AFTER the detectives came to break the news, she walked to a field in the grounds of a religious order's house and hung herself from a tree with her scarf. Inside, she felt dead already.

For years, the prospect of seeing the man who raped her being convicted by a court of the land and sent to jail had kept her engaged in living. The garda� were optimistic.

Three other girls had sworn statements that he had sexually abused them too. These crimes were much more recent than the seven alleged rapes he had got away with in 1994 when the Supreme Court had ruled that they were so old he could not adequately defend himself against the charges. This second case file was watertight. The garda� had worked assiduously, ever since she first went to them in 1997. They were talking about having him extradited from the US. Her counselling sessions were concentrated on getting her psychologically prepared for the ordeal of being crossexamined.

No extradition At first, after the guards sat with heavy surrender in her living room and told her that the state had decided not to apply for George Gibney's extradition, all she felt was relief. She would not have to go to court after all. Would not have to see his face ever again. Would not have to recount to an audience of strangers the intense details of that day he raped her in a hotel room in Florida when she was just 17.

It was a priest who cut her down from the tree two years ago. Her parents got the call from a hospital emergency room. They were sorrowfully practised in the drill.

The hospital calls had become part of their lives. Often, she would get up and leave the house in the middle of the night and wander aimlessly abroad. Sometimes she was admitted to A&E bleeding copiously after cutting her body indiscriminately with a knife or blades. Other times it would be an overdose of pills.

She had never tried to hang herself before, though.

It was the anger, she explains in a leaden voice. The raging anger that boiled inside her once the initial relief receded and which she could not express. She was left to drift like flotsam after a catastrophe in the sea. She who was once a future Olympic swimmer. The girl who cut through the water so fast that bystanders on the bank turned to one another and asked what was her name. A name to watch out for in the future, they would nod. That name lost to her now as she reluctantly chooses anonymity for a veil of armour. As if to compensate, she only ever alludes to George Gibney by his surname.

"I think he saw a vulnerability in me, " she agrees.

Her destiny was decided when she was five, after her mother was taken to Peamount Hospital with TB and remained there for six months. While her father would visit his wife at the hospital, the child would be sent to the house three doors down, where other little girls about her own age were minded by their live-in grandfather.

"If you tell anybody, your mother will die and it'll be all your fault, " the grandfather threatened her after the first time he sexually abused her, aged five-and-a-half.

The abuse was a regular occurence, becoming increasingly severe and rough. Once, when she was seven, she came home with scrapes and bruises and had to make excuses to her parents. When she was nine, her parents, worried about her psychological withdrawal, brought her to Temple Street children's hospital. It was supposed that her symptoms were a natural response to her mother's prolonged absence from home.

Her parents hired a private tutor to come to the house because she had fallen behind academically in school. All the while, the abuse continued, not stopping until she was 11, when the other family moved away from the locality.

When a swimming pool opened in her neighbourhood and she went there for the first time, she discovered a means of escape. "It felt like I was flying, " she remembers. "Like I'd been freed. I put everything into it. I really focused. It happened so quickly. One year, I wasn't able to swim. Within a year, I was breaking Irish records. People were wondering who I was."

Gibney eulogy One day, a swimming coach phoned her parents after seeing her swim and told them she had the potential to be a great champion. Trojans Swimming Club in Blackrock was recommended, the citation eulogising its founder, George Gibney, the Irish Amateur Swimming Association's national coach when she joined in 1990 and Olympic coach to the Irish team in Seoul two years earlier. In 1990, most of the club's most accomplished swimmers left Trojans, their puzzling departure barely whispered in swimming circles. (It has since emerged that, in 1990, a male swimmer informed a senior swimming official that George Gibney had raped him when he was 11. ) Even though the pool was 18 miles from their home, she and her father rose from bed at four o'clock every morning to be at the pool by 5.15am, as stipulated. While her father slept outside in the car, she was swimming her heart out inside.

"I was so driven. All I wanted to do was to go to the Olympics at any cost. That was my dream."

Gibney showered her with attention. Promised her he would make her a star. Gave her swimming togs and tracksuits and hats and goggles. Hugged her every time she swam well. That year, at the national championships, she streaked home first in the 50m freestyle, the 100m freestyle, the 100m breaststroke and the 100m butterfly. She was 16 years old, perfectly poised to be selected for the next Olympic games in Barcelona in 1992.

