This is the story Big Ballad Singer refers to in his opening post. A very shocking story.

There is nothing so sickening as the crime of rape. The story shocked me. I refer to the story Jim Carroll brought to my attention some time back regarding the rape of an 85 year woman and a young child of 13 in Ireland by the same man. It appeared in the Irish Independant on Friday July 17 2009.

"There was one striking feature about the shocking story of Simon McGinley, who on Wednesday was convicted of raping an 85-year old woman.

It is what wasn't reported -- which is that he is a Traveller. Had he been the victim of an attack, his identity as a Traveller would have been all over the media. But he was not the victim. He was the culprit: and thus the almost overwhelming silence about his background.

But no one conversant with the wilder extremes of Traveller behaviour and who heard about what happened in court the other day would be in any doubt about Simon McGinley's origins. It is almost inconceivable that young children from any other background would have been present, as his were (including one in nappies) to hear how he had brutally raped an 85-year-old woman.

Other details confirm this sense of an entirely different moral order. After the trial, his mother abused the victim's adult children, shouting that they should have put their mother in a home. Then there were protests at the refusal of prison officers to let his children speak to him before he was led away. They even shouted: "You didn't murder anyone. You shouldn't have got 21 years."

He himself declared to the victim's offspring: "Just remember. I never done it." (His semen was found on her bed and her injured genitals.)

Later, his mother, Mary McGinley, burst into song outside the courthouse, with a rendition of 'If Tomorrow Never Comes'. Perhaps the strangest aspect to this case was the presence, as a spectator in court, of the woman who McGinley had raped 12 years ago, when she was 13. She, too, is a Traveller. She had been babysitting for the McGinleys in 1997. While driving her home, McGinley violently attacked and raped her. Discovered by his wife in the course of this rape, he drove off naked and assaulted the girl again. She was thrown naked out the van, in front of her mother and his wife. She and her family were threatened with being "cut" -- he always carried a knife -- and told not to report the rape.

She later became famous as the 'Miss C', who went to England for an abortion. And although he was only 25 at the time, the court heard at his first trial that he had a daughter nearly her age.

It is almost impossible to imagine the details of this case occurring within the non-Travelling community, from the wife finding her naked husband raping the 13-year old babysitter, to a 25-year-old man having a child of nearly 13, to his mother singing 'If Tomorrow Never Comes' outside the courtroom in which he had been imprisoned for raping a woman of 85."