"She was saying about death. She asked me to promise if anything happened to her to tell what was going on, " Geraldine remembers, dry-eyed. "She was so calm about it."

After that bleak conversation, Kelly stopped talking. "One minute, I noticed she had diahorrhea and she was sick. The next minute, she was whacking her head off the wall. It was like she couldn't help it. That's all she did, day after day after day. I can hear her head whacking against the wall. She was doing it and she was crying. One day, my father caught her and said:

'Right, if you want to whack your head, I'll whack it for you'. He brought her into the house and started whacking her head against the wall. He was whacking her head inside. She was whacking it outside. She didn't shake, didn't scream, nothing. When I looked in her eyes, it was blackness. It was like she was gone. Not even blinking. Just dead. The next day, I went to school. I was very upset. I told the social workers and they went to the house and asked to see Kelly but my father said she was in bed sick.

They left soon afterwards.

"My father rang Uncle Gary in England and he said to put Kelly on the first plane to London.

The night before she went, my father brought her in to eat. She couldn't lift her arms or hold herself up. Tears were streaming down her face. Everybody else went with her to the airport the next day but I was sent to school.

That's my last memory of Kelly. Looking into her eyes and seeing nothing. Nothing. I don't think I'll ever get over her dying. Every time I think about it, I feel the same pain I felt then. I have to deal with that and live with that for the rest of my life and nobody has any idea how that feels and nobody gives a shit."

On the table as she speaks lies the only possession of Kelly's that Geraldine managed to salvage from her sister's life. It is a child's miniature diary with tiny blank pages and the title 'Zoe Zebra' printed on its little plastic cover. She keeps it on a green string in her handbag, always. The written entries are sparse. On the first page, Geraldine has recorded: "Kelly RIP February 4, '93". Page two reads: "Better by far you should forget and smile, than you should remember and be sad."

The only other entry is for 13 June next. It says: "Kelly's 30th birthday today . . . if she wasn't killed by our parents. I will always love you."

The life and death of Kelly Fitzgerald was described in Dail Eireann by the former minister for justice Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, as "the most horrific abuse case in the history of the state". Kelly died, aged 15, in a London hospital from blood poisoning, triggering an avalanche of recriminations, much of it aimed at the Irish welfare authorities who had been alerted by their English counterparts that she was officially registered as at "high risk" by Lambeth Council before the family came to live in rural Co Mayo in 1990. The first indication of her maltreatment had been recorded when she was four months old and admitted to a London hospital in a state of emaciation and dehydration. After Kelly died, her parents Des and Sue Fitzgerald pleaded guilty in Castlebar Circuit Court to a charge of wilful neglect and were sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment.

Suspected neglect Lambeth Council had warned that another child in the Fitzgerald family was also on the atrisk register. The official minutes of a case conference at St Thomas' Hospital in London in March 1990 described this second child as "withdrawn, losing weightf marks noticed on her when doing PEf eating excessivelyf reluctant to go home from school at the end of the dayf clingyf wants affectionf pale, ghostlikefeyes sad and scared". She was the Fitzgeralds' third-born child, Geraldine, three years younger than Kelly and already stealing sandwiches from her classmates' lunch boxes at Larkhall School at the age of nine. Preparatory notes for a Western Health Board case conference about Kelly and Geraldine on 5 February, 1993, under the heading, 'Suspected Neglect', noted that at school in Scoil Iosa, Carracastle, "both had a frightened look about them". In the welter of media coverage following Kelly's shocking death, Geraldine was obliquely mentioned in reports but never identified and then, wraith-like, she receded from the public's mind and ultimately vanished.

Fifteen years on, she is still underweight and riddled with bad health. Her lungs have collapsed twice and she has undergone surgery for a life-threatening condition classified as spontaneous pneumothorax. She has bad eyesight and suffers from asthma, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome and occasional kidney infections. She takes Valium and sees a psychologist every week. She believes her illnesses are associated with the trauma she has suffered throughout her life. She still bears scars on her back from the ritual beatings she says her father administered every day when she was aged 10, 11 and 12.

Alienated from her parents, who remain in Carracastle, she lives in the west of Ireland with her husband Wade Thompson, a South African who has lived in Ireland for 14 years and whom she married in September 2001. That was before she finally severed the communicCONTINUED FROM PAGE 11 tion cord with her parents. Initially, after their release from Mountjoy Prison she kept in touch, primarily to maintain contact with her siblings, including her baby sister who was born while Sue Fitzgerald was serving her jail sentence.

