'Part of my soul is damaged, and probably will be forever. I'm telling my story to show women and men who have been raped that you can survive'

Fiona Moran was 15 when she was raped by a gang of boys. Now working as a rape crisis volunteer, she says threatened closure of the service will leave young victims without support

IT WAS THE summer of 1985. The summer of Live Aid and the moving statue at Ballinspittle. It was the summer when Fiona Moran, who loved U2 and hated Duran Duran, had just turned 15. One day that summer, wearing her school-holiday uniform of jeans and T-shirt, she was chased and held down in the woods in her hometown of Shannon, Co Clare, by a group of people who until that moment she called her friends. And then she was raped.

Now 41, and a mother of four, Moran is a trained Rape Crisis volunteer supporting other people who have been through similarly harrowing experiences. In her own case she did not go to the Garda or tell her family what happened, fearful of the repercussions. “I never got help myself, but at least now I can help people access the services that are there for them and encourage people to avail of those services,” she says.

Until now, Moran has never spoken publicly about the rape. She is telling her story for the first time because of the feared closure of Rape Crisis Network Ireland (RCNI), the umbrella group for rape crisis centres across the country.

From the end of July, the HSE will withdraw all core funding from the organisation. This will mean redundancy for half of the six staff, with significantly reduced hours for the remaining three, making the future of the organisation uncertain. The Minister for Health is reviewing the HSE decision.

Without core funding the RCNI could face closure, and if that happens, a spokesperson says, those administering frontline services in the sector will now also be burdened with added administrative, advocacy and statistic-gathering services previously carried out by RCNI. “These services are vital. Rape-crisis centres don’t have the resources to do what RCNI does; cutting the funding is a massive mistake,” says Moran.

Moran’s life, before her attack, had not been easy. As a teenager she cared for her mother, who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Looking back, she knows she had low self-esteem from living with her mother’s violent mood swings and regular threats of suicide. Unable to cope with his wife’s illness, Moran’s father had left the family home for Scotland with no explanation, leaving no forwarding address. She had an older brother with his own problems who was “angry all the time”.

“Life at home was dysfunctional,” she says. “When I was out with my friends, just hanging around, I could get away from all that.” The day the attack happened, she was the only girl in the gang of teenagers who had arranged to gather, as usual, around Tullyvarraga Hill, in Shannon, a sloping beauty spot covered in pine trees. It was a sunny day, she remembers. Tullyvarraga was a regular haunt for her gang of friends. “Unless you were into sports, there wasn’t much to do around Shannon,” she says. One of the lads she met there that day told her the others were in a house nearby watching a film. When she got there, she realised they were watching a pornographic video. She can still remember the name of the film and recalls that she laughed when she saw what was going on because she didn’t want to get slagged by the young men. “I felt uncomfortable, but I was trying to be one of the lads.”

The next thing she knew, a game had begun, a game that involved her being chased like human quarry back towards Tullyvarraga Hill. “I ran from the house, and I remember getting to the top of the hill ahead of them. I was winded. I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t think anything nasty was going to happen to me. These were my friends, but I was freaked out. I could have turned left and headed for home and the shops, but I decided, stupidly, to turn right and head for the forest, where I could hide.”

In the forest one of the boys caught her and tried to help her find a hiding place. She thinks, looking back, that it had all been arranged – later it seemed odd that she was the only girl there that day – and that he must have known what was planned.

The rest of the gang caught up with her anyway. They sat on her legs so she couldn’t move. She remembers the pine needles sticking in her back, and she remembers shouting at them, to “get the fuck away from me; leave me alone”. It might have lasted “10 minutes or half an hour”. She remembers hearing one of the six teenagers who attacked her saying, “That’s enough, leave her alone,” and then hearing the laughter as they decided to head back down the hill. She was left bruised, in shock, her clothes torn.

“I just gathered myself together and tried to make myself as respectable-looking as possible,” she says. “I knew immediately there was no point telling anyone; it was my word against six. Anyway, if I told my mother it was likely she’d have a breakdown and end up in the mental hospital. If I told my brother he would have gone and killed somebody. I couldn’t tell my father because I didn’t even have his address. I went home and scrubbed myself in the shower until I was raw, trying to get rid of the guilt and shame. All I could think was that it was my fault. That I must have given them some signal. I was convinced I brought it on myself.”

Unable to scrub away the guilt and shame, she stopped going out. She made up excuses to avoid people. After a hospital visit for a suspected kidney problem, which may have been associated with internal bruising from the attack, the rumours started. That she had gone off for an abortion. Or another one – “the biggest rumour” – that she had administered a home abortion with a vacuum cleaner.

