Nora Wall (formerly Sister Dominic) (born 1948) is a former Irish sister of the Sisters of Mercy who was wrongfully convicted of rape in June 1999, and served four days of a life sentence in July 1999, before her conviction was quashed. She was officially declared the victim of a miscarriage of justice in December 2005. The wrongful conviction was based on false allegations by two women in their 20s, Regina Walsh (born 8 January 1978) and Patricia Phelan (born 1973). Walsh had a psychiatric history and Phelan had a history of making false allegations of rape prior to the event. Phelan subsequently admitted to having lied.
Wall was the first woman in the history of the Irish State to be convicted of rape, the first person to receive a life sentence for rape and the only person in the history of the state to be convicted on repressed memory evidence. Her co-accused Pablo McCabe was a homeless schizophrenic man. In relation to one of the two rape allegations, the defence showed that McCabe could not possibly have been there on the date in question. The jury acquitted McCabe on that count, and convicted him and Wall on the second rape charge. On 1 December 2005, the Court of Criminal Appeal certified that Wall had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. McCabe had died in December 2002.
The events took place following the airing of the documentary, States of Fear. A 2005 editorial in The Irish Times suggested that the programme influenced jury members and may have played a role in the miscarriage of justice against Nora Wall.
Biography – Nora Wall
Wall was born in 1948 into a large farming family in the Nire Valley area of County Waterford. She joined the Sisters of Mercy in 1967, taking the name Sister Dominic.
She joined St. Michael's residential childcare centre in Cappoquin, County Waterford in 1975. It had been St Michael's industrial school, but this was phased out at the end on the 1970s. Two, family style houses were built to house the children in the state's care there. She became the manager of this new St. Michael's in 1978.
The children at St. Michael's came from nearby counties Waterford and Tipperary. They were from troubled families who could not cope and there were often several members of one family in the home at the same time."Final conversion from monster to martyr", by Ann Marie Hourihan, Sunday Tribune, 1 February 2004 http://www.tribune.ie/archive/article/2004/feb/01/final-conversion-from-monster-to-martyr/
Biography – Pablo (Paul) McCabe
Pablo McCabe was also a local and almost the same age as Nora Wall. McCabe was handed over to St. Michael's industrial school in 1951 when he was a baby.
In 1988, McCabe addressed a gathering of the Sisters of Mercy in Gracedieu, Waterford. He spoke of being born in Dublin in 1949 to a single mother. She struggled until McCabe was three, but "had great difficulty in working, paying for accommodation and paying someone to look after me." Thus McCabe came to live in the "old St. Michael’s", the junior industrial school run by the Sisters of Mercy in Cappoquin. His memories were "very happy ones of caring and interested women." He then went to the Industrial School at Artane, Dublin, which he found traumatic, because it had "over nine hundred boys in a very strict set-up." After leaving Artane, he began to drift and became involved with drugs, stealing to support his habit, and spent time in South America. He returned to Ireland in 1977, receiving treatment at St. Brendan's Hospital, though alcohol abuse remained a problem.
In 1980, he came to Cappoquin again. He stated, "Cappoquin is my home. In Dublin I am homeless." The old institution where he had been reared had been replaced with the group homes, where he first met Wall. He hoped to find information about his mother, but none existed. In 1986 his mother wrote, hoping to find him. Wall facilitated a reunion, and McCabe and his mother spent three days together in Cappoquin. She had married in England and had four more sons, but had never told her new family of Pablo's existence."Miscarriage of Justice: Paul McCabe and Nora Wall" by Breda O'Brien, Winter 2006 edition of 'Studies' quarterly review –
Rape accusation, conviction, and appeal
Charges
Wall left St. Michael's in 1990, and left the congregation of the Sisters of Mercy in 1994. In 1996, she worked in a St. Vincent de Paul shelter for homeless men. In October 1996, she was arrested in Dublin and questioned about allegations made by Regina Walsh, whom she had cared for from the age of eight. Walsh alleged that McCabe had raped her, while Wall held her legs, on the occasion of her twelfth birthday on 8 January 1990. She also claimed that Wall had sexually abused her on numerous occasions. Wall was not questioned then or subsequently on a second allegation: that she had assisted McCabe in raping Walsh in a virtually identical way two years previously. This latter charge, on which neither she nor McCabe was questioned, was the one on which they would subsequently be found guilty.
Wall maintained her innocence and was released without charge. She finished her contract with the St. Vincent de Paul and, after some time, got work with Sir Patrick Dunn's Hospital, which she was forced to leave after the Gardaí informed the hospital she should not be working with people. In May 1997 she was formally charged. She had to sign on at a Garda station twice a day and lived on social welfare.
Arrest and trial
McCabe was arrested on the same day in October 1996. Gardaí, who interviewed at the trial, admitted to making no notes, and, under pressure of questioning from defence counsel, also admitted that McCabe did not dictate a statement as they originally suggested, but responded to questions. This is in breach of regulations, which allow only minor clarifying questions during the taking of statements. McCabe had signed two statements that were strange in the way they were formulated. For example, part of the first statement says, "I told Sr. Dominic what had happened the night before in Regina’s room. I told her I had intimate relationships with her, meaning Regina. She said to me I was like St. Augustine."
