The Trib

by David Kenny

  ‘She believes the reason she was singled out for what she describes as torture by her parents, from the age of five, was because she used to play with Kelly. ‘My father told us not to talk to Kelly, to pretend she didn’t exist, because she’d been bold. Me and Kelly were separated from the others [there were three other siblings at that time]. We weren’t allowed talk to them or play with them. We didn’t get the treats they got.’

  At first, when they moved to Carracastle from London, Kelly stayed behind, residing with her grandparents and thriving for the time being. In Mayo, Geraldine was isolated. At night she was put outside the back door in her nightdress to sleep on the step with the dogs, until the dogs grew raucous with the cold and were brought inside. After her parents were informed that Geraldine had been breaking into neighbours’ houses in the middle of the night, wrapped in a blanket, to steal bread, they put her to sleep in the bathroom with the door locked from the outside.

  ‘Most of the time, I wasn’t allowed into the house,’ she recalls. ‘While the rest of them would be having breakfast, I would be cleaning out the cowshed, restacking the turf and clearing up after the dogs. I had to walk the dogs every morning in my nightie – wind, rain or snow. I was never given anything extra to wear, except if somebody came to the house. I had to pick up the dog poop with my bare hands. If I missed any, my mother would take off her shoe and hit me on the head with it and then I’d have to clean and dry the shoes of the person who had stepped in it.

  When the chores were done, my father would make me do press-ups and run around the house.

  ‘He used to stamp on my bare feet and hit me if the others fell over or hurt themselves. Sometimes, to make him stop hitting me, she (her mother) would slap me to make me cry.

  ‘I never sat with the family for a meal. When they were eating, I was left outside. The only time I would be with them at mealtime would be when my father would tell me to stay and watch them eat. He’d offer me something on a plate but, when I went to take it, he would either put it down for the dogs or else throw it on the floor and tell me to eat it off the floor. Sometimes he made porridge and put a whole bag of salt in it or gave me dog-food and held my nose and forced me to eat it.’ A teacher in Scoil Iosa, noticing that Geraldine was coming to school with no lunch, apportioned some of her brother’s lunchbox to the girl but Sue Fitzgerald went to the school and instructed the teacher to stop.

  ‘My mother and father brought me to the bathroom every day and told me to take off all my clothes and he would beat me with his belt. The more I cried, the more he beat me. These beatings happened every day for three years.’

  (In a Health Board document outlining beatings suffered by Kelly at the hands of her father, it is repeatedly noted as ‘worrying’ that Des Fitzgerald admitted he was sexually aroused during these beatings.)

  ‘He hit me with a black pipe he used to have for the cows,’ Geraldine continues. ‘He said he hated me and I was a bitch. He said it was in the Bible that a father could take the rod to his child and that I made him do it. I was always warned by my parents to keep my socks up at school to hide the marks on my legs. Sometimes, after beating me, he’d fill the bath with water and put me into it and hold my head down under the water.

  ‘On the school bus one day, I was crying and a girl in my class asked me what was wrong. I said I was afraid to go home but my parents found out and my father beat me with his belt.

  ‘When the child psychologist used to call to the school, my father coached me in what to say to her. Sometimes, when I couldn’t walk, I was kept home from school. I tried telling the neighbour, Mrs Duffy – she’s dead now – and my parents beat me again.

  ‘My brother, Rory (seven years younger than Geraldine), used to ask my mother for biscuits and he would bring them out to me but I was frightened for him. I used to be nice like that to Kelly and I got beaten for it and I couldn’t let that happen to him. I told him not to play with me or talk to me.’

  After a fortnight away from the family, Kelly returned to live with them in Mayo for five months, until she was put on a plane at Knock Airport in a wheelchair and sent back to England.

  ‘The social workers came to the house one day after that and we were all told to take ourselves off while they talked to my parents,’ Geraldine recalls. ‘My parents were really strange that day.

  ‘They were really nice, and that wasn’t good. I got to sleep in a bed and have food. In the middle of the night, the phone rang. My mother answered it and she started crying and I knew. I could feel it in the air. I asked my mother: ‘What’s wrong with you?’ She just said: ‘Kelly’s dead.’ The following day, we were taken into care.

