Victim’s book details her horrendous ordeal

ONE of Eamon Cooke’s victims wrote a book, Playing In The Dark, documenting her ordeal at the hands of the paedophile DJ.

Siobhan Kennedy-McGuiness was prompted to write the book and subsequently testify against Cooke after a chance encounter 20 years later. Then a married mother-of-four, Siobhan saw Cooke with two young girls and she stepped back to the nightmare of when she was abused by the DJ.

In the book, Siobhan says that when she crossed paths with Cooke in Dublin he was ‘this bent figure of a man, seemingly harmless pensioner shuffling around like a favourite relative holding the hands of two children. ‘They could only have been about six or seven, the same age I had been when Cooke first began to paw at me and use my body for his own filthy and perverted sexual gratification. ‘Behind that cold, sinister stare lurked the same seething mass of hatred, perversions and depravity.’ Originally from Inchicore in Dublin, Siobhan described how she suffered horrific abuse at the hands of the well-known pirate radio broadcaster for a number of years as a child in the 1970s. In 2007 she was one of two victims who testified against Cooke, founder of the illegal station Radio Dublin. ‘For years my nightmares had been haunted by this man.’ She told how Cooke groomed her over a period of three years, building up an enormous sense of trust, so she had no understanding that what he was doing to her was wrong.

She claimed that Cooke performed oral sex on her and sexually abused her for a number of years.

She said she had no real understanding of what had happened to her until she was in her teenage years, and by then she didn’t want to talk about it.

But as she saw him with two young girls, she saw her own childhood and her suffering at the hands of the monster.

Siobhan, along with a number of other victims, went on to testify against Cooke and secured a conviction against the child abuser.