‘I lost five years of my life waiting for a trial’: Bláthnaid Raleigh describes pain of court delay following rape

Bláthnaid Raleigh, who waived her right to anonymity this week at the sentencing of her rapist Johnny Moran, has told of how people she met on the street in Galway after her attack brought her to a Garda station on the morning of her attack, ensuring DNA and crime scene evidence could be collected.

In a lengthy interview with Oliver Callan on RTÉ radio, Ms Raleigh also said that she intends to return to education to complete a Masters in childhood education, possibly with an emphasis on social care.

Now aged 26, Ms Raleigh said for a long time after the brutal incident she did not feel she could use the word rape as there had not been a conviction. She would use the words assault or incident.

[ Man jailed for ‘appalling’ rape of woman with bottle after night out in Galway ]

“I never felt I had the right to say I was raped because I didn’t have a conviction,” she said. “I didn’t have anybody to say, this is what happened.”

“Then when the verdict came back, I felt like I finally could say, no, this is what happened. I was raped. That’s what happened.”

Speaking about the wake of the incident she described encountering a group of a people “at the end of their night out” who asked her if she was okay and tried to reassure her.

“This guy had kind of been watching. And he kept saying, there’s something not right about this girl. Like something has happened to her. She’s not that upset because she can’t find her friends,” she said.

“And he kept saying to me, ‘I think you need to go to the guards. Will you just let me walk you to the guards? Because they’ll find your friends. They’ll get you home. You know, we can’t drive now’. So him and this girl walked me to the Garda station in Galway, that morning.

“And I never saw him again. I never got to know his name. But I have so much to thank that man for, because that meant the guards got into the house by nine that morning. I got to the sexual assault treatment unit that morning, which meant DNA could be obtained. All of that kind of stuff, that the crime scene had basically been untouched. You know, all because somebody just said something’s not right here with this girl.”

“The reality of it is, I could have gone home and had a shower and changed my clothes, or he could have had time to clean up in the house or get rid of evidence. And I could be looking at a very different situation, you know.”

Ms Raleigh said that the five years that it took for the case to come to a conclusion had been difficult. “I lost five years of my life to waiting for a trial and to share in my hometown with somebody who had done this and it takes so, so long. And then we get a trial date and it would get to the trial, and I’d be so hyped up, I’d be in a great place, and we get so close to it, and all of a sudden my sleep would change, nightmares would start.

“You think that this is it, once this is done now I can go and do my masters and I can go and do this. And then all of a sudden it would be they didn’t have enough judges, or you get to the day and they’d say, no, we don’t have it. It’s been pushed back. And I don’t think these people pushing back the days, it felt like nobody ever saw the other person on the other side of this, how much their life was being affected by every time it was pushed out.”

[ Naming of rapist Jonathan Moran has brought ‘great comfort’, Bláthnaid Raleigh says ]

Her mechanism for coping during the process was to read up on past cases, and she said she waived her right to anonymity to help others in her situation, having been in an “extremely lonely place” herself.

“A lot of the people that I had seen were historical, sexual violence cases, and they’re equally as traumatising. But I couldn’t relate to anybody,” she said. “I couldn’t see anybody young that this had happened to, that would understand what I felt now, and I thought, if I can give somebody a little bit of comfort, if they can see my face or, you know, if they want to drop me a message or something, if I can help somebody with this, it’ll be worth something.”