A young woman has said two boys who raped her at Limerick Racecourse when she was 16 stripped her of her innocence.
In a victim impact statement read out by counsel at a Central Criminal Court sentence hearing on Monday, the woman, now aged 18, said she had to live with what happened to her for the rest of the life.
“They not only took away the rest of my childhood, they took away the rest of my life,” she said. “At the age of 16, I was raped. This is always something I will have to carry around. But what I can do is live with the fact that I told the truth.”
Three boys stood trial at the Central Criminal Court sitting in Cork this year.
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Two of the boys, now 16 and 17, were found guilty of sexually assaulting and raping the girl in a car at Limerick Racecourse on December 26th, 2022. They were aged 13 and 15 at the time.
The third boy, who is now 18, was found guilty by the jury of four counts of aiding and abetting the rapes and sexual assaults. The court heard he moved the car during the attack. He was 15 at the time. He was acquitted of one count of false imprisonment.
Video clips were taken of the incident by one of the boys, including one clip of the girl walking away from the car after she had been raped.
The boys denied raping the girl, telling gardaí differing versions of events. One said he was in Dublin on the day in question. They all eventually claimed it was a consensual encounter.
The court heard previously that the girl was, in her own words, “really drunk” when she got chatting to the three boys.
The prosecution said the girl agreed to go for a walk with one of the boys because she wanted to kiss him. Instead, she found herself in a car belonging to one of the boy’s fathers where she was sexually assaulted and raped by two of them.
The girl said she told the boys “no” repeatedly and that she was on her period and had a tampon in.
When medically examined later that evening, she was found to have extensive bleeding and bruising. She was a virgin before the attack.
She was not in court for the sentence hearing in Dublin on Monday. In a victim statement read out on her behalf by counsel, she described her fear and anxiety in the aftermath of the attack, during which she was “begging them to get off me”.
“At the age of 16, I had my innocence stripped away from me,” she said. “These two [boys] took what they wanted with no regrets.”
She said her parents had to hear every “vulgar” and “gruesome” detail of what happened to her and that she will “forever have guilt on my shoulders – not just for how it affected me, but everyone around me”.
The court heard the boys, all cousins, have no previous convictions. They are all in detention or custody since the guilty verdicts were handed down last April.
The case was adjourned for a number of weeks for mention while probation reports are awaited.
