The longest-running criminal trial in the history of the State ended this week with four of seven accused men being convicted of sexually abusing their deaf and vulnerable relative.At the centre of the case was a woman (30s) who alleged she had been sexually abused from childhood by her three uncles and four brothers. Two of her younger sisters claimed they were abused by one of these brothers (35).The men denied a combined total of 103 charges, 98 of which pertained to abusing the main complainant. Towards the end of the nearly eight-month trial, the Director for Public Prosecutions (DPP) withdrew 83 charges. One of the brothers (34) had all charges against him withdrawn. The six men left on trial at the end – three uncles aged in their 40s and 50s and three brothers in their 30s – were charged with 16 counts of sexual abuse of the main complainant, while the 35-year-old man also remained charged with four counts against his other two sisters.This decision came after extensive legal argument primarily related to the main complainant’s evidence. She was questioned and cross-examined over video-link for 3½ months about the alleged abuse. Translation IssuesThe court heard the woman had a borderline learning disability with the reading level of a young child. Due to her complex needs, she required an Irish Sign Language interpreter and a deaf relay interpreter, as well as an intermediary to support and assist her with communication to the court.The court heard she had difficulties communicating concepts of time, such as dates, ages and before and after. Visual timelines and sequence charts were used to assist her.Two further interpretation teams were in court for the woman’s evidence to ensure the interpretation process was carried out correctly. The court heard the woman’s language deprivation and her limited understanding of Irish Sign Language resulted from her dysfunctional family upbringing and from growing up at a time when parents were often discouraged from communicating this way with their children.She communicated with family members using home-developed signing gestures, lip reading and later by typing messages on her phone. Her closest relatives had very limited formal sign language. The court heard the family was fractured, with the main complainant living away from home for long periods. Some of her brothers lived with relatives and did not have a close relationship with their parents. When she was giving evidence, questions were submitted to her support team beforehand and the evidence was divided into topics to try to minimise confusion. Despite this, the woman often struggled to answer questions directly, regularly saying she did not remember or did not know.During her testimony, the woman gave evidence that varied from the time frame on the indictment. For one brother, she testified he raped her when he was as young as four years old and she was seven. The defence later said this was a “devastating problem” for the prosecution.But the prosecution maintained that the jury had to examine the evidence in the context of the woman’s vulnerabilities, her language deprivation and the associated difficulties communicating her story.The trial heard she first disclosed the alleged abuse in 2017, after she attended a sexual health promotion course. An organiser of this course gave evidence that she asked him if sex between family members was breaking the law. He later met her to arrange a Tusla referral.The remaining chargesThe 20 remaining charges against the six men that eventually went to the jury to consider were a more accurate reflection of the evidence they had heard, the jury was told by prosecuting senior counsel Roisin Lacey in a closing speech.She urged jurors to focus on the allegations and the woman’s credibility, rather than the dates of the alleged events and the ages of those involved. The 55-year-old uncle was accused of a single count of raping his niece between 2009 and 2011 when she was in her early 20s. Her 46-year-old uncle was accused of raping her once between 1995 and 1996, when she was a child. The jury were unable to reach a verdict on these.Her 49-year-old uncle was found guilty of three counts of rape and one count of anal rape over an eight-year period between 2006 and 2014. The woman’s brothers both aged 33 were charged with raping her between 2007 and 2009 when she was in her late teens and early 20s. One of them was found guilty of two counts of anal rape, while the other was found guilty of one rape count, while the jury disagreed on the second count against him. The remaining brother (35) faced 10 counts against the three sisters and was found guilty on all of them. He denied three counts of rape, two counts of anal rape and one count of sexual assault, between 2003 and 2010, against the main complainant.He denied anally raping a second sister between 2010 and 2014, when she was aged between 10 and 12. He further denied one count of sexually assaulting the third sister between 2005 and 2006 and twice raping her between 2015 and 2018.This sister said he sexually assaulted her in a bedroom when she was about six or seven. She also alleged she woke up, aged 16, to her brother raping her after she had passed out while drinking at his home. She was raped again at his home aged 19, she alleged. The woman said this brother’s partner told her she had found a porn search on his phone for “raping drunken sister”. Gardaí found pornographic material on his phone, which he had thrown into a field. He told gardaí he viewed everything on Pornhub including mother/son, brother/sister, gay, lesbian and rape porn. Under cross-examination, she accepted she had made a sexual complaint against another relative who was not on trial but had later declined to give a statement to gardaí as it was a “bad dream that felt real”. This brother’s defence counsel, Karl Finnegan, later told the jury this other allegation demonstrated “from her own mouth she has imagined or experienced sexual abuse as feeling real when it is not”. He told the jury that, while it may find the evidence of the man’s pornography search history “embarrassing”, “distasteful” and “crude”, it was not proof of a crime.The main complainantThe main complainant spent about six weeks giving evidence before being cross-examined by seven defence barristers for more than two months. She was first interviewed by gardaí in 2017, but this was later described in court as a failed process because there were concerns about her understanding of the questions and ability to answer them. A number of defence counsels emphasised that their clients were not named by the woman during her first Garda interviews.She was reinterviewed extensively in 2021 with a team of interpreters.The woman alleged her 55-year-old uncle raped her in his apartment after they had been drinking together when she was in her early 20s.She told the court she was raped three times and anally raped once by a 46-year-old uncle.The main complainant alleged a 46-year-old uncle raped her when she was seven in 1995. The woman said her now-35-year-old brother abused her numerous times, including in the downstairs toilet of her house, in a bedroom and by a lake. She said she repeatedly told him no and told her mother about it. Garda InterviewsThe 55-year-old uncle described the allegations as “poxy lies” when interviewed by gardaí.The 49-year-old uncle initially denied having sex with the woman, before admitting to having sex with her five times over a 10-month period. He said he was very drunk. He insisted he did not have anal sex with her. The other defendants all emphatically denied the claims.After almost 51 hours of deliberations, the jury on Wednesday returned its final verdict.