At one point she told a friend what had happened, but when she was questioned by a teacher she denied everything, terrified of what might happen if her mother found out or the Garda got involved. “I kept on saying it never happened. I felt so much guilt and shame at the time. I had stood in the sittingroom while they watched porn. I let it happen. That’s the way I looked at it.” Word went around that she had been lying, and, overnight, graffiti appeared on her house: “Fiona Moran is a liar and a slut and a whore.”

After this, Moran says she “pressed the self-destruct button”, becoming promiscuous and reckless, living up to the labels that were being stuck to her. There were meaningless relationships and one-night stands and times when she sabotaged healthy relationships, because she felt she was “damaged goods” and didn’t deserve to be happy.

The next 15 years of her life were chaotic. She became pregnant at 17, during a brief relationship that ended before she had her first child. She went on to marry a man who later developed serious mental-health issues and had a son and a daughter with him. Ten years after the attack, one of the men involved apologised to her after bumping into her around the town. “I was stunned,” she says.

After her husband attempted suicide the first time, a friend suggested she go to counselling. “It shows you how I’d become the queen of the brave face, that I didn’t understand why she thought I needed counselling when it was him that was having problems,” she says. She went, though, finally opening up about what happened 10 years after she was raped. “It all came out, the floodgates opened; I told her everything about the rape and my mother. I think [the counsellor] needed counselling after talking to me. I remember she said, ‘How are you still sane?’ It was so powerful to tell somebody what happened and to be believed. I’d been suicidal and depressed for a long time, but I never related it to my rape, I think because I wanted to deny the fact that it happened.”

Although starting to talk about her past was the beginning of her coming to terms with the attack, it took years before real recovery began. Being open about the rape had raised another issue from her past. She had been sexually abused as a child by a family friend, something she had also kept secret. The depression continued. Her husband killed himself, which left her emotionally shattered.

In her next relationship she finally felt able to open up to a partner about what was causing her depression, but his unsupportive reaction caused more problems. “When I told him, he looked at me as though I was a piece of dirt at the bottom of his shoe. I closed in on myself again, convinced myself that my children would be better off without this non-functioning shell of a person looking after them,” she says.

Her father, whom she had become close with again when he returned to the family home after her mother’s death in a house fire, was now dying of cancer. She felt “utterly depressed and insignificant” and twice tried to take her own life. “Both times people found me in time and stopped me. But as far as I was concerned I was going to do it eventually,” she says. Her father’s death was a turning point. “It was like a light went on in my head when he died. He was a strong man, and it was as though his strength went into me. I got out of the unhealthy relationship I was in and just spent time on my own. Two years ago I became a volunteer for the rape crisis centre. At the first meeting I said, ‘My name is Fiona and I am a survivor of rape,’ and there was this round of applause.”

She says the support and encouragement of her colleagues at the rape crisis centre was incredible. She trained to support victims who came to the sexual assault trauma unit in Limerick. “During the training you have to work out your own issues, which was so important for me. I had to deal with my own emotions so I could be a support to other victims.”

She is now doing something she couldn’t do when she was 15, she says. When victims are faced with the forensic exam it can be “so traumatic, like being raped all over again, so to be there for them and support them is so important. One woman I helped said she couldn’t have done it without me, and it made me realise this is what I am supposed to be doing.”

Moran is now studying for a degree in criminology and hopes one day to become a full-time advocate for rape victims.

“For me it’s closure, it’s coming full circle,” she explains. “I wasn’t able to help myself; now I am helping others. I tell them when they are waiting for the forensic exam that I know what they are going through, that I survived and so can they.”

The first woman she supported had been anally raped, which, as she had taken a shower since the attack, meant the forensic exam was crucial to identify her attacker. “I told her she didn’t have to do it, but she was brave enough to go through with it. The most recent girl I worked with was 15, which was very poignant for me.”

The people who raped her still live around Shannon. Until recently, when she moved to Co Kildare, she sometimes saw them in the supermarket or in the pub. “I know they have families themselves now . . . I hope to God it never happens to any of their children.”

Moran is in a “wonderful relationship” with a man who supports her volunteer work, but she says she does not know if she will ever fully recover from the attack.

“Part of my soul is damaged, and I think it probably will be forever,” she says. “I’m telling my story now to show women and men who have been raped that you can survive and to encourage them to come forward and ask for help. I am still hoping the funding decision will be reversed. These services can save people’s lives.”

These services are vital. Rape crisis centres don’t have the resources to

do what RCNI does. Cutting the funding is

a massive mistake