Geraldine Thompson (27), whose sister Kelly Fitzgerald died in 1993 after a lifetime of neglect and cruelty by her parents, was visited by gardai at her home in the west of Ireland last Thursday night and informed that no charges are to be brought against her parents, Sue and Des Fitzgerald.

"What the hell is wrong with people?"

Geraldine cried on hearing the news. "My sister is lying in a grave because of what they have done and now they're going to get away with torturing me. The fight to make them answer for this is the only thing that's kept me alive all these years."

After Kelly's death from blood poisoning, it emerged child welfare authorities in Ireland and Britain had known she was being neglected and ill-treated by her parents. The couple pleaded guilty in Castlebar Circuit Court to a charge of wilful neglect in relation to Kelly and were sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment. Sue Fitzgerald gave birth to another child while in prison and that child lives with her parents in Carracastle, Co Mayo.

In an interview with the Sunday Tribune last June, Geraldine recounted a catalogue of physical and emotional abuse which, she said, her parents meted out to her from the age of five until she was 12 and finally taken into care by the former Western Health Board after her sister died.

"Most of the time, I wasn't allowed into the house, " she recalled. "At night I was put outside the back door in my nightie to sleep on the step with the dogs. 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.

"My father used to stamp on my feet and hit me if the others [brothers and sisters] fell over or hurt themselves. 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.

"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. He hit me with a black pipe he used to have for the cows. 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, when I couldn't walk, I was kept home from school."

Geraldine says she continues to suffer serious ill health as a result of her childhood. She is underweight, has bad eyesight and suffers from asthma, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome and occasional kidney infections. Her lungs have collapsed twice and she has had surgery for spontaneous pneumothorax, a life-threatening condition. She takes Valium, has made numerous suicide attempts and sees a psychologist every week.

In March 1990, when she was nine, a Lambeth Council case conference about Geraldine described her as "withdrawn, losing weightf marks noticed on her during PEf eating excessivelyf reluctant to go home from school. . . clingyf wants affectionf pale, ghost-likef eyes sad and scared".

Preparatory notes for a Western Health Board case conference about Kelly and Geraldine in February 1993, under the heading, "Suspected Neglect", noted that at school in Scoil Iosa, Carracastle, they "both had a frightened look about them".

Kelly Fitzgerald: A Child Is Dead, the report of a health board-appointed inquiry, recorded eyewitness evidence from neighbours, medical sources and school authorities indicating serious neglect and abuse of Geraldine. That report, which was highly critical of the health board's response to the case, was initially suppressed and, though an Oireachtas committee later passed a resolution that it be published, it was never widely circulated. The Government Publications Office has no record of it having been published.

"I can feel that whip across my backside.

I can physically feel it to this day, " said Geraldine after hearing that her parents are not to be prosecuted. "I have to live for the rest of my life knowing what they did to Kelly and knowing that they've got away with what they did to me and that nobody gives a shit. They've won."