Foster mother says she believes boy was raped by father

A foster parent of a child who was allegedly raped by his father and forced to have sex with his mother has told a trial she believes the accusations.

The now 12-year-old boy was taken into care when he was eight before moving to the witness’s foster home.

During her third day of evidence at the Central Criminal Court, the foster mother told the jury that the child was a “total contradiction”.

She said sometimes he would be very childlike, while other times he talked and acted like an adult, including displaying sexual behaviour.

“Of course he’s a total contradiction; he wasn’t allowed to be a child when growing up,” she told defence counsel Colman Cody SC.

Referring to the child’s sexualised behaviour, she said “he had to have learned that somewhere”.

Asked if she believed the child’s allegations of abuse, she said she did.

“I find it very hard to believe that an eight- or nine-year-old would make up the things he said to me.”

“I believed the truth of what the child was saying to me because I picked him up off the floor when he collapsed crying, when he nearly couldn’t breathe because he was crying so much,” she said.

The boy has previously alleged his father raped him, sexually abused him with a hot poker and forced him to have sex with his mother over the course of several years from when he was about six-years-old in their Waterford home.

The father is alleged to have filmed some of these incidents and shown them to others.

He is further alleged to have held a gun to the child’s head and to have left him locked in a box.

The parents face a total of 82 charges of abuse between 2007 and 2011 in Waterford.

The father and mother have pleaded not guilty to 16 counts each of sexual exploitation and one charge each of child cruelty.

The mother has also denied 16 counts of sexual assault while the father denies 16 counts of anal rape and 16 counts of sexual assault with a poker.

‘Very imaginative’

Mr Cody, who represents the child’s father, asked the witness about the boy’s imagination.

She said he was very imaginative and would write and read a lot.

She said the boy had written the outline for a book he was planning called My Life in My Hell.

Counsel asked if the child would blame the alleged abuse by his father every time he got into trouble for being bold.

The foster mother said sometimes he would but not always.

In 2013 the boy was taken out of the foster home and into residential care in the UK because his sexualised behaviour required specialised treatment, the trial previously heard.

The foster mother told the jury that his last words to her before leaving were: “I feel like a dog that nobody wants.”

She said she still loved the boy and had kept in touch with him since.

She said she would “take him back in the morning” but she knew that couldn’t happen.

Mr Cody put it to her that she believed “only one version of what the child said” and that she “found it difficult to believe any other explanation”.

She said it wasn’t her job to investigate the allegations, just to record them.

The trial continues before Mr Justice Robert Eagar and a jury.