In July 2019, Bláthnaid Raleigh was enjoying a typical night out in Galway with friends and a few acquaintances from Mullingar before going back to a house party. It was there that she was attacked and raped by Jonathan Moran.
In their hometown of Mullingar, Bláthnaid would spend the next five years living with the after-effects of that night while her attacker, who was unable to be identified for legal reasons, continued his life as if nothing had happened. On 1 July 2024, Moran was sentenced to eight years in prison.
In her powerful new book, Aftermath, Bláthnaid writes about the attack, its impact on her life and going through a justice system that claims to be victim-centric.
*****
AFTER DIARMUID MOVES home from London for work in 2020, he mentions to me one day that he’s thinking of going back playing rugby.
‘I’m going to go over and do a bit of training with Tullamore to see what it’s like there,’ he tells me. ‘I’m not going back to Mullingar.’
The significance of what he’s suggesting isn’t lost on me.
Mullingar Rugby Club has been around since the 1920s and generations of our family have been involved for most of that time, all the way back to when Dad’s uncle Christy was part of one of the very first teams in the club. He was the man who first got Dad and my uncle Enda involved, and they both went on to play for the club for years.
Whenever Dad needs a sporting party piece to entertain someone new for five minutes, he’ll tell them the story of how he was a team-mate of Joe Schmidt’s, back when Joe was just a young lad living in the midlands, teaching at Wilson’s Hospital and playing a bit of rugby in his spare time, long before he was coaching Ireland to Six Nations titles and a Grand Slam. (Austin likes to take up the story from there, never slow to bring up the fact that he played rugby with Beauden Barrett when the legendary All Black lived in Ireland for a few years as a youngster.)
It’s no surprise, then, that rugby was the backdrop for so many of my happy childhood memories: the weekend ritual of heading up to the club to watch the two lads play a match or a blitz, or the morning drives to Naas or North Kildare or wherever they were playing that week; Austin and Diarmuid piling into the back seat of the car afterwards, still wearing their boots, those old school, long-sleeved jerseys with the big white collar barely visible through the drying muck; arriving home, freezing, soaking, and being greeted at the door by the gorgeous smell from the pot of soup that Mam would have had on since the morning, and waiting for her to finish making the ham rolls to go with it; the whole family going out to awards nights, to club barbecues, to Mullingar Greyhound Stadium for the Night at the Dogs fundraisers; Austin’s eighteenth birthday party, which he couldn’t have anywhere other than the bar in the clubhouse.
Rugby was non-negotiable at home, so it was inevitable as a teenager that I joined a girls’ team and started to play myself. Even when we were getting hammered in matches, Andy Yeoman, our brilliant juniors coach, made sure that we never lost interest and kept having fun. Officially, I was a number eight, but for those first couple of years, positioning and tactics were entirely foreign concepts to me. It didn’t bother me one bit; I loved it, and when I got going, I turned out to be a decent enough player. When Wilson’s set up a school team when I was in sixth year, I played there too, and tag rugby leagues were a regular appointment in the summer months, but when the time came to make the step up to senior rugby with the club, my interest faded and I drifted away.
All of that is to say that, for most of my life, Mullingar Rugby Club was the sixth member of our family – but now, for as long as it is Johnny Moran’s club, it can never be ours.
Up until the summer when his team-mate raped me, Diarmuid had always tried to travel over and back as often as he could to keep playing, even though he was living in London. After that night, he never played for the club again. When the new season started back a few weeks later, there was no way that he could go back and share a dressing room with the man who had attacked me. There was no big conversation about it, and no confrontation or drama; Diarmuid just stopped showing up.
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In the immediate aftermath, both he and Austin felt so responsible for what had happened. It drove them insane to think that Johnny Moran had used the fact that he knew them as a way to make conversation, to make himself appear familiar and safe, and to make me feel comfortable and at ease when I first met him that night. Only for the fact that my brothers were there as a mutual connection, chances are that he would never have said hello to us, we never would have got chatting, and I never would have ended up back in that house. The guilt that they both felt, and the what-ifs that would never have any answers, were torture.
From the moment he first went down to join Mullingar at under-sixes or under-sevens, Diarmuid lived for rugby, so when he comes to tell me that he’s going back playing again, I’m not in the slightest bit surprised. The bit that surprises me is the club that he’s planning to join.