Geraldine invited her parents to her wedding reception in a hotel in Castlebar. Her father arrived late, dressed in mechanic's overalls, and told the bride: "You look like shit".

She is intelligent, attractive, distrustful, dignified, angry and strong-willed. She has no qualifications to pursue a career, having dropped out of secondary school when she went into "selfdestruction mode" while in care. She receives 185-a-week disability allowance and Wade receives the same amount in job seeker's allowance. Community welfare contributes 74.50 to the couple's 150 weekly rent. They have fallen behind in repayments to the credit union for the loan they got to buy a car so that Geraldine could keep her appointments with the psychologist every week. "I've asked community welfare for money for clothing and food but, apart from once, they haven't given it to us. The rent allowance we get keeps going up and down.

At one stage, we slept in the car for three nights.

We'll soon be in serious debt."

Living in a twilight zone Her dearth of knowledge about officialdom's dealings with her own case and with Kelly's is deeply disturbing, despite amassing a file of official documentation under the Freedom of Information Act, largely emanating from the Western Health Board. To date, she has failed to acquire her medical records from either Castlebar Hospital or St Thomas' in London and only discovered eight weeks ago that a Western Health Board-commissioned report exists, entitled 'Kelly Fitzgerald: A Child Is Dead'. Last Tuesday, she learned for the first time that the London coroner had formally concluded that Kelly died "from natural causes". It is as if Geraldine Fitzgerald has lived in a twilight zone all her life.

"I've got dreams. I've got ambitions, " she says, "but my life hasn't changed. I'm doing this [interview] in the hope that my life can change. I'm 27 years old and I feel my life is over, not beginning. I'm so sick and tired of it. I think I deserve something and I think she [Kelly] deserves something. I've fought so hard to be here all these years and what have I achieved?

I am literally tired from the amount of times over the years that I've appealed to people to help me.

I explain to them who I am and what I'm going through and it still doesn't make a difference.

The way I see life: you get born, you get f***ed, and then you die."

She believes the reason she was singled out for what she describes as torture by her parents, from the age of five, was because she used to play with Kelly. "My father told us not to talk to Kelly, to pretend she didn't exist, because she'd been bold. Me and Kelly were separated from the others (there were three other siblings at that time). We weren't allowed talk to them or play with them. We didn't get the treats they got."

At first, when they moved to Carracastle from London, Kelly stayed behind, residing with her grandparents and thriving for the time being. In Mayo, Geraldine was isolated. At night she was put outside the back door in her nightdress to sleep on the step with the dogs, until the dogs grew raucous with the cold and were brought inside. After her parents were informed that Geraldine had been breaking into neighbours' houses in the middle of the night, wrapped in a blanket, to steal bread, they put her to sleep in the bathroom with the door locked from the outside.

Treated like a slave and a dog "Most of the time, I wasn't allowed into the house, " she recalls. "While the rest of them would be having breakfast, I would be cleaning out the cowshed, restacking the turf and clearing up after the dogs. I had to walk the dogs every morning in my nightie . . . wind, rain or snow. I was never given anything extra to wear, except if somebody came to the house. I had to pick up the dog poop with my bare hands. If I missed any, my mother would take off her shoe and hit me on the head with it and then I'd have to clean and dry the shoes of the person who had stepped in it.

When the chores were done, my father would make me do press-ups and run around the house.

"He used to stamp on my bare feet and hit me if the others fell over or hurt themselves. Sometimes, to make him stop hitting me, she (her mother) would slap me to make me cry.

"I never sat with the family for a meal. When they were eating, I was left outside. The only time I would be with them at mealtime would be when my father would tell me to stay and watch them eat. He'd offer me something on a plate but, when I went to take it, he would either put it down for the dogs or else throw it on the floor and tell me to eat it off the floor. Sometimes he made porridge and put a whole bag of salt in it or gave me dog-food and held my nose and forced me to eat it." A teacher in Scoil Iosa, noticing that Geraldine was coming to school with no lunch, apportioned some of her brother's lunchbox to the girl but Sue Fitzgerald went to the school and instructed the teacher to stop.

"My mother and father brought me to the bathroom every day and told me to take off all my clothes and he would beat me with his belt.

The more I cried, the more he beat me. These beatings happened every day for three years."

(In a health board document outlining beatings suffered by Kelly at the hands of her father, it is repeatedly noted as "worrying" that Des Fitzgerald admitted he was sexually aroused during these beatings).