  ‘We were brought to the hospital in Castlebar. We were all in the same ward. We wanted to torment the doctors. One of us would put two others on a trolley and go wild, crashing into doors.

  ‘It was the first time I felt like a child, happy. The social workers said we would be going into care and I said I’d rather go home and be beaten because that was what I knew. It didn’t feel right at first, not being beaten. They said there was something wrong with me to feel like that.

  ‘I went to a family in Tubbercurry with my younger brother, Rory. I had clothes and I had food and I had hugs whenever I wanted them. I had friends. I got my ears pierced. But the social workers said I should be upset because my sister had died. Everybody kept talking about Kelly and everybody was feeling sorry for my parents.

  ‘When I tried to talk about me, they [her parents] said I was an attention seeker, that I was trying to take the attention away from Kelly. Nobody gave a continental about me. I started taking overdoses. I took a lot of them. If they had listened to me, I wouldn’t have done that.’ She has not harmed herself since meeting her husband, Wade.

  Geraldine and Rory were split up and sent to different families and, in her words, she ‘went out of control’. She started smoking and drinking, self-harming and missing school. For most of the following six years, she stayed from Monday to Friday at St Anne’s, a residential centre in Galway for children with psychological, behavioural and emotional problems. Her weekends were spent at another children’s centre, Aiglish House, in Castlebar.

  ‘In 1996 I tried to make a complaint [to bring charges against her parents for the abuse],’ she says. ‘I was in fear of my family but they were allowed have contact with me and I ran away from Aiglish.’ A Health Board note of this time records that it was ‘no surprise’ that she withdrew her complaint, following contacts with members of her family. Surprising too that, as the garda investigation of her parents was underway, Geraldine and her siblings returned to the family home for three days that Christmas.

  ‘We went to visit them once a month in Mountjoy. The social workers hired a mini-van and we would go up to Dublin and go back to Mayo in one day. My parents would say hello to everyone – ‘How’s it going? How’s school?’ – but they wouldn’t want to know anything about me. While they were talking in one corner, I’d be sitting in another corner.

  ‘An extra visit was arranged because it was my birthday. They were getting a cake and soft drinks and presents. I approached my mother for a hug and she said: “Oh, I saw you the other day.”’

  The agenda for a social workers’ meeting about Geraldine, dated 3 March 1997, four years after Kelly’s death, records: ‘Geraldine continues to be abused by her parents. While we have been able to protect Geraldine from the physical abuse that she experienced at home, we have been unable to protect her from the power and domination of her parents, particularly her father.’ The Health Board files attest to ‘the visible, ongoing rejection’ of Geraldine by her parents on access visits.

  ‘They didn’t rescue me,’ she insists. ‘It was only when Kelly died that I was taken out of there. Even when I was in care, nothing was done without the consent of my parents. When the social workers wanted me to go to court to give evidence about what was done to Kelly, my father refused to give his permission.

  ‘Even if it kills me, I
am going to have my say now. The reason I didn’t do it before was I thought I was to blame. People say that if you have been abused, you become an abuser yourself. I want people to know I’m not like that. I’m embarrassed; I’m ashamed of my life. People will say, “Why is she doing this to her parents?” But the only thing I can think of is a voice saying:

  “Please, Daddy, don’t hurt me.” ‘

  ‘My dream was to swim. He ruined my life’

  In 2007 the Tribune tracked alleged child rapist George Gibney to Orange County, Florida. Here, one of his alleged victim talks about how he ruined her life.

  18 March 2007

  After the detectives came to break the news, she walked to a field in the grounds of a religious order’s house and hung herself from a tree with her scarf. Inside, she felt dead already. For years, the prospect of seeing the man who raped her being convicted by a court of the land and sent to jail had kept her engaged in living. The gardaí were optimistic.

