‘I still love my Dad’ in spite of decade of rape
On RTÉ’s Late Late Show, however, Ms Doyle said she could never forgive her father for the horror he unleashed on her from the time when she was seven years of age.
While she also loved her mother, she said: “I walked out those court doors an orphan.”
Ms Doyle, who had been raped and indecently assaulted by her father, Patrick O’Brien, over a 10-year period, described how she learned that a request by him for a coffee was a coded signal for sex.
Last night she told Late Late Show host Ryan Tubridy: “It was the sign, the code. I’d be called at night when my mother went to bingo. ‘Fiona come down here and make me a cup of coffee’. And I’d come down, make him a cup of coffee and I’d bring it in to him and then just stand there and wait and see what position he wanted or what he wanted me to do.”
She also described the stress she still felt as an adult recalling details of the abuse that started on the day before her First Holy Communion.
Writing her victim impact statement for her father’s criminal trial was particularly difficult. “My First Communion became significant when I was writing my victim impact statement. I wrote about my feelings and the effects of the abuse, not the rape. I didn’t think I could write about it.
“I was stressed about it. I sat up the whole night and forced myself to remember the details, struggling because I was little at the time.”
She said that she “cut a lot of the nasty details” and wrote it in a way that she would feel comfortable reading it to the court. However, she said she still felt uneasy telling other people about the abuse.
She also described her mixed emotions when she saw her father being led away to prison, saying she knew it would be the last time she would see him.
“I nearly shouted at them not to take him. I nearly said ‘Don’t lock him up.’”
Earlier yesterday her daughter, Kristel, 26, said her mother got “the best sleep of her life” on Thursday after Justice Paul Carney revoked O’Brien’s bail and sending him to jail.
O’Brien, aged 72, of Old Court Avenue, Bray, Co Wicklow pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to 16 charges of the rape of his daughter.
Kristel said that while the judge’s decision to send her grandfather to jail came four days too late, she was happy that he had acknowledged that an earlier decision to grant him bail was wrong.
“He did apologise and he did rectify it,” she said. “He did it quite quickly. Unfortunately, it was four days too long, but he did it. Now it is written in law that my mum was telling the truth and no one can ever change that.”
In his initial decision not to send O’Brien to jail, Judge Carney took into account O’Brien’s old age and ailing health. But Kristel told RTÉ radio yesterday that her grandfather had “exaggerated” his illnesses.
“As for the walker, he was more than able to lift that out of the boot of that taxi and then all of a sudden he had to use it to walk? It doesn’t make sense,” she said.
“It was laid on for the courts and for the cameras.”
She said her grandfather had shown “no remorse whatsoever” for his crime and if he had, he would have pleaded guilty to more counts of rape.
The courts heard the abuse started the night before Ms Doyle’s First Holy Communion. But Kristel said it had, in fact, started “way before” that night.
“There is a whole lot more to this story and my mother wants to get all of that out there: How heinous it was; the real age it started from; how long it continued for.”
Her mother is currently writing a book and “some of the stories you will not believe”, Kristel said.
Ms Doyle tried to tell people about abuse but her mother would call her a “troublemaker” and provide a cover for her father.
Kristel said her grandparents also tried to put her down when she became the first person in the family to finish school. “They told me I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t smart enough, and I couldn’t do it.” she said. “I was told I was up myself and I was very snobby”
“I wanted to go travelling and I was told: ‘You can’t go around splashing your money like that.’ Anything I tried to do to better myself was brought down.”
Kristel said she figured out what had happened to her mother when she was 14, both because of her mother’s over-protectiveness towards her children and Ms Doyle’s fraught relationship with her own parents.
She said there was no way of holding her grandmother legally responsible for her failure to protect her mother as a child.
“But I do take some solace in the fact that she has lost her husband, she has lost her family, she has lost the community in which she lives in. She will be in some sort of prison if not actual prison,” said Kristel.