"He hit me with a black pipe he used to have for the cows, " Geraldine continues. "He said he hated me and I was a bitch. He said it was in the bible that a father could take the rod to his child and that I made him do it. I was always warned by my parents to keep my socks up at school to hide the marks on my legs. Sometimes, after beating me, he'd fill the bath with water and put me into it and hold my head down under the water.

"On the school bus one day, I was crying and a girl in my class asked me what was wrong. I said I was afraid to go home but my parents found out and my father beat me with his belt.

When the child psychologist used to call to the school my father coached me in what to say to her. Sometimes, when I couldn't walk, I was kept home from school. I tried telling the neighbour, Mrs Duffy . . . she's dead now - and my parents beat me again.

"My brother, Rory (seven years younger than Geraldine), used to ask my mother for biscuits and he would bring them out to me but I was frightened for him. I used to be nice like that to Kelly and I got beaten for it and I couldn't let that happen to him. I told him not to play with me or talk to me."

After a fortnight away from the family, Kelly returned to live with them in Mayo for five months, until she was put on a plane at Knock Airport in a wheelchair and sent back to England.

Care at a cost "The social workers came to the house one day after that and we were all told to take ourselves off while they talked to my parents, " Geraldine recalls. "My parents were really strange that day.

They were really nice, and that wasn't good. I got to sleep in a bed and have food. In the middle of the night, the phone rang. My mother answered it and she started crying and I knew. I could feel it in the air. I asked my mother: 'What's wrong with you?' She just said: 'Kelly's dead'. The following day, we were taken into care.

"We were brought to the hospital in Castlebar.

We were all in the same ward. We wanted to torment the doctors. One of us would put two others on a trolley and go wild, crashing into doors.

It was the first time I felt like a child, happy. The social workers said we would be going into care and I said I'd rather go home and be beaten because that was what I knew. It didn't feel right at first, not being beaten. They said there was something wrong with me to feel like that.

"I went to a family in Tubbercurry with my younger brother, Rory. I had clothes and I had food and I had hugs whenever I wanted them. I had friends. I got my ears pierced. But the social workers said I should be upset because my sister had died. Everybody kept talking about Kelly and everybody was feeling sorry for my parents.

When I tried to talk about me, they [her parents] said I was an attention seeker, that I was trying to take the attention away from Kelly. Nobody gave a continental about me. I started taking overdoses. I took a lot of them. If they had listened to me, I wouldn't have done that." She has not harmed herself since meeting her husband, Wad e .

Geraldine and Rory were split up and sent to different families and, in her words, she "went out of control". She started smoking and drinking, self-harming and missing school. For most of the following six years, she stayed from Monday to Friday at St Anne's, a residential centre in Galway for children with psychological, behavioural and emotional problems. Her weekends were spent at another children's centre, Aiglish House in Castlebar.

"In 1996, I tried to make a complaint [to bring charges against her parents for the abuse], " she says. "I was in fear of my family but they were allowed have contact with me and I ran away from Aiglish." A health board note of this time records that it was "no surprise" that she withdrew her complaint, following contacts with members of her family. Surprising too that, as the garda investigation of her parents was underway, Geraldine and her siblings returned to the family home for three days that Christmas.

Speaking out about shame "We went to visit them once a month in Mountjoy. The social workers hired a mini-van and we would go up to Dublin and go back to Mayo in one day. My parents would say hello to everyone . . .

'How's it going? How's school?' . . . but they wouldn't want to know anything about me. While they were talking in one corner, I'd be sitting in another corner.

"An extra visit was arranged because it was my birthday. They were getting a cake and soft drinks and presents. I approached my mother for a hug and she said: 'Oh, I saw you the other day'." The agenda for a social workers' meeting about Geraldine, dated 3 March 1997, four years after Kelly's death, records: "Geraldine continues to be abused by her parents. While we have been able to protect Geraldine from the physical abuse that she experienced at home, we have been unable to protect her from the power and domination of her parents, particularly her father."

The health board files attest to "the visible, ongoing rejection" of Geraldine by her parents on access visits.

"They didn't rescue me, " she insists. "It was only when Kelly died that I was taken out of there.

Even when I was in care, nothing was done without the consent of my parents. When the social workers wanted me to go to court to give evidence about what was done to Kelly, my father refused to give his permission.

"Even if it kills me, I am going to have my say now. The reason I didn't do it before was I thought I was to blame. People say that if you have been abused, you become an abuser yourself. I want people to know I'm not like that. I'm embarrassed; I'm ashamed of my life. People will say, 'Why is she doing this to her parents?' but the only thing I can think of is a voice saying:

'Please, Daddy, don't hurt me'."