Clodagh Finn: The system has failed Lavinia Kerwick — yet again

The following day, 2fm broadcaster Gerry Ryan said the man would certainly not have walked free if he had anything to do with it. Encouraged by his attitude, Lavinia phoned The Gerry Ryan Show and made history.

When he asked how she felt, she said: “I had to be removed from the court because I just sat there and cried and I kept on saying, ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.’ He might as well have raped me yesterday again.”

By the time the 11 o’clock news came around, Lavinia Kerwick was a national story.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of that interview. Neither broadcaster nor interviewee knew what might happen. “Gerry might have been sacked,” Lavinia said later.

He wasn’t although, despite the collective outrage, Lavinia Kerwick’s rapist never went to jail. A year later, he got a nine-year suspended sentence.

It was the year of the ground-breaking interview. 

A few months before, in April 1993, Annie Murphy shattered another taboo when she appeared on The Late Late Show to talk about the son she had with Eamonn Casey (I find it hard to attach the title ‘Bishop’ to his name after this week’s documentary exposing his grotesque “Buried Secrets”.)

It’s worth replaying that interview because the tone of disapproval so evident in Gay Byrne’s tone echoed a widespread belief at the time that Annie Murphy was a temptress and a hussy. Even so, his parting shot still rankles: “If your son is half as good a man as his father, he won’t be doing too badly.”

Annie Murphy gave him a magnificent side-eye and retorted: “Well, Mr Byrne, I’m not half bad myself.”

We now know that Eamonn Casey’s relationship with Annie Murphy represented the respectable tip of a very dark past. His niece Patricia Donovan spoke on camera for the first time to outline a catalogue of abuse that began when she was five.

She “spent years and years and years trying to get heard”, she said during Anne Sheridan’s excellent investigation into a man who had three other charges of child sex abuse made against him and one “child safeguarding concern”.

Two abuse cases were settled, but gagging orders prevented those involved talking about what had been done to them. However, if we can take one significant positive from the Casey documentary it is that women — and survivors of abuse — will not be silenced any more.

More and more, women are prepared to stand up in public to put the shame back where it belongs — on the rapist and/or abuser.

In the 1960s, poet Muriel Rukeyser asked: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/ The world would split open.”

The world did split open, to a degree at least, when Lavinia Kerwick told the truth about her life in 1993. Her courage led to the introduction of victim impact statements in court and emboldened many other women to tell the truth about their lives.

If feels so deeply unjust, then, that Lavinia Kerwick has been forced yet again to tell the truth about her life so that she can get access to the health treatment she needs.

On 18 July, she posted on X: “I have to be honest I am struggling with a very serious relapse of anorexia and have been hospitalised and I am so sorry I have let everyone down.”

There was an immediate rush to reassure her that she had not let anybody down. It was the other way around. The state had let her down. Again. It’s not often that social media posts are clear-eyed and balanced, but the outcry about the lack of suitable available care hit the nail on the head.

The harrowing details of her treatment, or rather lack of it, were also posted online. It made for shocking, painful, disquieting reading that should make the providers of healthcare hang their heads in shame.

It’s not that they are unaware of the issues. In March, MindEverybody organised protests in Cork, Limerick, and Dublin to highlight the urgent need to remove the multiple barriers faced by people trying to access services for eating disorders.

At the time, Amy Hanley, whose daughter was diagnosed with anorexia in 2022, said: “No family or individual should endure the obstacles we faced in securing treatment for my daughter.

“If the authorities treated this mental health condition with the gravity it deserves, not only could it alleviate the profound suffering experienced by patients, but it could also significantly reduce the economic burdens.”

The words that jump out there are “profound suffering” because they describe Lavinia Kerwick’s experience. She didn’t get justice for the rape perpetrated against her in 1991 and now she is being denied the treatment she needs for anorexia, a condition exacerbated by her experience of trauma.

She is getting the right treatment now, a friend told this column, although that means her phone has been taken away. While that might be standard practice it means she hasn’t been able to tell us how she is getting on.

Others, though, are using their voices to speak out on her behalf. One of them, Suzanne, used hers to outline why she was incensed by Lavinia’s experience.

“To read in another post the nature of her current treatment in an open, psychiatric ward; that she was stripped and held down after being sectioned, that there is no coherent treatment plan, no chance of rest, recuperation, dignity, is immensely distressing. Forty years ago this month, I was sectioned in a Cork hospital. My experience was identical to Lavinia’s,” she said.

Four decades on, nothing has changed.

“Once again,” adds Suzanne, “Lavinia's willingness to tell the truth in an open forum has exposed the mean secrets at the heart of mental health care in this country.”

The failure to respond to those mean secrets draws me back to a phrase Lavinia repeated in her interview with Gerry Ryan. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.

It’s a stain on all of our services that Lavinia Kerwick’s experience is actually true.