Will Ireland pay a heavy price for buying into the FGM moral panic?

Ireland’s Court of Appeal will soon have to answer this question.

After almost ten years of fighting to clear their names, a couple in Dublin at the centre of Ireland’s first and only FGM prosecution will finally have their bid for a certificate of Miscarriage of Justice heard. This will be in the Court of Appeal, in Dublin’s Criminal Courts of Justice before a panel of three judges in January 2026.

The application is being made under Section 9 of the Criminal Procedure Act 1993.

If the bid is successful they may be entitled to one of the biggest compensation payments in the history of the Irish State.

The couple have always maintained their innocence. 

I followed their trial – the first of its kind in Ireland, with interest fearing a possible repetition of England’s first questionable trial and conviction for FGM.

Additionally my UK-based FGM related work had confirmed that there was an urgent need to scrutinise what I termed the FGM industry and consider the possibility that it was doing major harm to families and communities. It had resulted in sections of the migrant population being singled out for screening and authoritarian measures which I regularly blogged about on Shifting Sands.

The incident which led to the Dublin trial had occurred during the decade-long FGM moral panic in the UK and across the western world. Ireland too had become alert to the issue. The first National Plan of Action to address Female Genital Mutilation (2008-2011) was launched in November 2008. The practice was made illegal in 2012.

The incident

The incident happened at the family home in September 2016. The 21 month old nappyless toddler had sustained trauma and bleeding to her genital area after falling on a toy. The parents took her to hospital where Doctors suspected she’d undergone FGM.

The family have been dealing with the fallout from that suspicion for the past nine years.

In 2019, the jury at Dublin’s Circuit Criminal Court unanimously found the couple guilty of being secondary participants to FGM – of aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring it on their nearly two year old daughter. As in England, the Police/Gardaí speculated that Ireland’s first FGM might have been carried out by a witch-doctor.

The father was sentenced to five-and-a-half years’ imprisonment and the mother to four years and nine months simultaneously. This despite being parents to three children, one of whom was still being breastfed.

In a Court of Appeal in November 2021, three Justices agreed there had been serious and far-reaching inaccuracies in that trial’s translation process, ruling it unsafe. Importantly, at this hearing the medical evidence used to convince the jury was also disputed.

The couple’s convictions were quashed and they were released on bail awaiting a retrial. The mother was reunited with her children in homeless accommodation in Dublin.

Another trial was held in June 2023.

During the parts I attended and where I met the parents, doctors’ medical knowledge and ‘expertise’, as well as the Prosecution’s FGM experts’ clinical knowledge, was roundly contested and found embarrassingly wanting. Nevertheless, the jury’s decision was inconclusive.

It took until July 2024 for a nolle prosequi to be entered in respect of all charges.  Real medical experts had examined and confirmed that the then almost nine year old girl had not undergone FGM. This meant that the State was no longer pursuing the prosecution.

But the couple have not yet been acquitted.

I suspect that RTE’s new six-part podcast series First Conviction being publishing weekly from 8 October 2025 and a TV documentary scheduled to be broadcast on 12 November on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player has played a major role in pushing the Court to finally address the Miscarriage of Justice issue.

Let’s hope their bid for that certificate in January 2026 will be successful and that they will be adequately compensated for the impact of a wrongful conviction.

First Conviction: A family torn apart, a system on trial by RTÉ provides useful background reading.