

I have to accept that in spite of what seems to me to be indecent haste, the eight men and three women on the jury must have thought longer than I did about the trial, about the evidence, about the young woman standing in front of them, having her life, her body, her genitals forensically discussed by strangers for nine whole weeks. And I am supposed to accept that all of this happened because she was embarrassed at having had consensual group sex with two rugby players. Listen, I am no angel: I have had sexual misadventures that I have regretted, that I have been embarrassed by.

But in all my born days, I have never been so embarrassed as to willingly put myself through a nine-week ordeal during which everyone in the country was discussing my sexual organs. Jesus wept.

I’ll be home tonight and I’ll see my beautiful girls then. Oh God. What on Earth am I going to tell them?