“When your life is on hold for all of those years, you’re not living, you’re just surviving.”

The strength and dignity of Castlebar woman Ciara Mangan shone through our television screens and on the frontpages of national newspapers in July 2023.

Speaking outside the Courts of Justice, she said that “waiving my right to anonymity is freeing for me personally. I’ve suffered in silence for many years but today I’m breaking that silence. People should know that Shane Noonan is a rapist and the sentencing today reflects the severity of the crime that was committed against me.”

READ MORE: Mayo woman to speak at UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women

Judge Eileen Creedon described the rape as “cold, predatory and premeditated.”

Shane Noonan, of Castlehill Park, Turlough Road in Castlebar, Co Mayo had waited until the last possible moment to plead guilty. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, with one year suspended.

Given the guilty plea, Ciara had thought her ten year wait for justice would be over.

Noonan was given three months to get his affairs in order after being sentenced to seven years in prison.

Given the severity of the crime and the guilty plea, Ciara sees this as an example of a justice system that “consistently bends over backwards for the perpetrators. They have every opportunity and every right to play the system to the best that they can for their benefit, whereas you’re fighting for the absolute bare minimum the whole way and the whole duration of the process.”

Then her rapist appealed the length of his seven year sentence.

“My problem with the appeal process was that there were no new legal arguments being brought to the table, whatsoever. It was simply that he wasn’t happy with the suspended portion of his sentence. There were no arguments at all about the trial or about his conviction, it was just he wasn’t happy with his suspended part, and they took two years to process this.

“He got time off for expressing remorse, and then 14 days later, he appealed the sentence. So effectively, you’re saying, ‘No, I’m not really sorry. I played the game. The judge gave me time off because I pretended I’m sorry, and now I’m going to appeal it because I’m not sorry and I want time off. They play the system throughout.’”

The Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan, TD, has publicly acknowledged that the two-year appeal process was ‘too long.’

READ MORE: Popular Westport Hair Salon shuts its doors after twenty three years

Life on hold

“I never, ever imagined that it would take me seven years to go through a justice system process to put someone away for five years. There’s nothing about that that’s encouraging at all when you’re in the legal system like that.

“When your life is on hold for all of those years, you’re not living, you’re just surviving. You know you’ll never get those seven years back. And that has an extreme toll on your health, your psychological health, your mental well being, every aspect of your health.

“When someone does go to jail, you start that countdown. He got sentenced to eight years, but he’s only going to serve five years and three months.”

The appeal threw that initial relief on its head: “I think I got two weeks’ peace. When you’re on trial as a victim, it is the victim on trial. They say it’s the burden of proof, but it actually feels very much like you’re you have to prove to everybody that you’re not a liar and that you’re telling the truth. And that’s why I say, you know, the victim is on trial.”

Home to Castlebar

“The first thing I did when he went to jail was to get rid of my apartment in Berlin, where I had been living, and started to arrange moving back home to Castlebar.”

For a long time, Ciara felt she couldn’t live in her home town as she had to keep looking over her shoulder all the time and was being intimidated when she was out in bars with friends.

“I stopped walking around my town, because he would beep his horn at me when I was walking around town.”

She moved back home within months of the verdict and has recently moved into her new home in the town and says: “I feel really happy to be home. I missed living in my hometown, but I’m here now.”

She has seen first hand how the justice system works and there are changes she wants to make.

Ciara credits her Mam with picking her up off the floor at a time of crisis and extreme depression. She has been very open about turning to alcohol as a way to try and numb the pain and briefly going to a psychiatric hospital in Germany.

It was in this time of crisis that she started getting counselling support.

“You don’t think that when you go to those counselling sessions, that they’re going to be your own words that are going to be used against you to trip you up and discredit you while you’re on the stand in a court of law. You’re not thinking that far ahead, because what you’re thinking about right now is my life hanging on by a thread, and I need this counselling, because otherwise it’s a very, very dark ending. You don’t think about that. So that’s why I feel like it’s a very, very important thing for me to be in this space today to advocate for change in that area.”

Currently in this country, private counselling notes can be ordered to be disclosed to the defence in sexual offence trials.

For victims this creates a ‘Sophie’s Choice’, she explains, as you question should you consider your pursuit of justice and sacrifice your privacy?

The accused, their counsel, judge and defence barristers “can read through your most vulnerable notes from counselling, and it’s an extreme violation of our privacy.”

“We don’t believe that counselling notes are relevant for a fair trial. They are necessary to survivors for their health. And survivors, as it stands, are choosing either to drop their trial because they want to go to counselling or they’re stopping counselling. So in my case, I just stopped going to counselling altogether.”

Balancing constitutional rights is at the core of this issue as it pits the accused’s right to a fair trial against the victim’s right to privacy, healthcare and justice.

Beyond Surviving

This was one of the reasons she has set up the Beyond Surviving organisation in 2023. Ms Mangan was among a group of survivors to meet with the Minister of Justice last month to lobby for a change in the law in this area.

Nearly two hundred survivors have engaged with the charity at their events around the county. The services it offers include connection, self-advocacy, healing support and empowerment.

The aim of Beyond Surviving is “really extending and complementing the already existing Domestic, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence services. We’re really targeting survivors and victims who have progressed beyond crisis. So that means that a lot of them would have already accessed rape crisis centre organisations, for example.”

As reported in The Mayo News last week, the articulate and passionate Mayo woman is in Geneva this week to address the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women on behalf of the group.