The case against the mother

THE prosecution case against the mother was that she was a ‘central’ part of the case, that she sexually abused her children, and allowed them to be sexually abused by others.

The trial heard the woman admitted abusing her children to gardaí and provided them with a list of names of people who also abused them.

These admissions to gardaí were ‘the strongest evidence you can have, an acknowledgement by the person who did it, that they did it,’ Mr Condon told the jury.

‘She has admitted her wrongdoing but is just not prepared to stand by the admissions she made to the guards,’ he said.

He said it was ‘convenient’ now for the mother to not want to accept her admissions, but that there was a ‘ring of basic truth’ to them which was consistent with her children’s allegations against her.

In relation to the neglect charges, the fact that the mother may have a low IQ or an intellectual disability was ‘not an excuse, let us be clear about that’, Mr Condon said.

‘When you look at the state of these children when they turned up at the foster homes, the caked faeces on their bodies, that’s not not coping,’ he said. ‘That’s an insult to people with intellectual disabilities to say they would leave their children in that condition.’

He said the mother was given every possible support by social services, but she didn’t want their help, regularly walked away from them and asked when they were going to close their case on the family.

‘It all comes full circle,’ he said. ‘They didn’t want them there because there were other things going on there.

‘They didn’t want these people under their feet.’

Dean Kelly SC, defending the mother, said she had made ‘exhausted admissions’ to gardaí in her fifth of six interviews over a two-day period and that no adaptations were made by gardaí for the woman’s intellectual disability.

Mr Kelly submitted that the sexual abuse of the three children could not have happened because of the ‘constant scrutiny’ of State agencies.

In relation to the neglect charges, Mr Kelly referred to evidence the mother was ‘struggling to cope’ and that it was not a deliberate and callous attempt by his client to wilfully neglect her children.

‘THEY DIDN’T WANT THESE PEOPLE UNDER THEIR FEET’