Tullamore have long been Mullingar’s fiercest rivals, the one fixture every season where neither side needs any extra motivation. Moving from Mullingar to join Tullamore is like leaving Liverpool to join Everton in soccer, or going from Manchester United to Manchester City. It just doesn’t happen – and on the very rare occasion that it does, there’s no shortage of people with long memories waiting in the wings.
‘Why Tullamore? Why should you be the one to leave?’ I tell Diarmuid.
‘Let him leave.’
‘No, fuck that. I’m not getting into that with them.’
That’s the bind that we’ve been in ever since this happened.
We don’t know how much we can say from a legal perspective, and we’re all terrified of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person and possibly jeopardising the case, so we keep to ourselves and stay quiet. The circle of people who know about what happened is a tight one, a close-knit group of family and a few of my closest friends.
Beyond that, I have everyone sworn to silence. So I know what Diarmuid means: he can’t exactly march down to the club with an ultimatum, tell them that it’s either him or Johnny Moran and explain to them exactly why there’s only one right answer. Unless Johnny Moran suddenly decides to leave the club himself – which doesn’t look likely – Diarmuid has no choice. He can’t go back.
Once Diarmuid makes his mind up to move to Tullamore, he just gets on with it; that’s very much his style. I worry about him, though. The club was a cornerstone of his life and now, in his late twenties, he has to start again from scratch. When he walked into the dressing room in Mullingar on matchday, he was walking into a room full of people that he had played with since he was a child.
In Tullamore, he’s the last man in to join a team who have already built their own bonds over the years. He loves playing rugby – that’s one thing that never changes – and he gets on great with his new team-mates, but more and more, I notice him throwing his gear bag back into the car and coming straight home after most matches. He rarely sticks around afterwards, win, lose or draw; no pints back in the bar, no nights out.
The sense of community and family that he had in Mullingar, where he knew every name and face and family, that’s not some thing that can just be rebuilt again overnight. Diarmuid wouldn’t be one to say it, but I can see the hole that it has left in his life, and that guilt eats away at me. Something that he truly loves has been taken away from him, and it’s because of me. I have brought this shitshow into his life – into all of their lives. It pains me to see the ripples spreading outwards to Mam and Dad and the two lads. It kills me to think of how all five of our lives have been changed by this, how it is five lives that have been destroyed, not just one.
Every year, when Tullamore and Mullingar inevitably get drawn against each other, Diarmuid finds a reason not to play. Whenever that weekend comes, he makes a vague excuse to his coaches – ‘I can’t make this one, sorry, I’m not around’ – and he sits it out. He could play and force the issue: let everyone see him togged out and ready to go, and see if Johnny Moran is still shameless enough to show up and play himself, or if he’d pick up a mystery hamstring strain in the warm-up and quickly disappear, but it’s pointless.
Expecting Johnny Moran belatedly to start feeling remorse after years of parading around town and running out on to rugby pitches with his head held high is optimism bordering on delusion.
When Diarmuid has been playing with Tullamore for a couple of seasons, he comes to me one day to tell me about a text message he’s received from the Mullingar club president.
‘Did I tell you that Anthony Doolan was on to me there?’ he says.
‘Yeah? What was that about?’
‘He was looking to see would I come back. They’re missing players and really stuck and wanted to see if I’d come down and give them a dig out.’
‘Did he ask why you left in the first place?’ I ask.
‘No, he just wanted to know if I’d come back.’
‘What did you say to him?’‘I didn’t get into it. I just told him that I’m staying with Tullamore.’
A little while later, a letter drops through the letterbox at home, addressed to me. When I unfold it, I see the Mullingar club crest, and at the bottom, Anthony Doolan’s signature.
Dear Bláthnaid …
There’s a part of me that always hoped that someday the club would find out about Johnny Moran, without me or anyone I know having to be the ones to tell them. I find it very hard to believe that nobody knows anything, not even enough to ask a few questions. Even if they were more concerned about his right to a presumption of innocence, as soon as he was charged, they could have easily suspended him – quietly, if that was their priority – until after the trial was concluded.
As soon as I start to read the letter in mild disbelief, I realise that’s not what this is about at all; it is a letter asking me if I’d consider coming back to the club as a player. I put it to one side and never respond.
*****
Bláthnaid Raleigh is a 27-year-old from Mullingar, Co Westmeath.
