I feared people would come to my home and threaten me and my sons for even suggesting that my uncle, Bishop Eamonn Casey, was capable of rape.
I was only able to make that call decades later as I completely believed that the child protection team would prevent him from accessing children ever again in his lifetime.
Then two weeks later, I was told the Vatican had decided he was not allowed to say Mass in public ever again, and that the Galway Diocese had to take him back to live there.
He was no longer permitted to stay in the Diocese of Brighton and Arundel in England, where he had been since 1998, after returning from Ecuador.
At that point, I believed that children and vulnerable adults would be safe from him. That is what should have happened.
Now that I know the restrictions against him were never fully enforced – either during his permanent ban from ministry or his initial suspension – it horrifies me to think that between November 2005 and up to his death in March 2017, he could have abused other children and vulnerable adults.
It is an exceptionally hard thing to do, to report an abuser. Most of the people I have met in my lifetime who have been abused are unable to do this.
For whatever reason, I seem to be constructed in a way that gives me no choice but to follow the path of justice. Despite the huge cost to my emotional health, there is a part of me that has to seek justice and accountability no matter what it costs me personally.
I felt I had no choice but to report Bishop Casey due to the risk he posed to others, and I had to carry on no matter what that cost me.
Years ago, I would have urged anyone who was abused to report it. Now, I know that a lot of survivors can’t do this or choose not to, for a variety of complex reasons.
I would say to all survivors, ‘You are not responsible for anyone but yourselves and it is not your fault if someone who abused you, abuses another person. Look after yourselves, and I hope that all of you will find a reasonable humane existence in this world.’
My life has been destroyed by the abuse I suffered and even further destroyed by what happened after I reported it.
I have lost relationships with most of my family. I have never had any effective psychological support despite a 20-year search and have no adequate tools to help me deal with the everyday nightmare of my life.
Do I regret reporting the abuse? No, because if I did, it would be to doubt the essence of who I am.
One of the reasons I continue to live is to challenge the lack of integrity and truth in the Catholic Church’s handling of sexual abuse with the hope that something I do will prevent a child from being abused like I was and that, as a result, I may find some peace, or feel like I have achieved something.
I feel, at times, that I have failed in what I set out to do in my efforts to protect children and vulnerable adults from abuse, but I haven’t failed. It is the church that has catastrophically failed.
When I was asked in 2019 to take part in a documentary for RTÉ, I agreed because I felt he had to be exposed as a paedophile.
On the day I went to meet reporter Anne Sheridan and RTÉ producer Birthe Tonseth to start filming in January 2020, I was determined to go through with this, even though I had no idea how I was going to speak on camera.
The only reason I felt safe enough to even try was because I knew Anne through her reporting for the Irish Mail on Sunday for months prior to this. The parameters of what I was willing to talk about on camera had been discussed in advance.
When I arrived, I was so distressed it took hours of talking to Anne and Birthe about the abuse, and my fears of the documentary being aired and what it could mean for me before any filming could start.
I had huge support from Anne and Birthe, and this enabled me to feel safe enough to get through the process of filming.
Now that it has been aired, I wonder if has it helped victims. I don’t know. It was tortuous for me, to wait for the documentary to be aired. It felt like I was waiting to go to court, that I would be judged on what I said.
I weep for the five-year-old part of me that is still waiting to be released from hell.
I still live in the nightmare of abuse, and nothing has been effective in coping with the daily flashbacks of trauma.
On the day the documentary was aired, feeling overwhelmed at what was to come, I listened to Joe Duffy’s Liveline programme on RTÉ Radio One.
I was shocked to hear my name being spoken repeatedly and hear Joe quote part of what I said. It felt surreal, and it still is.
I couldn’t quite grasp that I was being believed; that I was being spoken about like I was a real human being that was worthy of being believed. I kept repeating over and over again out loud: ‘They believe me. I am worth believing.’
I felt like I was a real person at that point and that I had a right to exist in this world.
When I reported my uncle for abuse to the authorities in 2005, I felt like I was branded a liar in the media reports that followed, and I have never quite recovered from that.
It seemed inconceivable that people were now saying the opposite.
All the kind words, of how courageous people said I was, penetrated a protective wall around me and it has been difficult to absorb.
Now weeks later, I still don’t know what to say, except to say thank you to everyone who believes me.
Maybe in time, it will sink in, and I will find a way of forgiving the part of me that still believes it is her fault.
I am autistic and I always struggle to interpret generic words that people use.
In the statement by the Diocese of Galway on July 23 last, the day after the documentary aired, the Bishop of Galway, Michael Duignan wrote: ‘My priority is that any person who was betrayed or harmed by Bishop Casey is heard and that their experiences are appropriately acknowledged and recognised.’
Does he mean that I now deserve to be appropriately acknowledged and recognised? And if so, how?
For many years, I have imagined being invited to speak to a Bishop in a way that could feel safe and to have a Bishop or a member of the hierarchy sincerely apologise for the harm that the Catholic Church has inflicted upon me and finally help me.
The problem with being severely traumatised by sexual abuse is that the capacity you need to communicate to get help is impaired by those traumatic events.
This means that contacting the Catholic Church is impossible for me. I need to be personally invited and made to feel welcome, not invited by a public statement.
When I did contact the then Bishop of Galway, Dr Martin Drennan, after my mother’s funeral in 2007, I felt like I was treated almost as if the abuse was my responsibility.
I was told that ‘there are at least two sides to every story and I have heard some of his side’, in relation to my uncle.
I have not been contacted by the Galway Diocese, nor any diocese, since the programme aired.
I feel it is the minimum they should do to attempt to heal some of the harm done to me by the Church, both the trauma of the actual abuse and the trauma of how it has been handled since.
I don’t know if I may ever feel safe enough to engage with senior members of the clergy, but I think they should at least extend a personal invitation to me, rather than a statement simply emailed to the media in the hope of potentially reaching us.
I want the Catholic Church to be a place where all members of the clergy are properly managed when it is discovered that they are a risk to children and vulnerable adults.
I want the Catholic Church to become a place where all are protected from predators within the system of the church.
I also want the victims of abuse to be helped in a way that takes account of how the trauma they suffered impacts their ability to communicate with the Church.
The first step towards this would be to acknowledge that the Church failed to protect children and vulnerable adults from harm by Bishop Casey.
They should also acknowledge he should never have been buried as a bishop.
He should now be removed from the crypt and all of the symbols of power the Church gave him in life be removed from him in death.
This honour is no longer his, it was never his, and he should be dealt with as an ordinary man who has done a great deal of evil.