Then the sun went in. She was competing in Holland with the club.

After one of the swim meets, she returned to her hotel room to dress for a disco that was part of the swimmers' itinerary. "Gibney came to the room and started saying how bad I was and that I was never going to go anywhere. Suddenly, he jumped on me. He pushed me down on the bed and then left the room. After that, he completely ignored me for a couple of weeks.

I was wondering what did I do wrong. Back home, at training, he'd act as if I wasn't there. I felt all this guilt. I was swimming my hardest, training extra hard to get his attention."

In 1991, Trojans organised a training camp in Tampa, Florida, to prepare for the national championships in Belfast, where swimmers would be selected for the Olympics. The swimmers were assigned to host families, returning for a daily siesta to their houses after morning training and before the afternoon session. One day, her host family was away and she remained at the poolside with another girl after everyone dispersed.

"Gibney appeared out of nowhere and said, 'Come on, we'll go for breakfast.' The three of us went for breakfast. Then he drove us to a hotel that I didn't know. He brought me to a room and said, 'You, get in there, ' and he went off with the other girl. I don't know where he brought her.

"He comes back and starts ranting and raving that I was so bad at swimming and how disappointed in me he was. I was sitting on a double bed. He jumped on me and raped me, there on the bed. He said if I told anybody, he would sue my family and nobody would believe me because he was George Gibney and he would bankrupt my family. Then he left.

"When he was gone, I just sat on the floor in the room. I couldn't leave because I didn't know where I was. He came back about three hours later with his wife and loads of kids and said: 'Come on you, we're going swimming now.'

"People saw me crying but nobody came near me. None of the swimming managers who were there approached me. My host family asked me what was wrong and I said I was homesick. I rang home and I told my mother that Gibney locked me in a room but I didn't tell her he raped me."

At the national championships in Belfast that year, her legs shook so much standing on the starting block that she could not swim.

"Even then, I kept crying all the time. I couldn't stop."

Finally, in 1994, her trauma reached crisis point. She feigned an injury to get out of swimming in a competition and was referred to a doctor appointed by the Olympic Council of Ireland. The dam burst.

She told the doctor about the prolonged abuse by the grandfather when she was a child and about being raped by Gibney.

Statement to garda� She made a statement to garda� about the first series of abuse. Two other females came forward and alleged that they had also been abused by the man. He fought the prosecution through the courts, seeking a judicial review but finally pleaded guilty in 1999. He was sentenced to five years' jail on conviction of seven charges of child sexual abuse of the three girls. The man is dead now. She heard he died in prison of natural causes.

In passing sentence, the judge remarked that it was probably no coincidence that one of the girls was later abused by her swimming coach.

"I felt I got a bit of justice, " she says. "It wasn't my imagination. It wasn't me going mad. It wasn't all in my head."

That experience encouraged her to make a statement against Gibney. He had eluded seven rape charges on the technicality that they were too old to defend.

Yet, most of the Gibney charges pertained to the same years (or post-dated them) as the charges against the convicted grandfather.

The explanation she was given for the DPP's decision not to seek Gibney's extradition on foot of the second investigation was that he was entitled to insist on having each of the four complainants' cases tried separately. Again, this had not arisen in the case of the grandfather or in the vast majority of sexual-abuse prosecutions.

"The guards were absolutely brilliant. They couldn't have done enough, " she says.

She is pursuing a civil action for damages against the Irish Amateur Swimming Association, the Olympic Council of Ireland and George Gibney. (This journalist has seen the legal statement of claim lodged in court, despite a denial by Swim Ireland that any such legal action exists. ) Meanwhile, she is left to cope with the devastation. She takes six pills for her mental well-being every night, attends a psychiatrist every week and a cognitive counsellor twice a week. She does not socialise and has never had a proper romantic relationship. She has suffered from anorexia, dropping to under five-and-a-half stone at one stage though she stands 5ft 10in tall, and has had surgery for the scars left by her self-mutilation.

She is too embarrassed by the cut marks on her skin (the most recent episode was last November) to ever swim again.

"I'm sorry to say this, " says her mother, sitting beside her on the couch, holding her hand and looking searchingly into her daughter's empty eyes, "but, sometimes, she's like the living dead."