Extract: 'Rugby was non-negotiable at home . . . I can see the hole it has left in my brother's life'
In July 2019, Bláthnaid Raleigh was enjoying a typical night out in Galway with friends and a few acquaintances from Mullingar before going back to a house party. It was there that she was attacked and raped by Jonathan Moran.
In their hometown of Mullingar, Bláthnaid would spend the next five years living with the after-effects of that night while her attacker, who was unable to be identified for legal reasons, continued his life as if nothing had happened. On 1 July 2024, Moran was sentenced to eight years in prison.
In her powerful new book, Aftermath, Bláthnaid writes about the attack, its impact on her life and going through a justice system that claims to be victim-centric.
*****
AFTER DIARMUID MOVES home from London for work in 2020, he mentions to me one day that he’s thinking of going back playing rugby.
‘I’m going to go over and do a bit of training with Tullamore to see what it’s like there,’ he tells me. ‘I’m not going back to Mullingar.’
The significance of what he’s suggesting isn’t lost on me.
Mullingar Rugby Club has been around since the 1920s and generations of our family have been involved for most of that time, all the way back to when Dad’s uncle Christy was part of one of the very first teams in the club. He was the man who first got Dad and my uncle Enda involved, and they both went on to play for the club for years.
Whenever Dad needs a sporting party piece to entertain someone new for five minutes, he’ll tell them the story of how he was a team-mate of Joe Schmidt’s, back when Joe was just a young lad living in the midlands, teaching at Wilson’s Hospital and playing a bit of rugby in his spare time, long before he was coaching Ireland to Six Nations titles and a Grand Slam. (Austin likes to take up the story from there, never slow to bring up the fact that he played rugby with Beauden Barrett when the legendary All Black lived in Ireland for a few years as a youngster.)
It’s no surprise, then, that rugby was the backdrop for so many of my happy childhood memories: the weekend ritual of heading up to the club to watch the two lads play a match or a blitz, or the morning drives to Naas or North Kildare or wherever they were playing that week; Austin and Diarmuid piling into the back seat of the car afterwards, still wearing their boots, those old school, long-sleeved jerseys with the big white collar barely visible through the drying muck; arriving home, freezing, soaking, and being greeted at the door by the gorgeous smell from the pot of soup that Mam would have had on since the morning, and waiting for her to finish making the ham rolls to go with it; the whole family going out to awards nights, to club barbecues, to Mullingar Greyhound Stadium for the Night at the Dogs fundraisers; Austin’s eighteenth birthday party, which he couldn’t have anywhere other than the bar in the clubhouse.
Rugby was non-negotiable at home, so it was inevitable as a teenager that I joined a girls’ team and started to play myself. Even when we were getting hammered in matches, Andy Yeoman, our brilliant juniors coach, made sure that we never lost interest and kept having fun. Officially, I was a number eight, but for those first couple of years, positioning and tactics were entirely foreign concepts to me. It didn’t bother me one bit; I loved it, and when I got going, I turned out to be a decent enough player. When Wilson’s set up a school team when I was in sixth year, I played there too, and tag rugby leagues were a regular appointment in the summer months, but when the time came to make the step up to senior rugby with the club, my interest faded and I drifted away.
All of that is to say that, for most of my life, Mullingar Rugby Club was the sixth member of our family – but now, for as long as it is Johnny Moran’s club, it can never be ours.
Up until the summer when his team-mate raped me, Diarmuid had always tried to travel over and back as often as he could to keep playing, even though he was living in London. After that night, he never played for the club again. When the new season started back a few weeks later, there was no way that he could go back and share a dressing room with the man who had attacked me. There was no big conversation about it, and no confrontation or drama; Diarmuid just stopped showing up.
In the immediate aftermath, both he and Austin felt so responsible for what had happened. It drove them insane to think that Johnny Moran had used the fact that he knew them as a way to make conversation, to make himself appear familiar and safe, and to make me feel comfortable and at ease when I first met him that night. Only for the fact that my brothers were there as a mutual connection, chances are that he would never have said hello to us, we never would have got chatting, and I never would have ended up back in that house. The guilt that they both felt, and the what-ifs that would never have any answers, were torture.
From the moment he first went down to join Mullingar at under-sixes or under-sevens, Diarmuid lived for rugby, so when he comes to tell me that he’s going back playing again, I’m not in the slightest bit surprised. The bit that surprises me is the club that he’s planning to join.
