Regina Walsh

Nora Wall (formerly Sister Dominic) (born 1948) is a former Irish sister of the Sisters of Mercy who was wrongfully convicted of rape in June 1999, and served four days of a life sentence in July 1999, before her conviction was quashed.

Wall was born in 1948 into a large farming family in the Nire Valley area of county Waterford.

He spoke of being born in Dublin in 1949 to a single mother.

She struggled until McCabe was three, but "had great difficulty in working, paying for accommodation and paying someone to look after me."

Thus McCabe came to live in the "old St. Michael’s", the junior industrial school run by the Sisters of Mercy in Cappoquin.

His memories were "very happy ones of caring and interested women."

He then went to the Industrial School at Artane, Dublin, which he found traumatic, because it had "over nine hundred boys in a very strict set-up."

After leaving Artane, he began to drift and became involved with drugs, stealing to support his habit, and spent time in South America.

McCabe was handed over to St. Michael's industrial school in 1951 when he was a baby.

She joined the Sisters of Mercy in 1967, taking the name Sister Dominic.

It had been St Michael's industrial school but this was phased out at the end on the 1970s.

Two, family style houses were built to house the children in the state's care there.

She joined St. Michael's residential childcare centre in Cappoquin, County Waterford in 1975.

He returned to Ireland in 1977, receiving treatment at St. Brendan's Hospital, though alcohol abuse remained a problem.

The wrongful conviction was based on false allegations by two women in their 20s, Regina Walsh (born 8 January 1978) and Patricia Phelan (born 1973).

Walsh had a psychiatric history and Phelan had a history of making false allegations of rape prior to the event.

Phelan subsequently admitted to having lied.

Wall was the first woman in the history of the Irish State to be convicted of rape, the first person to receive a life sentence for rape and the only person in the history of the state to be convicted on repressed memory evidence.

Her co-accused Pablo McCabe was a homeless schizophrenic man.

In relation to one of the two rape allegations, the defence showed that McCabe could not possibly have been there on the date in question.

The jury acquitted McCabe on that count, and convicted him and Wall on the second rape charge.

She became the manager of this new St. Michael's in 1978.

The children at St. Michael's came from nearby counties Waterford and Tipperary.

They were from troubled families who could not cope and there were often several members of one family in the home at the same time.

Pablo McCabe was also a local and almost the same age as Nora Wall.

In 1980, he came to Cappoquin again.

He stated, "Cappoquin is my home. In Dublin I am homeless."

The old institution where he had been reared had been replaced with the group homes, where he first met Wall.

He hoped to find information about his mother, but none existed.

In 1986 his mother wrote, hoping to find him.

Wall facilitated a reunion, and McCabe and his mother spent three days together in Cappoquin.

She had married in England and had four more sons, but had never told her new family of Pablo's existence.

In 1988, McCabe addressed a gathering of the Sisters of Mercy in Gracedieu, Waterford.

Wall left St. Michael's in 1990, and left the congregation of the Sisters of Mercy in 1994.

In 1996, she worked in a St. Vincent De Paul shelter for homeless men.

McCabe had died in December 2002.

The events took place following the airing of the documentary, States of Fear.

She was officially declared the victim of a miscarriage of justice in December 2005.

On 1 December 2005, the Court of Criminal Appeal certified that Wall had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

A 2005 editorial in The Irish Times suggested that the programme influenced jury members and may have played a role in the miscarriage of justice against Nora Wall.