'God and the Rape Crisis Centre are helping me': Yvonne O'Rouke on Defence Forces abuse

Sun, 08 Sep, 2024 - 21:50

Ann Murphy

As Yvonne O’Rourke lay crumpled up in Kilbride cemetery across the road from Baldonnel Aerodrome on a cold February night, a local farmer who came on her thought she was a balled-up plastic bag. Alerted to a noise in the graveyard by his barking dog, he thought it had been a false alarm until he noticed a little finger moving and quickly realised that the 'plastic bag' was a human being who was close to death.

He quickly raised the alarm and she was resuscitated and rushed to hospital amid fears that she would not survive. So serious was her condition on that night in 2002 that her parents had to be brought to Dublin from Tipperary by the Air Corps — just nine months after their eldest son died in a car crash.

The man who found her that night — and saved her life — was not to know that she had spent the night drinking to bury the pain she had been carrying around for five years, since she had been sexually assaulted on a night out by one of her superiors in the Defence Forces.

Neither did he know that just a short time earlier, she had fallen into a hole dug in a nearby field for a percolation test and her collapse in the cemetery was the culmination of a terrible day for her. She had earlier found out that hopes to get a place in a college course to help her carve out a niche in the Defence Forces had failed, and the disappointment was too much to bear on top of the burden she already carried.

She details the incident itself in a newly-released video on a Catholic YouTube channel run by media group Shalom World.

More than two decades on from that night in 2002, the former Defence Forces captain is a proud wife and mother of three boys. In 2020, the Workplace Relations Commission ordered the Minister for Defence to pay €117,814 in compensation to her after finding she was victim to gender discrimination arising from “an unacceptable systematic failure” in the Defence Forces.

She is also widely known as one of the Women of Honour group who blew the whistle on abuse and misconduct in the Defence Forces.

As she prepares her submission for the tribunal of inquiry into allegations of sexual harassment and bullying within the Defence Forces, the Tipperary woman must relive the traumas arising out of sexual abuse by a male member of the force five years before that horror night in Kilbride, but she must also grapple with memories of dark days when bulimia, depression, and alcohol dependence dominated her days.

Her wish to die at times overshadowed her will to live, she admits, but she is resolute that she will continue her fight for justice as one of the Women of Honour, who revealed what they had endured in the Defence Forces in an RTÉ documentary with Katie Hannon.

Painful process

Yvonne is not slow to admit that the process is difficult and she has reached out for support to the Rape Crisis Centre in recent times, cognisant of the effect that reliving her story could have for her.

She also believes she is being cossetted through the difficult times by God and Jesus, who are very present in her life since she returned to the Catholic religion she abandoned during her early days of training in the Cadet School which she joined at the age of 17 years old.

She admits that her religious devotion may not be popular in the modern world, but she is unfazed and says that when she takes out her submission to continue working on it, she sprinkles holy water on it to help her continue.

She credits a visit to Medjugorje in 2003 with a friend as being the turnaround point in her life and says now that the sexual assault led to her hating herself intently in the following days, weeks, months and years.

It was something she carried deep within her, and wasn’t spoken about to anyone.

It took me being resuscitated to tell people I had been sexually abused. I couldn’t tell anyone but I tried killing myself. I was so young and so naïve. It was a different world back in the late 1990s.

The strength and depth of the hatred and horror of what had happened to her led to her seeking a way to control her life — leading her to develop bulimia.

She recalls of those dark days: “You hate yourself so much, you eat yourself to the point where your belly hurts and then you get relief out of getting sick.”

“When you are in the midst of it, it is an awful illness or disease. It is so secretive. I remember being at home and getting sick late at night when staying in my parents house, waiting until everyone went to bed. It is absolutely disgusting for anyone who is going through. It is so hard and is so impinging on your life. You are literally constantly trying to orientate your life around where you are going, trying to get out of meals, where can you get sick. It is an awful disease.”

I feel anyone who has that (bulimia) really doesn’t think they are loveable and I wasn’t, from my point of view. You absolutely hate yourself so bad and you think you are so unworthy. You try and smile at everyone. When I was going through all that, everyone would say I was smiling all the time and that I was so happy.”