  Three other girls had sworn statements that he had sexually abused them too. These crimes were much more recent than the seven alleged rapes he had got away with in 1994 when the Supreme Court had ruled that they were so old he could not adequately defend himself against the charges. This second case file was watertight. The gardaí had worked assiduously, ever since she first went to them in 1997. They were talking about having him extradited from the US. Her counselling sessions were concentrated on getting her psychologically prepared for the ordeal of being cross-examined.

  At first, after the guards sat with heavy surrender in her living room and told her that the state had decided not to apply for George Gibney’s extradition, all she felt was relief. She would not have to go to court after all. Would not have to see his face ever again. Would not have to recount to an audience of strangers the intense details of that day he raped her in a hotel room in Florida when she was just seventeen.

  It was a priest who cut her down from the tree two years ago. Her parents got the call from a hospital emergency room. They were sorrowfully practised in the drill.

  The hospital calls had become part of their lives. Often she would get up and leave the house in the middle of the night and wander aimlessly abroad. Sometimes she was admitted to A&E bleeding copiously after cutting her body indiscriminately with a knife or blades. Other times it would be an overdose of pills.

  She had never tried to hang herself before, though.

  It was the anger, she explains in a leaden voice. The raging anger that boiled inside her once the initial relief receded and which she could not express. She was left to drift like flotsam after a catastrophe in the sea. She who was once a future Olympic swimmer. The girl who cut through the water so fast that bystanders on the bank turned to one another and asked what was her name. A name to watch out for in the future, they would nod. That name lost to her now as she reluctantly chooses anonymity for a veil of armour. As if to compensate, she only ever alludes to George Gibney by his surname.

  ‘I think he saw a vulnerability in me,’ she agrees.

  Her destiny was decided when she was five, after her mother was taken to Peamount Hospital with TB and remained there for six months. While her father would visit his wife at the hospital, the child would be sent to the house three doors down, where other little girls about her own age were minded by their live-in grandfather.

  ‘If you tell anybody, your mother will die and it’ll be all your fault,’ the grandfather threatened her after the first time he sexually abused her, aged five-and-a-half.

  The abuse was a regular occurrence, becoming increasingly severe and rough. Once, when she was seven, she came home with scrapes and bruises and had to make excuses to her parents. When she was nine, her parents, worried about her psychological withdrawal, brought her to Temple Street Children’s Hospital. It was supposed that her symptoms were a natural response to her mother’s prolonged absence from home.

  Her parents hired a private tutor to come to the house because she had fallen behind academically in school. All the while, the abuse continued, not stopping until she was eleven, when the other family moved away from the locality.

  When a swimming pool opened in her neighbourhood and she went there for the first time, she discovered a means of escape. ‘It felt like I was flying,’ she remembers. ‘Like I’d been freed. I put everything into it. I really focused. It happened so quickly. One year, I wasn’t able to swim. Within a year, I was breaking Irish records. People were wondering who I was.’

  One day, a swimming coach phoned her parents after seeing her swim and told them she had the potential to be a great champion. Trojans Swimming Club in Blackrock was recommended, the citation eulogising its founder, George Gibney, the Irish Amateur Swimming Association’s national coach when she joined in 1990 and Olympic coach to the Irish team in Seoul two years earlier. In 1990, most of the club’s most accomplished swimmers left Trojans, their puzzling departure barely whispered in swimming circles. (It has since emerged that, in 1990, a male swimmer informed a senior swimming official that George Gibney had raped him when he was eleven.) Even though the pool was eighteen miles from their home, she and her father rose from bed at four o’clock every morning to be at the pool by 5.15 a.m., as stipulated. While her father slept outside in the car, she was swimming her heart out inside.

  ‘I was so driven. All I wanted to do was to go to the Olympics at any cost. That was my dream.’

  Gibney showered her with attention. Promised her he would make her a star. Gave her swimming togs and tracksuits and hats and goggles. Hugged her every time she swam well. That year, at the national championships, she streaked home first in the 50 m freestyle, the 100 m freestyle, the 100 m breaststroke and the 100 m butterfly. She was sixteen years old, perfectly poised to be selected for the next Olympic games in Barcelona in 1992.

