Last week, 70 year old Noel Farrell, from Sligo, was sent to prison for a minimum term of 20 years. His crime? That he had, over a period of many years, systematically abused his own children, pairing horrific paedophilic sex crimes with physical abuse up to and including locking them in rooms for so long that they were forced to drink their own urine.
The only reason that the public knows Noel Farrell’s name is the immense bravery of his children, who waived their own statutory right to anonymity so that their monstrous father could be named and shamed in public. In a statement outside court, his now adult daughter Jessica, mustering a level of dignity that one only wishes could be taught in schools, said that “No words can truly express the depth of pain, fear and confusion that shaped our childhoods. What happened stole parts of us we can never get back.”
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