Police search garden for dead Baby at Dublin’s ‘House of horror’ Remember this Horror, Let us Never Forget. Below the Article is 2005, Just Read it Again.

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Angelique Chrisafis, Ireland correspondentFri 1 Jul 2005 00.56 CEST

In the back garden of a house in Dalkey, south Dublin’s fashionable celebrity haunt, forensic experts were digging yesterday for the decomposed remains of a baby boy.

Ireland, a country torn apart by two abortion referendums, has routinely been gripped and appalled by the discoveries of abandoned or murdered babies. But the grim excavations in Dublin are part of a story more horrific than anything Ireland has heard before.

A woman in her 40s, now living in Yorkshire, claims to have pieced together the fragments of her abusive past after years of therapy in England.

She remembers giving birth in the house in Dalkey, aged 11, after years of sexual abuse in which she was raped by her father and her brothers, sometimes after her mother had tied her hands.

The body of her first child, a baby girl, who she said was stabbed to death in front of her, was found in a laneway in south Dublin in 1973.

The woman, who has not been named, believes a second baby, who was born when she was about 13, is buried in the garden of the house in Dalkey and she has returned to Dublin to assist the police excavation.

The two-storey, semidetached house, which is half hidden by a neat garden hedge, has become known as the “house of horror”. The woman’s family left about 10 years ago.

The body of the newborn girl who police believe was the woman’s first baby, was discovered in a laneway in Dun Laoghaire, just over a mile from her home.

Two 11-year-old boys collecting seaweed on the beach were looking for a plastic bag. Seeing one on the ground, they opened it to find the baby’s body, wrapped in newspapers and soaked in blood.

She had been stabbed 14 times with a sharp instrument. Despite a police campaign, the baby was never identified and she was buried in a Holy Angels plot in a Dublin cemetery.

In 1995 the case was reopened after the woman living in England contacted Irish police saying the baby was hers and detailing her childhood abuse.

She told her story to Uinsionn Mac Dubhghaill of the Irish Times, one of the boys who had found the “bloody package” in 1973.

“My first recollection is of a baby kicking me in the classroom … I didn’t want to ask anyone what was happening to me,” she said.

“I felt there was something wrong and I knew I couldn’t talk to anyone about it.

“I remember at that time being in the bedroom in the dark on my own and my mother telling me I was a freak and I was going to have a deformed baby.

“I remember the night the baby was born … I was in the front bedroom in the house. I was on the floor in the corner.

“I felt really sick and my tummy was hurting me. I was crying. My father was in the double bed. My brother came into the room. He came over and started stamping on my leg. He said, ‘That’s not my baby, that’s not my baby’. He said, ‘If you tell anyone that’s my baby, I’ll kill you’.”

She then described what happened after she delivered the baby.

“My father came back into the room with a pair of scissors and a knitting needle, both in one hand. My mum and dad argued about it and finally my mum said to my dad, ‘If you don’t do it, I’ll do it’ … “

She said her daughter was stabbed with the knitting needle in front of her.

After the woman went to police in 1995, three of her relatives were questioned about her claims. One brother committed suicide before the arrests.

A file was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions but no prosecution was recommended, partly because of the time that had elapsed, but also because of the lack of independent witnesses and the lack of any admission of guilt.

Police have now been advised by an osteoarchaeologist that recovering a baby’s bones after so long in the ground would be “difficult but not impossible”.

It is understood that anyone questioned during the initial investigation will not be rearrested unless new evidence emerges.

Some elderly neighbours living on the quiet estate said they were aware of the woman’s story.

“She used to tell schoolfriends about it when she was a girl but no one hardly believed her,” said one woman. “Something should have been done about this years ago.”