Tullamore have long been Mullingar’s fiercest rivals, the one fixture every season where neither side needs any extra motivation. Moving from Mullingar to join Tullamore is like leaving Liverpool to join Everton in soccer, or going from Manchester United to Manchester City. It just doesn’t happen – and on the very rare occasion that it does, there’s no shortage of people with long memories waiting in the wings.
‘Why Tullamore? Why should you be the one to leave?’ I tell Diarmuid.
‘Let him leave.’
‘No, fuck that. I’m not getting into that with them.’
That’s the bind that we’ve been in ever since this happened.
We don’t know how much we can say from a legal perspective, and we’re all terrified of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person and possibly jeopardising the case, so we keep to ourselves and stay quiet. The circle of people who know about what happened is a tight one, a close-knit group of family and a few of my closest friends.
Beyond that, I have everyone sworn to silence. So I know what Diarmuid means: he can’t exactly march down to the club with an ultimatum, tell them that it’s either him or Johnny Moran and explain to them exactly why there’s only one right answer. Unless Johnny Moran suddenly decides to leave the club himself – which doesn’t look likely – Diarmuid has no choice. He can’t go back.
Once Diarmuid makes his mind up to move to Tullamore, he just gets on with it; that’s very much his style. I worry about him, though. The club was a cornerstone of his life and now, in his late twenties, he has to start again from scratch. When he walked into the dressing room in Mullingar on matchday, he was walking into a room full of people that he had played with since he was a child.
In Tullamore, he’s the last man in to join a team who have already built their own bonds over the years. He loves playing rugby – that’s one thing that never changes – and he gets on great with his new team-mates, but more and more, I notice him throwing his gear bag back into the car and coming straight home after most matches. He rarely sticks around afterwards, win, lose or draw; no pints back in the bar, no nights out.
The sense of community and family that he had in Mullingar, where he knew every name and face and family, that’s not some thing that can just be rebuilt again overnight. Diarmuid wouldn’t be one to say it, but I can see the hole that it has left in his life, and that guilt eats away at me. Something that he truly loves has been taken away from him, and it’s because of me. I have brought this shitshow into his life – into all of their lives. It pains me to see the ripples spreading outwards to Mam and Dad and the two lads. It kills me to think of how all five of our lives have been changed by this, how it is five lives that have been destroyed, not just one.
Every year, when Tullamore and Mullingar inevitably get drawn against each other, Diarmuid finds a reason not to play. Whenever that weekend comes, he makes a vague excuse to his coaches – ‘I can’t make this one, sorry, I’m not around’ – and he sits it out. He could play and force the issue: let everyone see him togged out and ready to go, and see if Johnny Moran is still shameless enough to show up and play himself, or if he’d pick up a mystery hamstring strain in the warm-up and quickly disappear, but it’s pointless.
Expecting Johnny Moran belatedly to start feeling remorse after years of parading around town and running out on to rugby pitches with his head held high is optimism bordering on delusion.
When Diarmuid has been playing with Tullamore for a couple of seasons, he comes to me one day to tell me about a text message he’s received from the Mullingar club president.
‘Did I tell you that Anthony Doolan was on to me there?’ he says.
‘Yeah? What was that about?’
‘He was looking to see would I come back. They’re missing players and really stuck and wanted to see if I’d come down and give them a dig out.’
‘Did he ask why you left in the first place?’ I ask.
‘No, he just wanted to know if I’d come back.’
‘What did you say to him?’‘I didn’t get into it. I just told him that I’m staying with Tullamore.’
A little while later, a letter drops through the letterbox at home, addressed to me. When I unfold it, I see the Mullingar club crest, and at the bottom, Anthony Doolan’s signature.
Dear Bláthnaid …
There’s a part of me that always hoped that someday the club would find out about Johnny Moran, without me or anyone I know having to be the ones to tell them. I find it very hard to believe that nobody knows anything, not even enough to ask a few questions. Even if they were more concerned about his right to a presumption of innocence, as soon as he was charged, they could have easily suspended him – quietly, if that was their priority – until after the trial was concluded.
As soon as I start to read the letter in mild disbelief, I realise that’s not what this is about at all; it is a letter asking me if I’d consider coming back to the club as a player. I put it to one side and never respond.
*****
Bláthnaid Raleigh is a 27-year-old from Mullingar, Co Westmeath.
Aftermath, with Niall Kelly and published by Gill Books, is available now.
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