WHEN MÁIRÍA CAHILL WENT PUBLIC about the sexual abuse she said she suffered at the hands of an IRA operative, she thought she had signed her own death warrant. After being betrayed by people within her own community, subjected to repeated interrogations and denied justice, Máiría took the decision in 2014 to waive her anonymity and speak to BBC Northern Ireland’s Spotlight programme. For taking this stand, for coming out as a survivor of sexual violence and of an extrajudicial IRA trial, she was slandered by politicians and smeared by journalists, even in the pages of the Guardian.
“The harassment was ferocious, so much so that it was raised in the three Parliaments: Westminster, the Northern Ireland Assembly, and Dáil Éireann,” she reflects nearly a decade after her interview was broadcast. “It was unprecedented to see a sexual abuse victim treated like that.”
Even today, she says former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams refers to her as “that woman”, and many of those within the tight-knit republican community where she grew up regard her as a traitor. She describes republicanism as like a “large dysfunctional family” where to step outside is to be “the target of rumour and innuendo”.
MÁIRÍA’S NEWLY RELEASED BOOK, Rough Beast is a political memoir as much as a personal one. She pulls a subterranean world of fear, paramilitary secrecy and parallel laws out of the streets of West Belfast and onto the page.
A former Irish Senator and Northern Irish Councillor, Máiría recalls she had originally intended to write a straightforward political analysis. But when she turned to the topic of Belfast in the immediate aftermath of the Belfast Agreement, she found her understanding was overshadowed by her own traumatic past.
“When I first started making notes in 2012 about what happened to me it, was cathartic. My daughter was around two or three, and I was in the middle of the