At the trial a Garda claimed that he did not know that McCabe suffered from schizophrenia, and said that he didn't see what difference knowing whether he did or not would have made. McCabe made a further statement, concerning the night of Regina Walsh's 12th birthday party on 8 January 1990. The alleged rape on 8 January 1990 was the only charge on which McCabe was questioned. Like Nora Wall, he was never questioned on the second allegation that he had also raped Regina Walsh two years previously in 1987 or 1988, again with Wall present. In fact, neither McCabe's nor Wall's defence teams received notification of this second charge until 28 May 1999, only six days before hearings began, and two years after they were initially charged.
After he was released after questioning, it emerged that it would have been impossible for McCabe to have been in Cappoquin on 8 January. He was living in a Dublin hostel from 7 January and his movements were fully recorded until he was committed to Mountjoy prison on 10 January. The Gardaí then returned to Regina Walsh and put it to her that McCabe could not have been in Cappoquin on 8 January. On 5 November 1996, she "corrected" her statement to state that it was not the day of her 12th birthday, but of the celebration of her 12th birthday some days before or after that date, that the alleged assault took place. At the trial, witnesses were produced to show that there was no man present at the birthday party.Breda O'Brien (2006), "Miscarriage of Justice: Paul McCabe and Nora Wall" , Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Issue 380, vol.95, Winter 2006.
Conviction
On 11 June 1999 an RTÉ television news announcer stated that on the previous day A 51-year-old former Sister of Mercy, has been found guilty of raping a 10-year-old girl. Nora Wall, originally from the Nire Valley, had been the victim's guardian while the child was in care at St. Michael's Centre in Cappoquin in County Waterford. Nora Wall's co-accused, Paul McCabe, a homeless man, was also found guilty of rape. Both have been remanded on bail, for sentencing in July. The victim was placed in care in St. Michael's when she was 6 years of age. When she was ten, she was raped by Paul McCabe, a homeless man who visited Nora Wall at St. Michael's. The victim told the jury that the nun held her legs while the man raped her. Both Paul McCabe and Nora Wall denied the charges. The pair were acquitted of a second count of raping the same child in 1990. The jury had heard conflicting evidence surrounding the dates of the alleged offence.
The second major charge against the two accused was that they had raped Regina Walsh in on 8 January 1990 on the girl's 12th birthday. The outcome was that the jury found the two accused innocent on that rape charge but convicted them on the other—the alleged rape that took place at least two years prior to the birthday party.Because of the non-guilty verdict, this allegation was not considered in the judgement of the Court of Criminal Appeal in December 2005.
Press reaction
After the conviction the media used vicious language about Wall in particular – "Vile Nun", "Pervert Nun", "Mercy Devil", "I was Raped by Anti-Christ".A programme about her on RTÉ's Would You Believe (TV series) series on 11 January 2000, gave a glimpse of some of the newspaper headlines
On 11 July 1999, the Sunday World carried a front page "exclusive" by crime correspondent Paul Williams. Entitled "Rape Nuns Abuse Pact with Smyth", it claimed that Evil nun Nora Wall, convicted for helping to rape a ten-year-old child, also secretly provided children for sick paedophile priest Father Brendan Smyth. The Sunday World has learned that depraved cleric regularly visited St. Michael's Childcare Centre in County Waterford where Wall – then known as Sister Dominic – was working. A female counsellor who works with the victims of this horror home revealed that Fr. Brendan Smyth may have abused children there. .....[she said] "the information is very reliable and also very disturbing".Sunday World, 11 July 1999, Rape Nun's Abuse Pact with Smyth A few years later, Wall was to win EUR175,000 libel damages from the Sunday World.Sunday World, 27 October 2002, "Apology: Nora Wall", cited in Alliance Support Group, 21 October 2007, The Apology Sunday World, 27 October 2002 That news received little attention from the media.The satirical Phoenix Magazine seems to be the only publication that gave an account of the successful libel action – see Phoenix Magazine, 8 November 2002, Worst Libels Nora Wall
Doubts about the conviction
On 17 June, a week after the rape convictions, Regina Walsh gave an interview to journalist Barry O'Keefe of The Star newspaper claiming that she had also been raped by a "black man in Leicester Square" in London.Irish Independent 24 July 1999, http://www.independent.ie/national-news/exnun-gets-life-for-rape-403564.html#Scene_1 This was news to Wall's defence team. Moreover, The Star published the names of Walsh and her "witness" Patricia Phelan for the first time. A Kilkenny businessman read the newspaper and recognised Phelan as the woman who had made a false rape allegation against him, and the defence came into possession of this evidence.
Sentenced
On 23 July 1999, Wall and McCabe came before Judge Paul Carney for sentencing in the Central Criminal Court. Their counsel, Hugh Hartnett, sought an adjournment or a stay on any sentence. He told the court that there appeared to have been a grave breach of non-disclosure of evidence by the state. The state had not disclosed that Walsh alleged she had been raped in London. Neither had they disclosed that Phelan's allegations against an unnamed man had been dismissed in judicial review proceedings.