She knows though that the seed for developing bulimia had been planted much earlier than the assault on her in 1997.

What happened with me was that I would have been very very fit and very active when I went into the Cadet School and then I slipped my disk during an exercise, and I had to repeat a year. At the start of the year, I still had a back injury so I wasn’t participating in all the activities that the lads were.”

But she was still able to perform well academically, despite not being able to partake in the same level of physical activities. She recalls then being left on her own during meal times and she felt it “got very vicious, very quickly”.

Yvonne O’Rourke with Fellow Women of Honour Diane Byrne and Roslyn O’Callaghan outside Government buildings last November. Picture: Conor Ó Mearáin/Collins

She felt it was so degrading “that I ended up making a decision at one stage to go across the road and get beans and mash and I would stay in my room and just make up the beans with the hot mash rather than be subjected to that.”

It took her over 30 months to complete the course, instead of 21, after she slipped the disk. She says now that she left the course with a lack of confidence.

She went into the air control tower in Baldonnel but failed one element of training there and had to go to camp for a period as a result.

It was around the same time as the sexual assault and she says a darkness then entered her life.

She continued: “Something kind of started after the Cadet School because I associated it with being ignored and with being disrespected completely. I was in the Cadet School from 1991 to 1994 and the sexual abuse happened in 1997. After the Cadet School, I definitely restricted my food. I think there was a fear that I would be ignored if I went to eat.

“But it was after the sexual assault then that it went into the spiral of hating myself, and then going eat, eat, eat and then get sick – up to eight times a day. It was just crazy.”

She wanted to protect her family from the horror of what she was going through, and reflects: “I kept them in the dark for a long, long time. I don’t know did I ever actually come out and say it to them. I can’t remember ever actually saying to them that I had bulimia.

You love your family and you don’t want them to ever know you are in pain. There was obviously a lot of pain there. If any message could come out of anything, it is to speak out because when you bring it in and you internalise it, it eats you up completely.

“I can remember at one stage that my heart would be thumping and I had heard of cases of people (who had bulimia) who would have had heart attacks. I knew this but I still couldn’t stop doing it. It was mind-boggling.”

“For anyone who is going through it, my heart would bleed for them because it is such a hard thing to live with. You are someone who is in such pain and suffering so much, and is going through so much turmoil and so much despair.”

Yvonne says she now has a much healthier relationship with food: “I remember one time going out with someone who wanted to take me out for a meal and I would say I wasn’t hungry. Now, the beauty of actually going out with someone for a meal now is great and to enjoy it and to love it and know it is nourishing your body and it is all good, it is just another level from where I was. For people who are in the depths of it, you are not even going out with your boyfriend for a meal. It is a crazy place to be.”

“You have lost control, your body has been absolutely been interfered with in a way that it never should have been so your body is in complete shock and this is you in control of your body, which is crazy.”

She adds that while she is now in recovery, she says she still has a legacy from the bulimia: “Even now, my teeth have chips and everything.”

Food was not the only thing she abused in her efforts to control her hurt and devastation after the abuse. She also turned to alcohol as something to help her forget.

After the abuse, I was going out the whole time, drinking my problems away. I just wanted to die. When your body has been violated, it is the most intrusive thing and you go into absolute hell.

“Before that, I wasn’t a big drinker. I often wonder how people didn’t ever say it to me about why was I drinking so much. I often wonder if only one person had said it, would I be able to say what had happened to me.”

She feels she is in a much stronger place now and has gone on to work as a chaplain in a school in Roscrea.

She is adamant that her transition is down to the 2003 visit to Medjugorje, having tried counselling and other therapies previously.

She is grateful to the friend who helped her find her faith again – as well as to the man and his dog who found her that night in Kilbride cemetery. Sometime after recovering from that incident, she gave the man a statue of a man and a dog as a “thank you” gift.

She found peace during the two weeks she spent in Medjugorje and returned home feeling like a different person, she recalls. She remembers her parents noticing the improvement in her and she often returns there.

She says: “For me, I let Jesus into my heart and went to Medjugorje. I received a great, great blessing over there and the healing was there. I got power over there from God.”

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