  Then the sun went in. She was competing in Holland with the club. After one of the swim meets, she returned to her hotel room to dress for a disco that was part of the swimmers’ itinerary. ‘Gibney came to the room and started saying how bad I was and that I was never going to go anywhere. Suddenly, he jumped on me. He pushed me down on the bed and then left the room. After that he completely ignored me for a couple of weeks. I was wondering what did I do wrong. Back home, at training, he’d act as if I wasn’t there. I felt all this guilt. I was swimming my hardest, training extra hard to get his attention.’

  In 1991 Trojans organised a training camp in Tampa, Florida, to prepare for the National Championships in Belfast, where swimmers would be selected for the Olympics. The swimmers were assigned to host families, returning for a daily siesta to their houses after morning training and before the afternoon session. One day, her host family was away and she remained at the poolside with another girl after everyone dispersed.

  ‘Gibney appeared out of nowhere and said, “Come on, we’ll go for breakfast.” The three of us went for breakfast. Then he drove us to a hotel that I didn’t know. He brought me to a room and said, “You, get in there,” and he went off with the other girl. I don’t know where he brought her.

  ‘He comes back and starts ranting and raving that I was so bad at swimming and how disappointed in me he was. I was sitting on a double bed. He jumped on me and raped me, there on the bed. He said if I told anybody, he would sue my family and nobody would believe me because he was George Gibney and he would bankrupt my family. Then he left.

  ‘When he was gone, I just sat on the floor in the room. I couldn’t leave because I didn’t know where I was. He came back about three hours later with his wife and loads of kids and said: “Come on you, we’re going swimming now.”

  ‘People saw me crying but nobody came near me. None of the swimming managers who were there approached me. My host family asked me what was wrong and I said I was homesick. I rang home and I told my mother that Gibney locked me in a room but I didn’t tell her he raped me.’

  At the National Championships in Belfast that year, her legs shook so much standing on the starting block
that she could not swim.

  ‘Even then, I kept crying all the time. I couldn’t stop.’

  Finally, in 1994, her trauma reached crisis point. She feigned an injury to get out of swimming in a competition and was referred to a doctor appointed by the Olympic Council of Ireland. The dam burst. She told the doctor about the prolonged abuse by the grandfather when she was a child and about being raped by Gibney.

  She made a statement to gardaí about the first series of abuse. Two other females came forward and alleged that they had also been abused by the man. He fought the prosecution through the courts, seeking a judicial review but finally pleaded guilty in 1999. He was sentenced to five years’ jail on conviction of seven charges of child sexual abuse of the three girls. The man is dead now. She heard he died in prison of natural causes. In passing sentence, the judge remarked that it was probably no coincidence that one of the girls was later abused by her swimming coach.

  ‘I felt I got a bit of justice,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t my imagination. It wasn’t me going mad. It wasn’t all in my head.’

  That experience encouraged her to make a statement against Gibney. He had eluded seven rape charges on the technicality that they were too old to defend. Yet, most of the Gibney charges pertained to the same years (or post-dated them) as the charges against the convicted grandfather.

  The explanation she was given for the DPP’s decision not to seek Gibney’s extradition on foot of the second investigation was that he was entitled to insist on having each of the four complainants’ cases tried separately. Again, this had not arisen in the case of the grandfather or in the vast majority of sexual-abuse prosecutions.

  ‘The guards were absolutely brilliant. They couldn’t have done enough,’ she says.

  She is pursuing a civil action for damages against the Irish Amateur Swimming Association, the Olympic Council of Ireland and George Gibney. (This journalist has seen the legal statement of claim lodged in court, despite a denial by Swim Ireland that any such legal action exists.) Meanwhile, she is left to cope with the devastation. She takes six pills for her mental well-being every night, attends a psychiatrist every week and a cognitive counsellor twice a week. She does not socialise and has never had a proper romantic relationship. She has suffered from anorexia, dropping to under five-and-a-half stone at one stage though she stands 5ft 10" tall, and has had surgery for the scars left by her self-mutilation.